Noah Kahan and Pop’s Beta-Male Backlash Against Trumpism

Embarrassing confession time: I am utterly fascinated by Noah Kahan. I first encountered him via Olivia Rodrigo’s cover of his hit “Stick Season” last fall, and since then have followed his ballooning career with bafflement and wonder. Here’s a guy who should be about as popular as perfectly innocuous songwriter dudes like James Bay or George Ezra or Dermot Kennedy, all of whom Kahan has opened for. (If you’re asking “who?”... exactly.) And yet, there he is with a Best New Artist Grammy nomination, on Saturday Night Live, headlining festivals around the world, and selling out Fenway Park two nights in a row.

A quick primer on the Kahan-omenon for the unfamiliar: Guitar-playing singer-songwriter from New England gets signed to a major label in 2017, at age 18, releases two albums that do OK, tours relentlessly, becomes really good at self-deprecating social media posts. Then the pandemic happens, he moves back to rural Vermont and starts writing songs about his hometown. He posts clips on TikTok and they go viral. He puts out his third album, Stick Season, in October 2022. Over the course of the next two years, it snowballs into a commercial juggernaut. As of July, it was the third-biggest-selling album of 2024, behind only Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen, and ahead of Beyoncé. The title track now has over 1.2 billion plays on Spotify. 

Lyrically, Kahan focuses on mental health struggles and small-town restlessness. He’s depressed in a comforting, curl-up-on-the-couch-and-watch-Gilmore Girls way, not a scary, razor-blades-and-pills way. Live, he introduces his songs by saying things like, “This next song is about Zoloft, and if you came to this show, I highly consider you take it.” He founded a mental health nonprofit and talks openly about his struggles with depersonalization and disordered eating. 

Sonically, he follows in the tradition of folk-adjacent indie guys (Bon Iver, Sufjan) and stomp’n’holler cringe (Mumford, Lumineers). But his commercial explosion over the past year has catapulted him well beyond their ranks. He now finds himself in a class with Ed Sheeran and Coldplay: nondescript white guys playing stadiums to intergenerational audiences. (Kahan’s joking reference to himself as “the Jewish Ed Sheeran” from a few years ago has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.) But why? Why Noah Kahan, of all people, and why now? This perplexed me for months.