The Celebrities Are Saying the Loud Part Quietly
7 min read
With his hat low over his eyes, and the sharpness in his voice sheathed, Eminem seemed slightly less than amped to be at the Kamala Harris campaign rally last Tuesday in Michigan. In a minute-and-15-second speech with nary a punch line or pun, the 52-year-old rapper saluted Detroit, voting, and freedom, and closed with all the passion of an HR professional giving a benefits update: “Here to tell you much more about that, President Barack Obama.”
Obama took it upon himself to play the part of the showman. Summoning his goofiest dad energy, he hooted the words of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” claiming he was so nervous that he had “vomit on my sweater already / mom’s spaghetti.” This line shook me to my Millennial core. It echoed the time at a North Carolina rally in 2008 when Obama cited Jay-Z lyrics by brushing some metaphorical dirt off his shoulder—a moment that christened an era in which Democratic politics and pop culture were brazenly intermingled. Partisanship and hipness seemed, ever so briefly, compatible. But as Eminem’s anti-performance had just indicated, we are now so far from then.
With veteran public idealists such as Bruce Springsteen and the West Wing cast on the trail for Harris lately—and with Donald Trump touting old allies such as Kid Rock alongside recent converts from hip-hop—it can be easy to overlook just how much celebrity culture’s relationship to political culture has shifted over the past few cycles. Mainstream entertainers have, as is typical, lined up for the Democrats—but they have, as is less typical, not tried to make much fuss about their participation. They seem to understand that the nature of celebrity itself has changed, and that praise from the glitzy class can be a liability.
Revisit, if you dare, the 2008 Will.I.Am music video “Yes We Can,” which featured a motley cast of stars—Scarlett Johansson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Herbie Hancock—speaking, singing, and piano-playing along to Obama’s soaring rhetoric. The video’s earnestness, so cringeworthy today, gives the lie to the summer hype about Harris recapturing Obama-mania. Moreover, it embraces an obsolete—and always shaky—cultural vision: “the arts” as represented by one unified team of dreamers whom voters tend to admire rather than despise.
The 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, leaning on star-studded concerts and a sitcom cameo, learned the hard way that this vision had started to die out in the 2010s, because of both technological and political shifts. Chopping the prime-time-viewing masses into factions, social-media and streaming platforms turned out to be resentment-making machines; it is, simply, annoying to be told that an actor is important and popular when you, in your own media consumption, never encounter his or her work. Trump was a perfect champion for the resulting and widespread sense of cultural dislocation. He was an entertainer, sure, but an entertainer who humiliated other entertainers on his TV show. When Hollywood began pumping out resistance-themed entertainment early in his presidency, it produced little art of lasting significance, but it did bolster Trump’s claims to be aligned with the people rather than the elites.
Eight years later, after the pandemic spread yet more disunity and QAnon spread conspiracy theories about what goes on inside Hollywood’s private corridors, mistrust of celebrities seems to be at a high. On talk radio and TikTok, one of the hottest cultural topics of the moment is the sexual-abuse accusations against Sean “Diddy” Combs. The stories articulated in the federal indictment and dozens of civil suits against him are chilling (Combs denies them), but the chatter they’ve inspired on social media tends not to be focused on sympathy for the victims. Rather, many commenters seem gleeful with hope that the investigation into Combs will take down the many stars who attended his White Parties—events that, for years, symbolized the height of aspirational excess in pop culture. Trump used to brag about his closeness with Combs, but that hasn’t stopped him and his surrogates from continuing to tag Democrats as the party of celebrity decadence. Trump shared a fake image of Harris with the rapper; Elon Musk recently posted on X, in response to Eminem’s presence at Harris’s rally, “Yet another Diddy party participant.”
Mass antipathy toward celebrities does not mean, however, that stars don’t matter anymore. Quite the opposite. This is the age of stans—a word partially coined by Eminem, which now refers to internet-enabled superfandom. Stans are not just loyal to particular entertainers; in many cases, they’re monomaniacal and tribalist, rooting against rivals just as much as they root for their faves. At the same time, the rise of influencers—a term that can refer equally to a TikTok goofball and a philosophy podcaster—is helping further break down the border between entertainment and media. An influencer’s job isn’t merely to amuse; it’s to spread ideas and opinions. We’ve evolved into a polytheistic celebrity culture, worshipping countless mini-idols that command a different form of adulation in each household.
The structure of this new fame ecosystem doesn’t fit neatly with national politics. Authenticity, the feeling that a celebrity is showing their real self, is what attracts fans, and nothing is less authentic than being a partisan hack—especially given the disillusionment spread by the pandemic, inflation, and the war in Gaza. Celebrities who want to talk about the election are probably smart to cultivate an air of reluctance. Take, for example, Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper, who gave a lengthy, apologetic explanation to listeners before interviewing Harris on her podcast: “As you know, I do not usually discuss politics, or have politicians on this show, because I want Call Her Daddy to be a place where everyone feels comfortable tuning in.”
One of the most haunting pieces of media from this election season is The Daily Show’s recent dispatch from the Gathering of the Juggalos, the music festival thrown by the face-painted rap-metal group Insane Clown Posse. The fans (called juggalos) who are interviewed profess all sorts of liberal leanings—about abortion, the economy, trans rights—but also say they’re nonvoters; seemingly as a matter of identity, of pride, they feel outside the system. Violent J, one of ICP’s two members, told The Daily Show that he supports Harris. But really, he didn’t seem to care very much about the election either way; he didn’t even know who Tim Walz is.
Even the most plugged-in stars seem a bit detached. Chappell Roan, the breakout singing sensation of the year, has rejected calls for her to endorse a candidate. After backlash, she clarified in a TikTok video that she would be voting for Harris, but that because of various issues—primarily America’s support for Israel’s war—she couldn’t rightly call that vote an “endorsement.” In September, Taylor Swift gave Harris a much clearer boost, but her Instagram post on the matter was strikingly muted in tone, especially given Trump’s efforts to troll her. She hasn’t weighed in on the campaign since then. (Don’t bet against some crucial, last-minute activism—Swift is, among many other things, a master of timing.)
Then there’s Eminem. The rapper is a pretty prize for any political campaign; more than two decades after his first hit, he still commands a huge following among young men, a demographic that may well decide this election. The news that he’s voting blue isn’t much of a surprise, but he seems to be refining his methods with each election. During the 2016 campaign, he released an anti-Trump diss track; its opening line lives on as a meme-able example of how clunky protest art can be. During 2020, a campaign waged mostly online and in ads, he lent “Lose Yourself”—the ultimate inspirational anthem—to a Biden-Harris commercial. This time, he gave that short, halting speech, and it was, in its way, perfect for this cycle. The video is likely to pop up in the TikTok or Instagram Reel feeds of fans, many of whom might find Eminem’s palpable sense of burnout relatable and his words, therefore, more credible.
This past Friday brought to the campaign trail one of America’s highest-wattage figures: Beyoncé, who spoke at a Harris rally in Houston along with her mother, Tina, and her Destiny’s Child bandmate Kelly Rowland. Beyoncé’s potential involvement in this election has been speculated about for months. Her track “Freedom” became Harris’s rallying song, and fans theorized feverishly—and incorrectly—that she’d perform it at the Democratic National Convention. But when Beyoncé finally joined Harris onstage on Friday, it wasn’t to sing or dance. In a calmly uplifting speech, she focused on the historical nature of electing the first Black, female president. And she added this crucial stipulation: “I’m not here as a celebrity.”
