In the second issue of Stems, we mapped the political leanings of the major music streaming audiences. Now, with ICE buying recruitment ads on your favorite platform, it feels like time to check back in on where music fans sit in the political hellscape of 2025. (Does Kristi Noem know something about Charli XCX fans that we don’t?)

Once again, we pulled survey data from Statista—this time looking at how fans of different music genres self-identify across the political spectrum, from far left to far right, compared with the general population. Without further ado:

True to its reputation, Country music does over-index in fans who self-identify as far-right on the ideological spectrum, and who are also more likely to live in rural areas and small towns. But interestingly, country music doesn’t have the most conservative fans as a whole (more to come on that below).

Rock fans skew older—mostly 40 and up—but still lean more progressive than the general population. Rock fans’ lefty tendencies undercut the long-running Poptimist critique that rock has gone conservative at its core — not to mention conservative critiques of classic rockers like Bruce Springsteen asserting they’ve lost their fans to the right.

Latin music listeners self-identify as right-leaning more than other music fans — even more than country, which was a surprise. There is some nuance: Latin music fans tilt more center-right than country fans, who skew far-right. (It’s worth remembering that Latin music isn’t a genre — it’s an entire universe, stretching from dembow to salsa and including the music of many countries.) Also worth noting: whatever their political leanings, millions of Latin music fans love Bad Bunny, so maybe the haters should cool their jets about his Super Bowl halftime show.

Hip-hop fans lean slightly more progressive than the general population, and are significantly less likely to identify as center-right. Hip-hop may not have the total dominance of the charts that it had a few years ago, but compared to every other genre, politically, its fans look the most like the rest of America.

Pop fans skew heavily female (59% vs. 41% male) and are more likely to live in major cities, so it makes sense that they’d lean progressive, or, more specifically, center-left. (Do we see the influence of leading center-leftist Taylor Swift here?) Congrats, pop fans — you’ve got the most left-leaning listener base of them all!

Episode 2 of Fela: Fear No Man opens with Saul Williams, Flea and others trying to capture who Nigerian music giant Fela Kuti was: Bob Marley, Dylan, Malcolm X, Mandela all come up as reference points. The comparison that makes sense to me is some cross between James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Like Brown, Fela was a generational artist who invented an entire genre, his Afrobeat influencing artists from Beyoncé to Burna Boy to Paul McCartney, who talks about seeing Fela perform in Lagos and weeping. And like Ali, Fela put everything on the line—his freedom, his livelihood, and his safety, even as he declared his own country inside his Lagos compound and drove Nigeria’s military dictatorship insane.

The show’s logline asks what art can actually do in the face of injustice. The answer, like Fela himself, is complicated. Jad Abumrad (Radiolab, Dolly Parton’s America) might not seem the obvious host, but he and his team did the work: two years, 200 interviews, spanning Barack Obama (whose company, Higher Ground, produced the series) to Ayo Edebiri to Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. The result is a twelve-part audio documentary and oral history that’s dense, personal, cinematic, and often moving.

Fela died in 1997, and there’s little usable interview tape of him, so the series finds truth through the people who lived around him. One of the most powerful voices is a onetime keyboardist, Dele Sosimi, whose father was killed by soldiers when he was a boy; Fela was the only one who acknowledged his trauma and gave him purpose. Several of Fela’s twenty-six wives give a picture of the cult-like energy around him in his Kalakuta Republic compound, and, later, the terror of the 1977 military raid. During that attack, Fela’s mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti—an activist in her own right, and, as Abumrad argues in Episode 4, a foundational figure in Nigeria’s protest tradition—was thrown from a window. She later died from her injuries. The show makes it clear that Fela’s art didn’t always protect himself, his loved ones, or even his sanity, but it did outlast his body.

A footnote on the business side: Fear No Man is also a reminder of why limited-series podcasts still matter. Prestige audio docs have been fading as a business strategy for a few years; they’re often too expensive, and too finite to justify the investment. But when done right, an eight-hour epic like this delivers the depth no panel or interview show can match.