The Pop Corporation

Remember when the United States of America wasn’t nearly as difficult to look at. Obama was president and while guilty of some Politician Shit, at least he seemed capable, wore the title with a sense of responsibility, and could go for weeks without making any scandalous headlines.

Back then, Donald Trump was a noisy conspiracy theorist online – a former reality TV star with a big mouth and bad hair and, who knew that getting rinsed by Seth Myers at a glitzy ball, would somehow end up with one of the most irritating premierships of any generation.

However, now we live in some kind of Post Fact world, where opinions are to be shrieked and passed off as The Truth, it can be easy to look back at those times as simpler, and better.

While the landscape was certainly easier to digest, you wonder if Trump’s MAGA movement landed a blow with the sting of some truth in it, when you look at some of the defining works of the time, and find that sure, maybe, the liberal pop-culture field was pretty boring, bad, academic, and lacking any real punch, fun as some of it is.

It seems that MAGA’s 2016 victory should have given the liberals and the left more cause of pause – which clearly didn’t happen with any great effect, what with Trump beating Kamala Harris who was, fairly or not, seen as a totem of Obamacore* – a class of Americans out of touch with the country.

Think of how in the UK, Cool Britannia is viewed, and how the right wing capitalised on a sense of unease about the collected Guardian columnists, pop-culture feminist books and disingenuously poking at identity politics and race.

Either way you look at it, MAGA Republicans and right-leaning Libertarians are either okay with white nationalism, or actively white nationals themselves. That’s for political writes and columnists to work out, as we’re a music and pop culture channel, which means we’ll focus on some of the things that were hits from the time, and see what feels right in 2025.

*Coined by Vulture, but we don’t have a subscription for them, so we’re not sure what they’ve said.

HAMILTON

So we start with the big one. There was a time when ‘Hamilton’ felt like Americans were trying their best to be accountable for their history, and embrace the future with a rap-musical. The way people fell over themselves to heap praise on this theatre piece was jarring at the time, with people not so much being fans, rather, devotees.

Any criticism of ‘Hamilton’ was met with hurt from fans who lapped it up. People would attend multiple shows and Lin Manuel Miranda became a superstar, co-signed by Obama and every talkshow host in the States.

Some criticisms of the show sounded like too-Woke bores, saying that it stuck in the craw that a play about a bunch of White Racists being played by Black actors was still a play about some horrible men at its core. Elsewhere, rap fans gritted their teeth through a very Whitewashed version of hip hop culture and the flows contained within the songs were from a very White Middle Aged Dude Approved version of rap (Golden Era) that felt like you were caught in the crossfire of yapping dinner party types talking about the plight of inner city youths in New York City, talking over the current Black voices about the perils of modern life right now.

Of course, Miranda is basically a good bloke, and has acknowledged criticisms that have been levelled against his all-conquering play. What’s one guy to do? He just wrote a thing with good intentions, and now the dust has settled, his puppy like enthusiasm shouldn’t make him a pariah. However, Hamilton has always sucked, and now in a post Obamacore world, more people are willing to tell their feverishly enthusiastic friends that they never liked it, and were just smiling politely initially.

Maybe that’s the real kicker in all of this – well-intentioned it may have been, but there’s elements of it that were so tone deaf and blindly optimistic, that it was the thing that truly encompassed the Centrist American dream.

TRANSFORMATIONAL REALITY TV

When Queer Eye was repackaged, it hit the world’s populace like a freight train. Some nice guys teaching working class guys that it was okay to give themselves self love, tidy up a bit around the house, cook some pasta, and all that wholesome stuff.

However, these transformational reality shows were steeped in American Centrist therapyspeak, where everyone’s feelings were equal and valid, where everyone was ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ which, again, is wholesome and well intended, but given the wastelands that America housed its people, a new haircut and a shampooed carpet was papering over the cracks.

It is no surprise that the term ‘Pink Capitalism’ is a phrase that was birthed during this Centrist period in US history. There was a sense that you were being told to buy your way out of misery with balms, fancy pasta, trinkets and therapy. The superficial consumption of the show was completely overlooked during this time, and slowly, as the wheels fell off, an insular and angry America revealed itself, which MAGA jumped on.

HARRY POTTER FANDOM

It seems wild, given that JK Rowling has literally stated that she’ll be using the money from her books to attack Trans people, that in 2025 there’s people still willing to sign-up to projects and have the tried-and-tested ‘separating the art from the artist’ conversations over a children’s book.

It is amazing to think of the chokehold the books and films of Harry Potter had people in. People were getting Slytherin tattoos, sharing results from Buzzfeed quizzes about their personality related to the franchise, and buying all the merch as partially grown adults would wear Hogwarts scarves to the pub.

To point out the lousy writing and thematic holes in the series feels almost redundant, given that they’re children’s fantasy books – however, in this blissfully unaware period of modern history, the obvious racial stereotyping and bigotry in the book can only be a product of a populace taking their eye off the ball.

PHARRELL IS HAPPY

Pharrell had hits with ‘Get Lucky’ and the vilified ‘Blurred Lines’, but it was ‘Happy’ that did him in.

He said: “It was only until you were out of ideas and you asked yourself a rhetorical question and you came back with a sarcastic answer. And that’s what ‘Happy’ was. How do you make a song about a person that’s so happy that nothing can bring them down? And I sarcastically answered it and put music to it, and that sarcasm became the song. And that broke me.”

The ‘YES WE CAN’ of music, sanding off the edges and a thin message of hope.

SNL’S HALLELUJAH

It turns out that Kate McKinnon’s reading of ‘Hallelujah’ while dressed as Hillary Clinton, was supposed to be funny. On paper, an earnest, deadpan ballad while dressed as a politician, should have been funny.

However, it was taken as serious, and everyone just ran with it. And Liberal America never looked so mealymouthed in their first moment after Donald Trump won the 2016 election. Her voice cracks as she says “I’m not giving up – and neither should you”, and of course, she was dead right. Regrettably, the performance now looks like the kind of feeble fight put up by American Democrats who fight fire with… well… being a bit upset while singing a song?

The Republicans had dirty, effective tricks – the opposition had a furrowed brow.

BUZZFEED

With the aforementioned personality tests, Obama’s West was writ large in the bubblegum successes of Buzzfeed. A preppy talent show for a bunch of kids who were either Camp Counsellor Bubbly or Middle Class Right On Sexual Politicn Kids With Republican Parents Hot Messes. Look at the Try Guys, with Keith in his choir and Eugene being the kid who stays out late in clubs to the titillation of tweens who dream of moving to a big city full of fun Queer people.

There were lasting successes from the halls of Buzzfeed – notably Quinta Brunson who, herself, has managed to forge a certain Obamacore for the 2020’s with Abbott Elementary. However, Buzzfeed went from being omnipresent to something of an afterthought, thanks in part to the impossible speed reached by kids memeifying the mess of the United States with Dadaist abandon, while they upped production values and Mr Beast stole a march on their market.

During 2016, Buzzfeed wrote about Obama so frequently that it was dubbed “creepy” and “almost uniformly uncritical and often sycophantic” by MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. They refused to run ads for Trump (so they’ll be on the right side of history with that), noting that they didn’t run cigarette ads because they’re “harmful” and that, for the same reason, they wouldn’t run coverage for MAGA.

CHANCE THE RAPPER

In 2016, ‘Coloring Book’ was released, and the last piece of Obamacore art that hit the big time. Hailing from Chicago like Obama, with a joyful, safe liberal version of Christianity imbued in his music, everyone sang “when the praises go up – the blessings come down“, and for a moment, we all forgot about the Evangelicals who make America should a rotten country.

However, it was the same year Trump was elected and suddenly, all these hymnals sounded like people ineffectively tweeting ‘thoughts and prayers‘ at yet another school shooting. It was fun while it lasted, but the fire America was under needed more than just platitudes, and sure enough, 2019’s ‘The Big Day’ saw Chance fall off, through no fault of his own. The landscape had shifted. People needed some righteous ire or missives from the frontline, not clasped hands and a concept album about how much someone loved their wife.

Chance, without question, was the recipient of one of the hardest backlashes in recent times.

SHAKE IT OFF

Taylor Swift’s rise to megastardom was cemented during the Obamacore years, and ‘Shake It Off’ was emblematic of the blind hope found in American pop music. Perfect teeth and not a hair out of place, Swift went from being a successful popstar to a rampant capitalism in control of her own work, future legacy, and of course, flight logs which would subsequently be used by the US government for their own nefarious needs.

It was a success story that polarised pop fans – one camp pointed out that men had been acting like this for years without reproach and it’s funny how loud the criticisms are when it’s a woman, the other camp saying ‘fuck all billionaires, regardless.’ Within that, we find the politics of Obama-era America in microcosm – handwringing over the successes of someone while actual villains get away with murder, and focusing on silly celebrities and tying ourselves in knots about the morality of it all, while actual fascists roll out their bleak plans on the world.

Discourse focused on Swift’s appropriation of Black culture in videos, and how she sang “the players gonna play… the haters gonna hate…” while she shook it off, and so too did the American right wing. Semantics ruled, and Swift would go on to break records and become increasingly divisive, hanging around with MAGA supporters and hitting out at them during Harris’ presidential run.

In 2025, and a new album on the way, those polarised views doesn’t look like narrowing any time soon. Maybe we’ll learn to stop looking to celebrities for answers and making actual politicians answerable instead?

ALL OF ME

Listening to John Legend’s ‘All Of Me’, you can almost feel Barack Obama loosening his tie and Michelle taking out her earrings and popping them into a designated dish on her dresser, while they make eye contact over “what would I do without your smart mouth?“

Again, its culture with the wrinkles smoothed somewhat. It’s affluent, aspirational, modest America. It’s Oprah Winfrey successes and sentimentality from a loft apartment overlooking the twinkling lights of New York. It’s the faux homeliness in the way “all your edges” is half-sung.

It is another well-meaning piece of popular art that, sure, may sound like a calculated and commercial attempt to create a first dance, but ‘All Of Me’ is not the enemy. It feels a world away from the Rust Belt flirting done by everyone Going Country in the Trump presidency.

PARKS & RECREATION

The subtext of Obamacore is that we were fools to be so sincere, so earnest, so hopeful because we’d solved nothing, and the deluge was closer than we’d prepared for. Our ideals meant nothing and racism was still present, and that letting our cynicism relax meant that people acting in bad faith were ready to pounce while we settled down to watch the plucky Leslie Knope try and climb the ladder with all of the best intentions.

Like Poehler’s character, Obama’s premiership did have some very meaningful accomplishments which should not be downplayed – however, we were about to be hit with Authoritarianism and a global pandemic, and we’re clearly still reeling from it.

It almost feels, looking at a show like Parks & Rec, like we were in some kind of 1960s American Dream stasis – and of course, the ugly, gnarly ’70s followed that decade, where unbridled hope made its way for political turmoil, cults and upheaval.

As fluffy and fun as this show is, at the core of it is something of a dead-end optimism, which refuses to tackle real human evil. Can we expect that from a light sitcom? Of course not. That all said, the wide-eyed wonder of Leslie Knope is in sharp relief of what was to come.