An emotional self-fulfilling prophecy

“Kluck, what do you think of Noah Kahan,” asked one of my students. I typically love finding common ground with my students and can almost always find something to genuinely celebrate about almost anything they like.

It was a loaded question, and I knew the right answer for that moment (“He’s the greatest!”), but I gave the real one instead. “I don’t really think of Noah Kahan at all.” This, of course, qualified as rank heresy in the classroom.

I’m a professor at a Christian college, which means I’ve spent the last 24 months hearing about Mental Health Messiah Noah Kahan, who is someone I would never know about but for the fact that I work with college students—most of whom talk like they would personally take a bullet for Kahan if given the opportunity.

Kahan is a musician (folk, I guess?) who looks like church basement Jesus paintings and sings about his emotions and how hard everything is all the time. In this, he is human catnip for Gen Z and some Millennials and is doing very well for himself. I find the music “not for me” in the same way that an artist like Dua Lipa is also clearly not made for or in any way marketed to me. But I’m fascinated by the phenomenon of this person.

Now is a good time to say that people should (within reason) listen to whatever music they enjoy, for whatever reasons they enjoy it, and that “not for me” doesn’t in any way mean “bad.” But I think what’s interesting about the Kahan situation is that it is kind of an emotional word salad (trauma! pain! anxiety! Covid! Oh my!) that scans as “smart” music because it is performed by a guy from Vermont (from the same town as Dick Loudon … if you know, you know) wearing a sweater and acting sad. Now is also a good time to remind people that the songs may actually be good, by someone else’s metric. I’m not a musician or a music expert.

Kahan is the current Hipster Heavyweight (Lightweight?) Champion of the World, having taken the strap from Bon Iver, whose music feels like ancient history and fun stadium rock compared to the sad-sackery that Kahan is trading in. What’s interesting to me is that my students—who are generally happy, well-resourced people—are lapping up the Kahan experience and all its attendant mopiness and anxiety with a spoon.

It’s almost as though Kahan (and others) are presenting a sort of emotional self-fulfilling-prophecy inasmuch as it would be very bad for business for Noah Kahan to stride onto the stage and say something like, “I feel very confident and good tonight! I just started lifting! Hello Boston!” His audience seems to want the shuffling, anxious, demure version of Kahan, such that he is as trapped in his own persona as they are in their expectations for it. Like, if he ever just woke up one day feeling good—it would potentially wreck his audience. I dislike this, for him. The “health” part of mental health (ostensibly, the good part) seems to be a journey without a destination.

This raises interesting questions about what we expect out of our rock stars. Because I am a.) old and b.) a little bit of a caveman/knuckle-dragger myself, my concert experiences include bands like The Rolling Stones and Metallica. At no point in either experience did I ever expect that The Rock Star was anything like me. In fact, I hoped that he wasn’t, and would have been disappointed if he was. I guess I go to rock shows to see rock stars doing rock star things, not guys who dress like me and shuffle around like me and feel nervous like me and play their acoustic guitars on a rug like the one in my living room. I’m paying money to see someone perform who is fundamentally different than me, not someone who is a human avatar for my own complex emotional palette.

However, his audiences seem to want exactly that. I would think they would want to escape the constant blender of self-doubt and anxiety they convey that they are perpetually trapped in, but it seems like the music and media they gravitate toward just feeds it all the more.

Kahan is a heady admixture of psychology-talk and church-hurt, which is downright irresistible for certain audiences. The question is, will his audiences ever allow him to heal? And does he even want to? With “hurt” so doggone saleable (grab your $45 Stick Season candle on the website!), peace, hope, and joy seem downright silly by comparison.