Let’s put the Opium down
This article was originally written for the Daily Trojan, published Sept. 10, 2025.
The subgenre shows the extent of Gen Z’s growing political disillusionment.
Playboi Carti performing at a concert in 2017. Carti started the Opium record label and music collective in 2019. (7rucify / Wikimedia Commons)
For casual listeners, the sound of the rage rap genre of music — as popularized by the Playboi Carti-founded record label Opium and its artists including Carti, Ken Carson and Destroy Lonely — is a whole lot of nothing. It says a lot, but also holds no significance at all. Ironically, that nothingness explains why Generation Z gravitates toward it.
The rise of Opium brings forward the question: What does it mean that music defined by nihilism is now the soundtrack of a generation?
Historically, rap has served as a form of resistance: In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, artists like Public Enemy and N.W.A utilized hip-hop for political protest, rallying against systemic racism and police brutality. Songs like “Fight the Power” and “Fuck tha Police” named injustices and demanded change, making the artists’ collective resistance alongside their audience impossible to ignore.
That tradition underscored the idea that music, like politics, mattered because it held the inciting power to unite a multitude of perspectives under a shared goal.
In contrast, Opium flips that tradition on its head. Rather than bringing the invisible to light, its artists obscure, draining the messaging that seemed to be natural to hip-hop’s musicality altogether. At Carson’s shows, mosh pits erupt before he even utters a word, and this does afford an odd sense of catharsis. But to immerse oneself in music that refuses to say anything is, paradoxically, a statement about everything.
The appeal is rooted in youth exhaustion. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior survey, 40% of high school students experienced “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” continuing a years-long crisis in adolescent mental health.
That despair doesn’t exist in isolation — it collides with the digital environments young people inhabit on their mobile devices. Nearly half of United States teens describe their social media use as “almost constantly,” as found by the Pew Research Center in 2024. The Surgeon General has warned that using social media for more than three hours per day is linked with doubled risk of depression and anxiety symptoms.
Against this backdrop, music that offers no clear message feels protective. It gives listeners permission to disengage, if only for the length of a track, from a world demanding constant opinions, identities and performances. In that sense, Opium’s “nothingness” acts as a reprieve.
Of course, reprieve can’t be confused with solution, especially when it feeds the suspicion that participation — culturally or politically — no longer affects outcomes. This nihilism, while soothing in the long term, corrodes the long-held belief that societal institutions are worth showing up for, which puts the next generation’s collective energy at risk of slipping away.
At first glance, young people look more polarized than ever: Social media amplifies ideological extremes, feeding the impression that the generation is split between two very opposite poles. Yet, national surveys reveal a more complicated picture.
This spring, the Yale Youth Poll found that voters aged 22–29 leaned Democratic by 6.4 points, while those 18–21 leaned Republican by 11.7 points — an 18-point gap within a generation. Meanwhile, the 2025 Reuters Digital News Report documented record levels of news fatigue and avoidance among young people. While Gen Z appears hyper-politicized within the bubble of social media, in reality, large numbers are exhausted, retreating to spaces that ask nothing of them.
This phenomenon signals a deeper erosion of trust. Young people are trapped between loud, polarized extremes online and are stuck with an internal fear that the civic foundation is broken. If politics feel futile, then culturally, the Gen Z embrace of Opium makes sense.
This withdrawal carries a heavy cost: If young people find themselves only in aesthetic rebellion, this phenomenon threatens to fester into a full dissipation of political energy. This act of rebellion against mainstream rap, older generations and the sheer burden of the world’s problems in everyone’s futures is teetering on the precipice of catastrophe. For a generation that will soon constitute the largest share of the electorate, resignation is dangerous.
This is what failing institutions want. As college students, falling into the comforting thrum of socializing with friends or complaining about the stresses of coursework is easy. The challenge is, then, to rebuild the spaces where meaning feels reachable — on campus, in local communities and in civic life.
That endeavor starts small: demanding transparency in University politics and from administrators, participating within student government, registering to vote. These aren’t the most glamorous acts, but they could be the antidote to our generation’s nihilism.
Yes, it will be difficult to grow these idealistic demands into progress, and institutions have proven time and time again that they ignore their constituents. But once Gen Z gets past the haze of its ideological lethargy, the other options will seem less out of reach.
