Opinion: On the State of Popular Music
On Monday, September 14, 2026, Ella Langley’s hit “Choosin’ Texas” achieved its 22nd week atop the Billboard Top 100 charts, tying with Mariah Carey’s holiday classic “All I Want for Christmas Is You” for the longest time spent in the #1 position. Meanwhile, right behind Langley sat her pop-country contemporary Stella Lefty, and her song “Boston.”
This is, to put it simply, a disaster for the music industry. Two artists who, despite some general talent, are not producing meaningful music, instead creating something devoid of depth or purpose. And perhaps even worse, something representative of the corrosion of culture in this nation.
Now, I have to admit, “Choosin’ Texas” is a good song, even if I’m not a fan of the rest of Langley’s body of work. My problem with the track’s success comes in how inorganic its success is. “Choosin’ Texas” is designed to be background noise. In the streaming era, artists are incentivized to create music that will get put in auto-generated playlists, be autoplayed in grocery stores or dentist waiting rooms, or simply get radio airplay for the sake of filling three minutes. As put by music critic Holiday Kirk on his blog Our Heart Speak the Same Words, “Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” is currently stuck in the #1 position (21 weeks and counting) because it is stuck in the #1 position. It’s #1 so Spotify recommends it to users all the time which keeps it #1. Thus, a song that would have ran the country charts and peaked around #36 on the Hot 100 15 years ago is now the biggest Billboard hit in history.” And this is not to say that there aren’t people who organically enjoy Langley’s music, I’m sure there are, but a reasonable person must realize that this success is not entirely organic.
Briefly, I want to touch on another aspect of Langley, which is her association with right-wing figures. She has been noted to have followed social media accounts of the late Charlie Kirk, appeared at a festival organized and headlined by Kid Rock, and has cultivated a relationship with “manosphere” podcaster Theo Von. It’s hard not to connect these behaviors to associate Langley with the larger MAGA movement’s intentions to convert young people to their ideology.
Even worse than this is the rise of the artist known as Stella Lefty. Stella Lefkofsky, the Chicago-area native is the daughter of Eric Lefkofsky, the billionaire founder of Groupon and healthcare technology firm Tempus AI. Immediately, you see the issue at hand. An artist, with the financial backing of her billionaire father, got semi-popular on social media and immediately had a songwriting team, a record deal, and a place on the soundtrack of a major Hollywood blockbuster (Scream 7). Lefty is the quintessential nepo baby and an arguable industry plant.
Worse still is her consistent and repeated pattern of stealing or interpolating melodies. Many are familiar with her hit “Boston” being a dupe of Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season”, to the point that Kahan successfully had his name added to the credits of the song before its release. The same occurred with Lefty’s “Summer You Were Mine,” which interpolates The Chicks’ song “There’s Your Trouble”, though the latter’s writers only had credits added after release. Other accusations, which become exceedingly obvious when comparing the songs in question, include “Why Wouldn’t We” copying Blake Shelton’s “I’ll Name The Dogs” in both melody and lyrical content, “Misery” lifting from “A Million Dreams” of the soundtrack of The Greatest Showman, “7/11” using the same melody as Wheatus’s hit “Teenage Dirtbag,” and “Good at Leaving” containing similarities to Justin Bieber’s “Ghost.”
Outside of the first two examples, none of Lefty’s songs contain credits for anyone outside of her own writing team. This would imply that Lefty and her team did not get permission from the original song’s composers to recreate their work for her own purposes, which is illegal under United States copyright law. The use of interpolation methods also is ethically dubious, as it is used as means to work around having to pay royalties to the original work’s creators.
So, Stella Lefty, a nepo baby, a recipient of elite funding, and a plagiarist. Perhaps this could be forgiven if she was exceedingly talented, but she is not. She combines a grating, forced Southern affectation to her voice with uninspired instrumentals and lyrical depth as deep as an inflatable pool, with such hits as “I like it when you’re nice to me” and “Smokes in my car / But it's okay 'cause I let him.” Lefty is truly one of the least inspired, least interesting, least talented, and least enjoyable artists I have ever heard.
What’s the conclusion here? It’s not to write off mainstream music altogether, but now more than ever to support the innovators, the true creatives, both in the mainstream and the alternative, the major labels and the indies. We must reward genuine creatives, to protect the greatest form of human art.