Among the pedestaled titans of Western music, George Frideric Handel was the first composer whose work not only quickly became celebrated in his own time but has been heralded ever since. Before Handel, no real “repertoire” of enduring music had existed. Composers were considered craftsmen in an evanescent art, their creations regularly superseded by fresher work. Most music that got performed was relatively new. Claudio Monteverdi, the preeminent European composer of the early 17th century, was largely forgotten within decades of his death, in 1643. Johann Sebastian Bach amounted to hardly more than a cult figure after he died, in 1750, his major works unplayed well into the next century.

When Handel died, at 74 in 1759, he was already well fortified for posterity. A celebrity since his 20s, he had been the subject of grand portraits and was depicted as Orpheus in a 1738 statue in London’s Vauxhall Gardens. Whereas Bach earned an unmarked grave in Leipzig and one obituary four years after he died, Handel was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Handel stands apart in another way from the musical giants who have since been rediscovered and enshrined: Each of them is renowned for an array of often-performed pieces. His stature is owed above all to a single work—the oratorio Messiah. Among the towering masterpieces of Western music, the Messiah occupies a distinctive place: It is familiar to more people than any other work of its kind. Bach’s B Minor Mass and St. Matthew Passion and Monteverdi’s Vespers are comparable among supreme choral pieces, but they aren’t performed at your church or the high school down the street. The Messiah often is, trotted out during the Christmas season by amateur and professional choruses around the globe. A fair percentage of the world probably knows the “Hallelujah” chorus well enough to sing along.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Why music really does make you happier]

This skewed acclaim is unfair to Handel, who was as brilliantly prolific as any composer who ever lived. But it is also a tribute to the overwhelming effect of the Messiah, which is a feat of sustained inspiration arguably unsurpassed in the canon of Western classical music. “Comfort ye, comfort ye my People,” the libretto opens, pulling us in at the beginning, its flow of compelling melody and stirring choruses enthralling us for the next two hours and leaving us singularly exalted.

Reasons for the Messiah’s enduring power are manifold, though certainly they begin with the music itself, which manages to join the lofty and the populist, as does all of Handel’s work. In Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah, Charles King takes his cue from the oratorio’s ability to convey, era after era, “a transporting sense that something cosmic and profound was at stake, even when the cares of this world happened to intrude.” King, who embarked on the book during the pandemic, found renewed comfort in the Messiah’s arc, especially its message of hope in difficult times, starting with those first words: “Comfort ye.” He also felt moved to recover “the Messiah’s sheer weirdness” by exploring its origins in the murkier currents of what is remembered as the age of reason.

King, a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University and a splendid writer, has made a specialty of popular cultural history. A meticulous researcher, he delivers surprises, and his prologue is one of them:

Some days he would wander the manor house in a blank stupor, barely able to lift a foot … He was so afraid of the cold that he lay under six blankets in winter and four in summer. He never married, fathered no children, and made distant enemies more readily than close friends.

These fine and vivid sentences are not, as the reader expects, about Handel. They are about his exquisitely odd and obsessive acolyte, Charles Jennens, the Messiah’s librettist, a figure few listeners are aware of.

King proceeds to relay more about Jennens’s inner life and creative struggles than about Handel’s, of which firsthand reports are skimpy. Jennens’s story is indeed fascinating. A rich squire and crabbily conservative political dissident, he was “emotionally tormented,” but still managed to be a significant art collector, Shakespeare scholar, and patron of music. King’s resurrection of Jennens’s crucial role, laboring in private over a libretto that he hoped would inspire “the Prodigious” (as he called Handel) to new musical heights, helps illuminate how unusual Handel’s oratorio was and remains.

Here is the “weirdness” that King emphasizes. An oratorio is essentially an unstaged opera, a story told in music. The Messiah is a collection of gnomic scriptural passages that are prophetic in import but offer no story at all. “It has nothing that could be called a plot,” King observes. “Its form is more like that of a found poem, built from Bible verses that have been rearranged and, here and there, edited” by a depressive man struggling to find his way toward hope and a return to a pre-Enlightenment vision of religion. Jennens, for whom faith and kingship were imbued with mystery, endorsed the legitimacy of the deposed Stuart monarchy and rejected the rational Deist perspective. For his part, Handel—a generally agreeable though fiercely proud man, witty and gluttonous and gouty, and given to polylingual swearing—was probably indifferent to such political and sectarian matters. But he knew a good librettist when he saw one.

The form of King’s book is like an intricate collage, gathering very different characters with the goal of concentrating on the surround, the context. Not all of the figures are directly connected to Handel, and at times King’s deep background verges on the tangential. But a similar storyline links his cast of characters: They are coping with dire predicaments (of widely varying sorts), in a time of political flux and fear, all of them managing to carry on—a spirit of perseverance that runs through the Messiah.

For example, King delves at length into the outlandish marital travails of the contralto Susannah Cibber, whom Handel turned to as he rounded up singers for the Messiah premiere, in 1742 in Dublin, a propitious convergence for both. We learn, as a scandalized public did, all about her husband’s outrageous abusiveness, her lover’s and family’s efforts to protect her, the two lawsuits her husband filed against the lover (a creditor whom he’d initially welcomed into a ménage à trois). Cibber’s well-known suffering lent her musical lamentations in the oratorio a raw power—“He was despised and rejected of Men,” she sang, “a Man of Sorrows, and acquainted with Grief”—for a stunned opening-night audience and in many of her performances after.

Other lives and issues are more peripherally entangled in King’s tale of the Messiah’s emergence. A distressing chapter on the British slave trade, to which Handel had a minor financial connection, features an African Muslim named Ayuba Diallo who ends up enslaved in Maryland. Against all odds, he ultimately succeeds in returning to Bundu, in West Africa. His episodic journey includes an interlude in London, where “it would not have been unusual to see Diallo walking past Jennens’s townhouse in Queen Square”—though who knows if the two ever met. Several times in his absorbing narratives, King reaches for these sorts of indirect associations.

And what about Handel’s evolution, personal and musical? After all, he is the composer who made the Messiah, even if he didn’t do it alone, or have the originating idea for it. Handel sometimes gets a bit lost along the way in Every Valley. After a well-stocked chapter about the oratorio and its premiere, King understandably—he isn’t a musician or musicologist—doesn’t devote much space to exploring the particulars of Handel’s style and reputation, or the special place of the Messiah in his work as a whole.

The compositions that Handel churned out at a remarkable rate were simultaneously demand-driven and distinctive, convention-bound and transcendent. Working within the musical language of his time, he could conjure any effect: dancingly energetic, profound, aristocratic, folksy, eerie, heart-filling, comic. He could do it all, and he had an uncanny sense of how to grab an audience. (His effervescent Water Music is a familiar example.) Few could work faster; that Handel wrote the Messiah in 24 days has long stirred talk of divine inspiration, though in fact he was known to turn out a three-hour opera in three weeks. Some have speculated that he was manic-depressive and wrote when he was manic. Indisputably, his speed was abetted by liberal borrowing from his own work and generous pilfering from other composers’ (not illegal in pre-copyright times, but still regarded as a bit tacky). Four Messiah choruses are lifted from his earlier pieces, none of them sacred. About his plagiarisms, Handel was unapologetic, saying more or less that those people didn’t know what to do with their stuff.

He wasn’t wrong: Handel the enthusiastic copier was also a pioneer in developing the English oratorio. Born in Halle, Germany, in 1685, he settled in England in 1712 and concentrated on the genre of Italian opera seria, a London craze whose popularity later faded. Facing bankruptcy by the 1730s, Handel revived his career by turning from seria—courtly entertainment stuffed with mannered drama—to the pared-down English oratorio. Making use of his operatic skills and dramatic instincts, he transfigured this new musical genre with results that most choral composers you could name—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms—are manifestly indebted to. By contrast, the artificiality of his operas, the major part of his output, has kept them from becoming repertoire staples.

[From the November 1946 issue: Handel]

In all of his work, Handel was among the greatest, most irresistible of tunesmiths. Like Bach, he believed in a union of word, meaning, and music. To that end, Bach often pursued esoteric symbolism and numerology, with vocal lines crossing in the music when Christ is mentioned, and the like. Handel wanted his illustration to be more on the sleeve. “Their land brought forth frogs,” the soprano sings in his oratorio Israel in Egypt, to an accompaniment that is hopping, hopping, hopping. When the chorus proclaims, “There came all manner of flies,” the strings break out in buzzing.

In those places, Handel plays the plagues of Egypt for laughs, but he does the same kind of thing in earnest in the Messiah. “Every Valley shall be exalted,” the tenor sings in a robustly rising line, which sinks for “and every Mountain and Hill made low.” Then “the Crooked” (jagged line), “straight” (held note), “and the rough Places” (jagged again), “plain” (long held note). Each word and image of the text is painted like this.

Meanwhile, you hear Handel lifting the music to mighty climaxes over and over, and it never gets old.

“For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given,” the chorus sings, tossing that bit back and forth in dancing counterpoint. Momentum begins to gather, the notes climbing, the rhythm bouncing us joyously along: “And the Government shall be upon his Shoulder; and his Name shall be called.” Then we arrive at spine-tingling proclamations: “Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace,” as strings race ecstatically above. What Beethoven, who considered Handel his only musical superior, particularly admired was his ability to get dazzling effects with simple means. As both composers knew, simple is hard.

Among the possibly apocryphal stories about Handel, one has him commenting to his servant, upon finishing the “Hallelujah” chorus, “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself seated on His throne, with His company of Angels.” In fact, nothing indicates that he considered the Messiah his magnum opus at the time, or expected that this piece—with its grandeur, its gravitas, its power to be emotionally moving at nearly every moment—would be his ticket to immortality. Famous though he was, Handel was still a jobbing composer, and composers had never been endowed with an immortal aura.

[From the April 1885 issue: Handel 1685–1885]

Yet he was eager to share an awestruck response to the Dublin premiere. As King reports, Handel wrote a letter a few months after the event, enclosing an Irish bishop’s verdict: “The whole is beyond any thing I had a notion of till I Read and heard it,” the cleric reported. “It seems to be a Species of Musick different from any other.”

The letter was to Jennens, the Messiah’s librettist. Handel wanted him to know “how well Your Messiah was received in that Country.” One of the most inspired composers of all time might have been aware, in some sense, that he had transcended himself, but he could not claim to understand the alchemy that had worked this wonder. In the spirit of his oratorio, the goal of his letter to Jennens seems to have been not to blow his own horn but to give comfort to his companion in the endeavor.

*Lead image credit: Illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Heritage Images / Getty; Photo12 / UIG / Getty; Geoffrey Clements / Corbis / VCG / Getty; Print Collector / Getty; Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy; CBW / Alamy; Album / Alamy.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Weirdest Hit in History.”

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The American family continuously evolves. People are marrying later, and having fewer children. Gay people get married. People can publicly swear off marriage altogether without being ostracized. But in politics the attachment to the traditionally nuclear family seems unwavering, and especially this year. As Republicans are losing support among women, more candidates are leaning on their wives and daughters to soften their image. So strong is the pressure that one candidate in Virginia posed with his friend’s wife and daughters and left the impression he was married.

Why is there this enduring notion that there is just one version of the “ideal family”? In this episode of Radio Atlantic we talk to Jessica Grose, a New York Times columnist and author of Screaming on the Inside. Grose pinpoints the origin of the American fixation on the nuclear family. And she explains how the candidates’ evoking of this ideal gets in the way of supporting policies that might actually help families

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I think it’s fair to say that the family has been deployed in this election in more overt ways than usual. A great example: the very tight, very closely watched race for Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District. The Democrats are hoping to flip the seat.

Their candidate is Eugene Vindman, an Army veteran and lawyer. But not only that: He’s a dad.

Eugene Vindman’s daughter: This is our dad.

Eugene Vindman: I’m Eugene Vindman.

Eugene Vindman’s son: And he is running for Congress.

Vindman: And I approve this message.

Daughter: Just say hi, Dad.

Vindman: Hi, Dad.

Rosin: Vindman’s adorable, red-headed daughter gives him the sitcom-dad treatment. She jabs him in the ribs, and his wife and son laugh. It’s all very cute, and it’s all part of a very explicit strategy.

In a place like exurban Virginia, Republicans are vulnerable, especially with women voters. The gender divide between the two parties is big and growing. So in Vindman’s other ad, he takes on his opponent, Derrick Anderson, for being a MAGA extremist and, particularly, on this one important issue.

Campaign ad narrator: When Roe v. Wade was overturned, Derrick Anderson said the Supreme Court got it right. He’s wrong because now, women face criminal prosecution and life-threatening complications.

Rosin: In campaign ads across the country, Republicans and Democrats are fighting for the hearts and minds of women by showcasing the women—more specifically, their wives and daughters.

Dave McCormick: When we call a family meeting, the first vote’s always the same: 6 to 1.

Dina Powell: 7 to 1.

McCormick: I want one thing and our six daughters want something else—6 to 1.

Powell: And me, 7 to 1.

Matt Gunderson: I believe abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. I don’t want politicians dictating health care for my daughters.

Jaymi Sterling: When Larry Hogan married my mom, he became a father to three strong, independent women. As pop-pop to four granddaughters, we know you can trust him too.

Larry Hogan: I’m Larry Hogan, and I’m proud to approve this message.

Rosin: To bring it back around to that Virginia race: The Republican in that race, Derrick Anderson, doesn’t have a wife or daughters—or any children—just a fiancé.

News clip: Derrick Anderson, an unmarried GOP candidate in Virginia, posed with his friend’s wife and kids to give the impression he is a family man. The photo was used in a campaign video. But, again, they are not his family.

Rosin: He posed with his friend’s wife and children in front of a house and a lawn in a holiday-card configuration that very much left the impression that this was his family. Which begs the question: Why, in an era of declining marriages, delayed marriages in parenting, all different kinds of marriages, is the ideal of a traditional family still so strong?

Why would a candidate pull a risky move like that, rather than just say to the voters, I’m not married yet?

I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

“Cat ladies,” “our dad in plaid,” “Mamala”—judging from this week’s VP debate, both sides are fighting for who has a lock on being more pro-family.

But that fixation didn’t start in 2024. It has deep roots in American history. And, weirdly, the more the American family shifts and changes, the more certain segments of society cling onto it for dear life.

Certain men are drifting conservative, while women are drifting more liberal. And the irony is, that’s affecting the actual American family. Fewer people are falling in love and starting a family.

So I wanted to understand this gap between the ideal family that shows up in politics, on Instagram, on TV and the living, breathing, actual American family.

And the perfect person to talk to about that is Jessica Grose, a New York Times columnist and author of the book Screaming on the Inside. She writes about these stories we have about gender and family, what she calls scripts. Here’s our conversation.

[Music]

Rosin: So, Jess, one of the things I deeply appreciate about your book is how you make explicit these scripts that we’ve inherited about what the American family should be, what it should look like. I feel like these are things we don’t even think about. We just think, Oh, yeah. That’s normal. That’s what it should be.

Can you talk about what some of these scripts are and where they come from, where their roots are?

Jessica Grose: So even these ideas of the nuclear family—so mom, dad, 2.5 kids, house, all that—that was allegedly the main and only form of family ever in the United States. It was never true for everyone, even at its peak.

There was lots of sex outside of marriage. There was lots of divorce. There was lots of separation that didn’t become a divorce. There were single parents. There’s all sorts of different family structures. But where does it come from? Shorthand is: The Industrial Revolution created a real divide between the domestic sphere and the public sphere.

So in preindustrial America, everybody was in and around the home: moms, dads, extended family, servants if you were wealthy. And kids worked.

The Industrial Revolution happens. They create this sort of separation between the workplace and the home. The home was seen as women’s domain. The workplace was seen as the male domain. And even now—where the majority of women work, the majority of mothers even with young children at home work—we still are stuck in these sort of old-fashioned scripts that, if they ever were true, were true for maybe a hundred years.

Rosin: Which is amazing to me, how enduring these scripts are and how much they pervade our sense of how things should be and what is normal, and particularly in the U.S., and particularly in American politics. It seems like in every era, the script takes on a slightly different form. We’ll just, for shorthand, say: in every political era. So how do you see them showing up now? Like, what is the ideal American family, as reflected in the current political dialogue?

Grose: I would say that it is pretty uncontroversial now for women to work. It is still valorized in some places for women to stay home, and it’s still unacceptable in some sort of cultural enclaves.

But I would say, in American culture writ large, it’s pretty uncontroversial for a woman to work. However, they are still expected to do the majority of domestic tasks, which many of them—us—don’t love. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Yeah.

Grose: And I think in this political era, marriage and long-term commitment is still so normative that—and I’m so curious about what you think about this—I think we will see a married, gay president before we see a single president.

Rosin: Yes. I mean, it’s funny you should say that, you know, it’s normal for women to work. What surprises me is—we’ll take the “childless cat ladies” moment: I understand that everybody made fun of vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance for saying, “childless cat ladies.” He got a lot of grief for it. But it is a little bit amazing to me that that would even come up, that you could still vilify a single, working woman.

Grose: Yeah, that’s why, you know, a lot of conservative commentators will say, The culture is so anti-marriage. The culture is so anti-family, you know, Democrats and liberals are trying to destroy the American family, when, you know, every pop-cultural thing is about marriage.

I mean, look at not even just modern things, like Bridgerton—hugely successful Netflix show about the marriage plot, right? The idea that somehow now the goal for most people still isn’t marriage and kids is demonstrably untrue based on polling. Whether or not they actually accomplish that and it happens for them—that’s another story. But still, do most people want to get married and have children? Most young people, yes.

Rosin: And is that statistically true?

Grose: Yes.

Rosin: On the left and the right?

Grose: Yes.

Rosin: Okay. Then I want to run this theory by you because that’s what I thought was true, that on the left and the right, the desire to be married is the same. But there’s something splitting in the—

Grose: Well, I wouldn’t say it’s the same, but I would say it is the majority on both.

Rosin: It’s the majority on both.

Grose: Yes.

Rosin: Okay. So I want to try and locate what is splitting between men and women. Because if men and women both still want to get married, and yet there seem to be just wide divergences about what that looks like—what the marriage looks like, what the ideal looks like—I just want to locate where the split is.

So I wrote an article for The Atlantic called “The End of Men” and then turned that into a book, like, over a decade ago. So I’ve been tracking this gender divide for a while. Back then I would say it was nascent. Like, you could see that women were pulling ahead in sectors of the economy, and men were resisting adapting. And I wasn’t really sure how it would play out, either in the economy or in the marriage market.

And I would say, you know, a decade-plus—it’s gotten more extreme. And what’s gotten more extreme is that men have hunkered down in their attachment to traditional male–female roles, which is, like—that’s not obvious. It’s not how it rolled out in many other countries. And just one more part of this theory is that women are then resisting that. Like, it’s a reactive cycle. Like, the more that men dig in—in corners of the internet, in the culture, in politics—the more women resist.

Grose: I think that is true for some. I mean, if you look at the polling, there is definitely a gender divide in terms of how liberal women have become and that there are just simply more conservative men. That is true.

I think the education part of it is really important, because I think college-educated men have, for the most part, accepted more egalitarian structures. They, you know, need their wives to work. I mean, the idea that you’re going to be a two-income family, I think, is, for most people who have children, just a necessity.

Like, you cannot, you know, support in any sort of real way multiple children on one income in most parts of the country. So I think, however they feel about it, they need the money.

Rosin: You’re resisting the broader research about diverging worldviews, it sounds like. So where do men and women diverge then?

Grose: Well, no. I’m not resisting it. I just think it’s concentrated among men who are already conservative. So I think those men are becoming more polarized and more conservative.

But I’m not sure, again. Based on the sort of polling about these, it’s like: So the way the question is asked and by whom and in what way—there’s just so much noise in this data. So I definitely buy that there is a subset of young men—and there are maybe more of them—who were already conservative, who are pushed to more extreme versions of conservatism.

Does that mean that in Gen Z, we’re just going to have this massive gender divide, and no heterosexual people will ever get married again, which is what the Washington Post argued in an op-ed? I don’t buy that—for many reasons, number one being: I just think thirst outweighs politics.

Rosin: Thirst? (Laughs.)

Grose: Horniness. Desire.

Rosin: Oh, thirst. Desire. Yes. To get married.

Grose: Yes. To get married.

Rosin: I mean, that’s cute.

Grose: (Laughs.)

Rosin: I mean, very cute. I know you love your husband. I’ve seen you post many wonderful things about him, but—

Grose: I’m a normie. I’m sorry. I can’t help it.

Rosin: It’s okay. You’re a normie and a romantic, as far as I can tell.

But there are countries where it hasn’t rolled out that way. I mean, there are countries—say, South Korea, to some extent Japan—where the pressures on women, combined with their increasing presence in the workforce, combined with the unyielding social and cultural pressures, has actually resulted in lower marriage rates, refusal to marry, and lower birth rates.

Like, that is a real thing.

Grose: It is a real thing, but we’re just so much less homogenous, culturally and racially and religiously, than those countries, and our attitude towards women working is much more advanced and always has been. So, you know, I don’t see the future for the United States as a South Korea.

Is it possible that the future for the United States could be more like Germany or one of the other Western European countries where the birth rates are really pretty low? I think that is more of a realistic possibility.

But there is a lot of variation. And I think young men, in my experience in reporting, do want to be more involved in their children’s lives. Like, they don’t see it necessarily as “unmanly.” The thing that they do see as unmanly is earning significantly less than their wives.

That always does seem to be the sticking point. So I do think we have successfully—for some, not for everybody—made caretaking seen as an acceptable thing for men to do.

Rosin: Across social classes?

Grose: It depends. It really depends. I think we live in such a big country. We live in such a specific country, regionally. I think that that does cut across class to some extent.

I often think about this Republican pollster that I interviewed, and she was talking about how paid leave is popular for everyone. Like, men really want it too. And she described talking to a rural dad who had an hourly job, and he was talking about how his wife had a C-section, and she really couldn’t lift anything, and he really wanted to be there to help her. That was not seen as unmanly or whatever to him. Like, that was extremely desirable and what he really wanted, and he couldn’t afford to take the time off work, because he’s an hourly worker. So he doesn’t work; doesn’t get paid.

So I think about that a lot. I think it just really depends. But I do think more women going to college and college graduates, for the most part, out-earning non-college graduates—I see that as a potentially bigger problem.

Rosin: Right. You just have women in the middle class who are just out-earning the marriageable men around them.

Grose: Right.

Rosin: After the break, we go back to politics and talk about how these gender dynamics are affecting the upcoming election.

[Music]

Rosin: Okay, so back to this election. The gender divide just keeps getting wider and wider in the U.S. between Republicans and Democrats. Given all the statistics you just said about marriage and family, what would you mark as the origin point of that growing divide?

Grose: Trump. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. I literally saw a graph today that showed that the divide really became a yawning gap starting in 2015 among young people. Even the fall of Roe didn’t move the needle the way Trump and his rhetoric moved the needle.

Rosin: Really?

Grose: Yes.

Rosin: That’s surprising.

Grose: I mean, he is so uniquely repellent to young women. And who can blame them?

And I wonder if also—I mean, and this is more speculation—the outpouring of #MeToo, which I think is an immediate cause, was a response to Trump being elected, in many ways. And perhaps, seeing that sort of outpouring of storytelling and upset, and then seeing that nothing really changed, right? Like, can we point to sort of any demonstrable policy outcomes of #MeToo? Harvey Weinstein’s in jail. But sort of on an individual level, is young women’s daily experience of sexism markedly different? I don’t know.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Grose: And then seeing, like, We did this whole movement. We marched in the streets. And what’s changed, socially and culturally, you know? We’re now—what?—the third generation post-sexual revolution, post-women really flooding into the workplace and colleges. And so I wonder if that is sort of another frustration.

Rosin: Meaning what?

Grose: Well, cultural progress has stalled somewhat for women, right?

Rosin: I see.

Grose: So you know, obviously Roe was overturned. But it’s like, my mom was one of—her medical-school class was like 5 to 10 percent women, right? And so I was raised in a community where my mom was one of the few full-time working moms, right?

And now my daughters are being raised in a community where, I think, all of their friends’ moms work full-time.

I do think that there is possibly a sense among young women—it’s like, Well, I saw my grandma. My grandma was working. My mom was working. Why, culturally, am I still doing the majority of the work? Why am I still more mature than all of these boys? Why are the expectations on me to be different, a certain kind of way, still what they are when we’ve been fighting for this for so long?

Rosin: I see. That makes some sense to me, that we had for the last, let’s say—it’s not even that long, but let’s say—50, 60 years been making progress on quantifiable issues, like wages, workplace participation, certain kinds of social acceptability, and now we’ve landed at the difficult, murky cultural issues, and those do seem stalled in many ways.

Grose: That’s exactly what I was trying to say.

Rosin: So digging more into this election, the interesting thing to me in this election is that everyone is fighting over the “normal” territory, like who’s weird and who’s normal. And while it’s novel that Democrats are making headway, it does actually make me a little nervous when people start defining normal—like, collecting around normal, because we all kind of know who they mean and who they’re excluding.

So to start with just the low-hanging fruit—that’s J.D. Vance. In 2021, when he was running, this is when the “childless” situation came up. And he used the word normal. He said: “Is this just a normal fact of American life, that the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their offspring, via their own children and grandchildren?”

This is a policy view that some people in the conservative world like, that people with children should have greater voting power, sort of greater influence in how the country is run.

Grose: One of the things that I find saddest is that there are a lot of policies that pro-family liberals and pro-family conservatives agree on, or at least can come to the table to talk about—child tax credits being the main one, but paid leave is pretty universally popular. I think childcare will never happen, because that is something that they can’t agree on, because many conservatives feel the government should not have a role in supporting children being cared for by anybody but their own parents. But, you know, that’s another topic.

There are a lot of low-hanging fruit of policy that we could come to a somewhat bipartisan agreement on, but when you frame it as, you know, quote-unquote, “normal people,” “parents versus everybody else,” it just makes it impossible.

Rosin: Yeah, what’s confusing about J. D. Vance is sometimes he talks about the family issues in this culture-war-ish ways, like the Vance who talks to Tucker Carlson about cat ladies, but then there’s the J. D. Vance who, in mixed company, talks in a lot more measured ways about being pro-family. Like, maybe he could come to an agreement on child tax credits.

Grose: Well, you know, listen—I don’t know what is in this man’s heart. I have never spoken to him. But I suspect, based on the things he said before he became pro-Trump and the things that he said after he became pro-Trump, that this is calculated. I don’t know that it’s a sincere belief. I just don’t know.

He has, you know, explained his sort of change and revelations, and he’s converted, and he’s moved to a different mindset. And that’s, you know—maybe that’s genuine. I don’t know.

I mean, to me, it’s just bad politics, because there are a lot of people without children who vote Republican. So why are you alienating voters? Like, that’s number one: Don’t alienate huge groups of people.

Like, it’s just a bad idea. But I do think, number one, if it is not genuine, it’s to appeal to, you know, his potential future boss and all of his followers. And if it is genuine, I think it is pushed further and deeper by reading and listening to sources that just echo a very narrow idea and push you further into the same talking points, and surrounding yourself with the same people who only believe these things and sort of gets you into sort of more extreme territory on these issues.

Rosin: Yeah, I suppose that’s other whole version of J.D. Vance, which is the very-online version of him.

Grose: Yes.

Rosin: Like, when he’s gone on conservative podcasts in the past and talked, for example, about how childless leaders are “more sociopathic.” This is the kind of language that comes from certain corners of the internet.

Grose: Yeah. And if you hear him talk on all these podcasts that people were furiously clipping, it’s clear when he speaks to this audience of conservative bros, it’s almost unintelligible to people who are not versed in their shorthand. Well, one thing they often say about parents versus nonparents is that nonparents don’t have quote-unquote “skin in the game.”

And it’s just like, What do you mean? They’re part of society. They’re in the community. They’re using parks. They’re using roads. Like, they do have skin in the game. Like, they do.

Rosin: I just want to say: I am the parent of three children. I love my children. I find this argument to be absolutely absurd because people who have children are narrowly focused on their family and their children. And anybody who doesn’t have children is probably spending a lot more time thinking about the community, making more-logical decisions about broader issues and what should be done. Like, I would not pick a busy parent of three kids to be the one to make, like, broad social policy and decide what our future is.

You’re welcome to write me all the hate mail you want, parents. Again, I have three children, and I love them all. But I find just, like, the base idea that parents are more invested or intelligent about the future to be absurd.

Grose: Well, actually, the part of it that bothers me more is the idea that parents are more moral than nonparents. In statements defending them—both Sean Combs, [who] is accused of really vile sexual assault, and then Justin Timberlake, who was pulled over for driving under the influence—they said that they were family men. And they use that phrase, “family men.” And it’s like, Who cares?

Rosin: Right.

Grose: It has absolutely nothing to do with the crimes they are alleged to have committed.

Rosin: Yes. Absolutely.

Grose: And that it’s even in the year 2024 used as some kind of defense—or, you know, moral superiority or whitewashing or whatever it is—is, like, insane to me.

Rosin: I mean, I think this is why I love in your book this surfacing of the scripts, because there’s just an unconscious, assumed “family equals good.” And so you can just call that up in any moment that you need to. It’s just so—exactly. He could be a terrible father. I wouldn’t, I mean—Puff Daddy—I wouldn’t want him to be the parent of a young girl.

Grose: Donald Trump is a family man. Like, Who cares?

Rosin: Yes. That’s, like, a data point about someone, like their age. It doesn’t say anything about their moral worth or goodness.

Grose: Well, my spiciest take, which is: I just think that we still have a first lady or first gentleman in the year 2024 is absurd. This is an unpaid job. Why? For what? Pay someone to do that job, and stop making the president and the vice president our mommy and daddy. Like, What Freudian nonsense is this? Like, I don’t like it at all. (Laughs.)

And I hate the focus on, you know, the scrutiny. I felt so bad for the scrutiny on the Bush twins and Malia and Sasha Obama. Like, Leave the kids alone. Leave Barron Trump alone. Let him live at NYU. I don’t care what he’s doing. Like, I hate it. I hate all that.

And that is the one thing I agree with Melania Trump about. Like, Leave them alone. Just leave them all alone. Do not bring this sideshow into the government. Like, it has nothing to do with the job of being president, and it shouldn’t.

Rosin: Right. Right. So what is the Democratic vision of families? Like, what do we actually see from the left?

Grose: Well, I do think it is, again, these cultural scripts, and these were around when you wrote your book. For college-educated people—and now there is an association with college education and being a Democratic, liberal voter, so that’s an association that exists—children are seen as the capstone. So you get married. You get a good job. You then have kids.

And I think that there is more room in conservative cultures to have kids when they come. And there’s also a lot more pressure not to have, in religious circles, to not have sex before you’re married, and if you do get pregnant, to get married. And that association has actually loosened over time. But it’s still, I think, somewhat of the attitude—that, like, You should have kids really young, and even if you can’t fully financially provide for them, that’s okay. You’ll figure it out.

I think that is, you know, not the norm [among the] college educated and especially urban, college educated. I mean, if you look at the average age of first-time moms in places like New York and San Francisco, it is now, you know, pushing 35. It’s like 33.

Rosin: Right, so it’s not childless cat ladies. It’s just, like, “delay the children and also have a cat” lady.

Grose: Well, delay the children because you’re getting educated and because living in cities is really expensive. I mean, I think I would like just to generally push back on the negative framing of all of this. It’s like, It’s good that women have access to education. It is good that it is much more unusual for people under 19 to have children. Like, these are all things that we saw as unalloyed societal goods, right? Like, and now there’s sort of this funhouse mirror of, like, No. It’s bad. Now it’s bad. It’s like, Well, is it? Is it just: We have new challenges because of these changes?

And so I sort of just always want to make sure we’re framing it that way, that it’s like, There’s new challenges. Yes. We do have to think about the birth rate more. We do have to think about how hard it is for people to start wanted families. We do have to think about, you know: Are people not meeting people that they want to have children with anymore, and why is that? And it’s so complicated.

I can’t, I mean—I just don’t think that there is some crisis of the liberal family. I just don’t buy that. I think many liberal men and women in their 20s have anxiety and dread about having children, but people have always had anxiety and dread about having children.

For my book, I read the diaries and letters of women going back hundreds of years, and their emotions were identical to what people feel today about having children. It’s scary. It’s, you know—the greatest responsibility you can have is for other humans. The only difference now is many people have an actual choice about whether to become parents. It is somewhat socially acceptable to not have children. And it’s like: The second it is even barely socially acceptable to not have children, there’s this huge backlash and panic and fear. And I think we should be really highly suspicious of that.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Grose: Like these feelings are not new. People have always felt this way. Why are we—

Rosin: —so afraid of them?

Grose: So afraid of them, saying these emotions are aberrant and not, you know—if having children is the right thing for you to do, these are normal feelings to have on the journey to get there.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

In terms of political theater, that is, if you could mandate something, what would it be? Would you be like, You’re never allowed to talk about a politician’s family? You would ban the term, you know, first gentleman, first lady. Like, what would Jess Grose’s rules of political theater be?

Grose: Oh, it would definitely be: We never talk about anyone’s family. We just never talk about it. We only talk about their policies. We do not parade them around at conventions. We do not blow up their Instagrams. Like, it’s ridiculous. Like, I just—it only turns negative, I think. And I think it’s, especially to minor children, unfair.

Rosin: Yeah. And I think in a deeper way, what it does is perpetuate the script that the only person who can be in charge of us, our leader—the only person we can trust, the only person of good character—is a person with a so-called normal family.

Grose: I agree with that.

Rosin: All right. Well, we’re in full agreement. Jess, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Grose: Anytime.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Morgan Ome. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

The great musical mystery of the year, for me at least, has been all the hype around a 25-year-old singer-songwriter named MJ Lenderman. He is “often described—accurately—as the next great hope for indie rock,” The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich wrote recently. I like Lenderman, but his pleasant, country-inflected new album, Manning Fireworks, certainly doesn’t scream next anything. It almost could have been released in 1975, or 1994, or 2003.

Petrusich’s article made something click for me, though. She defined indie rock as “however one might now refer to scrappy, dissonant, guitar-based music that’s unconcerned, both sonically and spiritually, with whatever is steering the Zeitgeist.” She then said Manning Fireworks “could have been released in 1975, or 1994, or 2003” … but in a good way.

Such is the manner in which Lenderman has generally been praised: as a restorer, a throwback, a reassuring archetype. The North Carolina native plays guitar and sings backup in the genre-bending band Wednesday, but his solo music—laid-back, witty, tuneful while noisy—seems designed to trigger déjà vu. He fits in a clear lineage stretching back through mysterious slackers such as Mac DeMarco, Pavement, and R.E.M. to the Boomer goddaddies of wry disaffection: Neil Young, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground. In a glowing review of Lenderman’s new album, the critic Steven Hyden wrote, “As a young, curly-haired brunet dude, he made exactly the kind of music you would expect from a young, curly-haired brunet dude.” Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers told Rolling Stone, “He checks all the boxes for me.”

This is going to sound earnest in that intolerably Millennial way, but: Isn’t box-checking not very indie? When I first dabbled in hipsterdom, in the early 2000s, Wilco was defacing folk guitars with electronic chaos, Animal Collective was inventing barbershop psychedelia, and Joanna Newsom was writing supernatural symphonies on her harp. What united these artists wasn’t commercial independence—some were on major labels—but rather their belief that authenticity arose from experimentation. Whereas normie genres such as country and mainstream rock seemed to be chasing faded glory, acclaimed indie acts honored their influences by pushing their ideas further: Think of Sonic Youth intensifying John Cale’s drones to screeching frequencies, Modest Mouse’s yelpy profundity emerging from the Pixies’ yelpy absurdity, and so on.

For more than a decade now, though, that sense of forward movement has been harder to detect—because it’s not been quite as rewarded as it once was. When Spotify came to America in 2011, it decimated the profitability of recordings and overwhelmed the public with choice. It also empowered listeners in ways that eroded the importance of music critics, record stores, and real-life scenes. Tidy narratives of progress—always somewhat fictive, useful to journalists and publicists more than to consumers and artists—started to degrade. Prestige, based on a few pundits’ idea of boundary-pushing genius, stopped paying the bills like it once did (because people stopped shelling out for buzzy music without hearing it first). Die-hard fandom became crucial (the trendy phrase for this is parasocial relationship). This confluence of factors influenced indie rock much as it influenced the mainstream: by making identity more important.

The most discussed indie-rockers of the past decade were thus singer-songwriters with strong points of view, such as Mitski, Waxahatchee, Soccer Mommy, and Bartees Strange. The breakout bands tended to be glorified solo projects (Japanese Breakfast, Tame Impala, the War on Drugs) or, in the case of Haim, a sisterly trio ripe for stanning. As the media caught up to the internet’s amplification of long-marginalized voices, issues of race, gender, and sexuality became more explicit in the critical conversation. All of these new stars were serious talents, and all of them did, in various small ways, innovate; the layered and whispery vocal style of Phoebe Bridgers, for example, has proved influential. But in general, the progression of indie in the streaming era can be tracked less through sound than through the question of who’s singing and what they’re singing about.

Of course, indie rock—like any musical tradition—has always been rooted in questions of identity. It’s just that in the past, the default identity tended to be a white guy who’s only comfortable revealing himself through cryptic poetry, buried under aural distortion. Stephen Malkmus and Jeff Tweedy absolutely wrote about their own maleness, but most listeners and critics didn’t focus on that. Now, when identity has moved from cultural subtext to text—and indie rock has come to seem more like a settled language of self-expression than an unruly journey into the unknown—the next big thing seems oddly familiar: a man, in a once-male-dominated genre, singing about being a man.

The cover of Lenderman’s 2021 album, Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, features a photo of a naked guy holding a cat, framed by happy-faced stars and moons. It was a fitting statement of winsome, self-exposing masculinity—of a bro who knows he’s babygirl.

Stylistically, the cover also conveyed his musical approach: concise, funny, building layers of meaning through simple juxtapositions. Much of Lenderman’s early work made him out to be a lo-fi magpie, pairing wonky riffs with understated punch lines delivered in a flat, vaguely fearful drawl. On Guitar Solo’s “I Ate Too Much at the Fair,” Lenderman encapsulated an entire relationship—who cares for whom, who spends and who saves—in one couplet: “I ate too much at the fair / Despite what you said.” Gobs of reverb, with sweetness at the edges, conveyed his lovelorn bloat.

That album and his breakthrough follow-up, 2022’s Boat Songs, felt rooted in what you might call the “woke first person,” situating individual desires with an anxious nod to the society around him. In one song, he fantasized about becoming a Catholic priest so he wouldn’t have to worry about girls anymore. Another, the rollicking “Hangover Game,” used an anecdote about Michael Jordan to probe his own drinking habit. I always laugh at “Inappropriate,” whose noodling organ sounds like the Doors being recorded from the other side of a wall:

Accidentally saw your mother
Sleepin’
She looked so peaceful and disgusting

It felt inappropriate
To catch her like that
I never want to see her sleep again

Manning Fireworks, his new album, shifts the perspective a bit: He now often seems to be singing about other guys. Lenderman told The New York Times that some of the album’s lyrics were inspired by misogynistic podcasters such as Andrew Tate, who preach an alpha, acquisitive view of how men should behave. The album is at its best when it links sorrow and pigheadedness, suggesting that the contemporary Problem With Men has something to do with the heartbreak and impotence that rockers like Lenderman have long plumbed (he sings tenderly of one character “punching holes in the hotel room”). At times, though, Lenderman is as predictable as a political cartoonist, employing glib ironies to mock smartwatches and guys who rent Ferraris after a breakup.

These themes are modern—listen closely, and the album actually couldn’t have come out in 1975, 1994, or 2003—but the album’s sound is not. Lenderman is now making blast-at-a-barbecue Americana, bedecked in pedal steel and tragic-hero guitar solos. Some elements hit the ear as unexpected: doomy riffing in “Wristwatch,” drifting clarinet in “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In,” the rumbling uplift of “On My Knees.” Yet fundamentally, the album feels unmoored, assembled through reference points. Although the music scans as the work of a full band, it makes sense that Lenderman played most of the instruments: This is one rock geek’s modest vision, unimpeded. Lenderman’s skills aren’t debatable, and when I watch videos of him performing with his heavy-lidded eyes and boyish smirk, I get why people are obsessed. But if this is the next great hope for indie rock, then indie rock is becoming a costume closet.

Luckily, other contenders exist for that title, and one of them is Lenderman’s own band, Wednesday, a quintet founded in 2017. When I first listened to the group’s 2023 album, Rat Saw God, I felt a rush of recognition—not for any particular sound, but for the way Wednesday took for granted that its job was to break ground. The songs blended noise-rock and country into gnarled, surprising shapes. The lead singer Karly Hartzman—Lenderman’s now-ex-girlfriend—told tales of small-town life through sweet warbles and harsh screams. All five of the band members at the time were credited as songwriters, and all of the album’s songs seemed like they could have arisen only through a collision of creative minds.

Wednesday is part of a fascinating trend sweeping through Gen Z rock: a revival of shoegaze. The subgenre originated in the late ’80s as bands such as My Bloody Valentine blanketed concert venues in slow-churning guitar squall while staring down at their effects pedals. The new incarnation—check out the fearsome young trio Julie—draws not just from traditional shoegazers but also from heavy metal, emo, and even electronica. The trend can probably be attributed to TikTok’s demand for sounds that make banal images seem profound. But another reason might be a latent hunger for rock that’s abstracted, collaborative, and sensation-first. Shoegaze is, after all, a term for subsuming individual personalities into pure sound.

[Read: How indie rock changed the world]

Even outside of that fad, to my ear, many of the most exciting things happening in 2020s indie are bands. Recent consensus-masterwork albums have come from Dry Cleaning and Wet Leg, whose spoken-sung vocals enmesh with spry, unpredictable post-punk; Turnstile, a hard-core act that veers into dance music and power pop; and Big Thief, whose ornate folk jams radiate sci-fi eeriness. The state of the music industry—especially after the dangers and disruptions of COVID-19—is broadly discouraging of bands: Groups are just more expensive and harder to market than solitary figures. But if indie rock means anything, it means trying to carve out a refuge from the forces shaping the mainstream.

And make no mistake: If indie mostly defines itself around solo stars, pop will devour its last shred of differentiation. The streaming years have seen tremendous evolution in the sound of mass-market music, in part because identity-based imperatives have pushed the world’s biggest entertainers to act more underground. Inspired by the alt-mainstream bridge-builder Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift and her protégés have started to employ indie-rock producers to furnish them with classic signifiers of authenticity. Listening to recent pop is like playing record-snob bingo, trying to identify the musical touchstones used to illustrate the singer’s confessional zingers. Much the same thing can be said of Manning Fireworks—and it’s likely no coincidence that Lenderman is getting memed in the same manner as a pop girlie.

Time for a confession that will make me sound like a parasocial hypocrite: I’m worried about Lenderman’s breakup. He and Hartzman were dating for years, and many of their songs chronicle their love. But they split recently (and—here’s more lore—moved out of the Asheville property where they and some other cool musicians lived). The breakup is apparently amicable: Lenderman is still in Wednesday, and the two just performed together on The Tonight Show. Still, with all the fame building around his solo career, it’s natural to wonder about the band’s fate. Speaking about Wednesday’s future, Hartzman recently told Rolling Stone, “There has to be a lot of change.” That’s scary as a fan—but then again, change is what a fan of music like this should want.