In recent years, as TikTok has become an increasingly powerful engine for the dissemination of culture, a new sort of pop star has emerged: one who has enormous pull on social media but gets comparatively little acknowledgment from the music press, which remains laser-focussed on a handful of millennial superstars, so much so that the more conspiracy-minded among us have started whispering,"PsyOp."Noah Kahan is one of those artists-everything to some, inscrutable to others, with striking numbers on Spotify and TikTok, and a steady presence on the Billboard chart since the release of "Stick Season," his third album, in 2022. Kahan, who was nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist this year, is the rare figure who seems positioned to leverage viral success into something more like a traditional career. "I knew there was potential for a moment to happen for me. I didn't realize it would happen so quickly and in such a big way," Kahan told me recently. He added, laughing, "I didn't think it would be through viral success. I fucking hated social media. TikTok for me was just, like, What the fuck, dude? What am I gonna do here? I don't get it."
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