Stella Lefty and the Rise of Nepo-Baby Musicians and “Industry Plants”
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Most musician bio-pics rely on a familiar trope: a troubled kid—wildly talented, terribly traumatized—hopes to make something of himself before the world swallows him whole. Think Ray Charles in “Ray,” climbing out of poverty after losing his sight. Or Johnny Cash in “Walk the Line,” picking cotton on his family farm, unable to shake the grief of his brother’s death. Or Tina Turner in “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” who finds solace in singing after her parents abandon her and her sister. These from-nothing-to-something origin stories are central to the mythology of American meritocracy, the belief that in every rural town, lifeless suburb, and boarded-up city block there lives a future star. Elvis in “Elvis,” James Brown in “Get On Up,” Loretta Lynn in “Coal Miner’s Daughter”—you’d be hard pressed to find a musician bio-pic that doesn’t trace the arc from obscurity to stardom, hardship to glory, only to reveal how fame begets its own ruinous burdens. Silver spoons and mentally well-adjusted people need not apply; we prefer our artists broken and emotionally bedraggled, their genius lacquered with spit and suffering.
Why are musicians such reliable rags-to-riches archetypes? Perhaps it’s because music, more than other artistic disciplines, tends to be understood as something a person either has a natural gift for or not. As a teen-ager, Jimi Hendrix carried around a broom and pretended it was a guitar, and he later taught himself to play the instrument entirely by ear. When her mother brought home a Boswell Sisters record, a young Ella Fitzgerald spent hours imitating the group’s front woman, Connee Boswell, in an effort to learn to sing. Stevie Wonder made music out of everything, saying he was known in the projects as “the blind boy who was always making noise, beating on walls, hitting on boxes.” Prodigies, all of them, but the mythos is consistent: their gifts came from somewhere deep within, not from schooling or parental directive or formal instruction. In the end, technical virtuosity matters far less than having soul, that ineffable, impossible-to-fake quality that’s embedded in the cosmic architecture of a performance. Maybe this is why we want our musicians to have suffered: so that they can transpose the almost mystical frequencies of existence into an emotional language we know but cannot name.
Can a musician who is a “nepo baby” channel the mystical frequencies of existence? Can a person who has leveraged family connections to jump-start her career really make resonant, evocative art? If you turn to the internet for answers, the verdict is clear: no. The nepo baby—“nepo” being short for nepotism, and “baby” being short for spoiled rich kid—is instead imagined living at her parents’ palatial estate, with a butler to bring her breakfast and a luxury car awaiting her in the driveway. She makes music because, well, what else is she going to do? She will never need to work a normal job, and perhaps her father even knows a few high-profile major-label executives, if she’d ever like an introduction. The nepo baby has surely taken singing and piano lessons since childhood and has always been praised for her talent. She owns tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of home-recording equipment and has access to professional studios in New York and Los Angeles. She works with expensive producers and engineers. She pays a publicity firm top dollar to create a comprehensive social-media-marketing campaign. She shoots a high-budget music video, which is then cut into short-form clips engineered for peak virality. They go viral. The lead single nets millions of streams. The musician becomes a perma-fixture of our screens, and we wonder: Why is this person being shoved down my throat? We learn that their dad is a tech billionaire, or an entertainment executive, or an esteemed musician or artist himself. We think: surely she’s jumped the line, skipped the requisite heartache and pain required to make it as an artist and launched blithely into the good part. We learn to resent her and the pay-for-play system that facilitated her rise.
Or, at least, this is the story we tell ourselves on social media any time a child of money or fame vaults into public life. And there always seems to be someone—a new young actor, model, musician, influencer—available for scrutiny, whose apparent speedrun to fame becomes ground for conspiratorial investigation. The most recent example is the twenty-three-year-old Stella Lefty, whose breakout hit “Boston” swept through TikTok earlier this summer and catapulted her onto the charts and into the discourse. “Boston” is an uncanny interpolation of Noah Kahan’s stomp-clap sensation “Stick Season,” a song built around a geographical callout and a chatty, lilting vocal delivery. Like “Stick Season,” the hook for Lefty’s “Boston” is undeniable, one that’ll weasel into your brain after one listen and refuse to leave. I first encountered the song as a short-form video on social media, and it didn’t make much of an impression; Lefty seemed to me yet another competent, country-curious folk-pop artist chasing the success of Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas,” a country crossover hit that has now spent sixteen weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. (Langley is from Alabama; Lefty grew up outside of Chicago, but in her singing she’s adopted a raspy Southern twang.) When internet sleuths dug into Lefty’s background, they discovered that her father, Eric Lefkofsky, was a co-founder of Groupon and is now a billionaire A.I. executive. The ensuing debates about her potential nepotistic advantages have focussed less on whether her wealthy father is directly responsible for her fame and more on how lavishly he has financed her career—an advantage that, if true, feels particularly unfair to artists struggling in an economy in which student loans, housing, and health-care costs stifle opportunities to save up and invest in artistic pursuits. Lefty has mostly avoided addressing these questions, though she certainly seems confused by the criticism. “It’s just so unnatural to see so many people having opinions about me,” Lefty told Rolling Stone, in June. “Whatever people are loving, they are loving.” Her music really is all about loving, too, with songs projecting the uncomplicated joy of a wide-eyed college graduate who goes to the bar on the weekends and falls in love at first sight. Lefty does not make music to suffer to—it’s music for the kid who still believes that the right song, the right night, or the right city might change everything.
Some nepo-baby artists are more transparent about their privileges. The pop star Gracie Abrams, for instance, is the daughter of the filmmaker J. J. Abrams, and her early success sparked questions, and critiques, about how she scaled the mountain of stardom so quickly. Of all the Taylor Swift-inspired singer-songwriters out there, was it an accident that a “Star Wars” director’s daughter was the one to land a No. 1 album and a Saturday Night Live performance? “The nepo stuff is obviously in the discourse appropriately,” Abrams told the Times, last month. “I had a safety net, and that allowed me the ability to experiment and to concentrate, and I had the gift of time to dedicate to doing this thing I loved.” Although indictments of industry favoritism have dogged her since her début, Abrams is clearly talented; she’s a powerful, melancholic vocalist with a masochistic pen and an anxious, intimate approach to arena pop. Her songs seem determined to establish that she’s more than a product of privilege, and indeed a heartbroken, bent-out-of-shape human being. Her latest album, “Daughter from Hell,” overflows with impetuous self-lacerations: she’s bleeding, she’s bruised, she’s a slipknot, a crack in the pavement, so drunk she’s throwing up at the party—she’s a daughter from Hell, apparently, the nepo baby clawing at the velvet walls of her inherited life. (Besides, privilege is all relative, as pointed out in one viral tweet: “[Stella Lefty] is a level of Nepo Baby that makes Gracie Abrams look like an orphan.”)
Claire Cottrill, who performs as Clairo, is another young star who has distanced herself from the nepo-baby charges by releasing some of the most vulnerable and elegant pop music of the past decade. Her father, Geoff Cottrill, is a marketing executive who’s worked with Converse and Coca-Cola; Clairo, naturally, has been labelled both a nepo baby and an “industry plant,” terms often used interchangeably in internet discourse to describe artists whose success is seen as owing more to institutional maneuvering than to organic public discovery. Her first record deal with FADER Label was scrutinized because its co-founder, Jon Cohen, had reported professional ties to Clairo’s father. “I definitely am not blind to the fact that things have been easier for me,” she said to Rolling Stone, in advance of her 2021 sophomore album. Some artists, like the Gen Z rock band Geese, have been pegged as industry plants despite not having famous or ultra-wealthy parents. Earlier this year, Wired ran an article under the headline “The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop.” The investigation alleged that a digital-marketing company had engineered various social-media accounts and algorithmically enticing posts to push the band’s critically lauded fourth studio album, “Getting Killed,” manufacturing a hype that otherwise wouldn’t have emerged. The claim seemed to belie the fact that such marketing strategies are ubiquitous in today’s promotional economy, a necessity for any aspiring artist, but it nevertheless tapped into a central anxiety in contemporary music fandom: whether the viral acts we encounter online are the results of grassroots cultural enthusiasm or the carefully arranged products of corporate influence. That Geese or Clairo makes good music seems almost immaterial; they didn’t earn their success in the right way, so the logic of social media goes, and thus their art appears tainted by the stain of false pretenses.
An unignorable element of the nepo-baby-and-industry-plant online discussion is the discordance between the internet’s perceived democratization of discovery and the industry mechanisms that still shape popular culture. A core promise of our current digital reality is that anyone, anywhere, can become famous, or widely beloved, based on talent alone. You post a song or a video, and soon, with nothing but the help of the benevolent algorithm, you are positioned before millions of fans. But the hidden variables that can dictate virality—expensive recording equipment, proximity to major cities, the time and bandwidth to create and churn out online content—favor those with safety nets and preëxisting cultural capital. Whether or not the music has merit, an artist must contend with the myriad corporate forces that have the power to pick and choose what breaks through the online scrum, and what doesn’t. It is enticing to wonder what story musician bio-pics will tell in fifteen or twenty years. How many more artists, realistically, will come from the mud, perform locally, and find themselves in the right place at the right time? The internet presents a new vision of this story, one in which the local stage is the algorithm, cycling through performers and one-trick ponies until, finally, the hive mind selects its favorite. “Industry plants don’t exist,” Stella Lefty’s manager, Adam Alpert, recently said in defense of his client. “You have to make great songs that people like, and all these artists that people call ‘industry plants’ are having success because they’ve done just that.” A great song, beloved by all, plucked from the air like wind but aligning perfectly with market interests and chart trends: to quote from Lefty’s smash hit, “Last month, you were just another someone.” ♦