The Ben Shapiro Show - July 30, 2026


Meet the Country Singer Beating Everyone on the Charts


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

184.4

Word count

1,549

Sentence count

143

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 The Revenge of the Normies is here.
00:00:02.000 This time we're seeing it in the music industry.
00:00:04.000 Apparently, Americans love this absolutely mid country song by Ella Langley.
00:00:09.000 We will examine why.
00:00:10.000 Plus, as an ex rapper, I'm delighted to hear that rap music has been out of the top 40 for the first time since 1990.
00:00:15.000 Um, gotta say, like, as a former rap star myself, I weep for my former industry.
00:00:23.000 It's sad.
00:00:23.000 I guess they're just not making good stuff anymore.
00:00:25.000 So, apparently, Hendrick Lamar and SZA's 13 week billboard hit 100 number one Luther.
00:00:32.000 Fell off the Hot 100 dated October 25th, 2025.
00:00:35.000 There were no rap songs in the chart's top 40 last week, according to Billboard.
00:00:39.000 So hip hop's commercial dominance peaked in 2020 when it was woke to listen to rap.
00:00:46.000 It had slipped, it had neared 30% market share.
00:00:49.000 That was down to 25% in 2023.
00:00:51.000 It's at 24% so far in 2025.
00:00:55.000 The only hip hop song in the top 15 of the Billboard Hot 100 right now is a Drake song.
00:01:00.000 Meanwhile, the number one song in America is from Ella Langley.
00:01:04.000 She has three songs in the top 10.
00:01:06.000 And her Choose in Texas has been topping the charts.
00:01:12.000 It's co written by Miranda Lambert.
00:01:15.000 It's been 15 weeks at number one.
00:01:18.000 That broke the record that was held by Whitney Houston for I Will Always Love You and Mariah Carey for We Belong Together.
00:01:24.000 And she's leading Taylor Swift and Drake in the charts.
00:01:27.000 I have no idea who this person is.
00:01:28.000 I mean, to be honest, I'm not the target audience for this, right?
00:01:32.000 I listen to classical music and maybe some old jazz.
00:01:34.000 But this is a very popular song right now.
00:01:37.000 And it's basically just kind of an old ballad.
00:01:39.000 Here's what it sounds like.
00:01:53.000 It's got the cast of Yellowstone in it,
00:02:00.000 yep.
00:02:01.000 I mean, this is fine.
00:02:04.000 It's like a normal country
00:02:07.000 We're gonna get to the chorus somewhere in here.
00:02:07.000 song.
00:02:10.000 Okay, and it's just people dancing.
00:02:15.000 Okay, so this is like.
00:02:19.000 I mean, gotta admit.
00:02:21.000 Yep, fairly generic.
00:02:23.000 That's fine.
00:02:26.000 Reese Witherspoon's daughter.
00:02:27.000 Okay, so you got some celebs in this music video.
00:02:31.000 It's seven minutes of this.
00:02:32.000 This is seven minutes of this.
00:02:33.000 That's a long song.
00:02:36.000 The first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is not that long.
00:02:41.000 That's fine.
00:02:41.000 I mean, like, okay.
00:02:43.000 Again, do I think this is like one of the great groundbreaking pieces of art?
00:02:47.000 No, but I think that here's the thing the midness of it, I think, is the draw.
00:02:52.000 Is that possible?
00:02:54.000 Now, like, we are so looking for normie right now that anything that's just like, oh my gosh, this is relaxingly normal.
00:03:00.000 Everybody's like, oh, you know what?
00:03:01.000 We're not going to get, we're not going to get like the Seattle Storm co owner coming down and just berating people at a bar about lesbian politics.
00:03:07.000 It's just going to be a pretty girl playing a guitar and talking about how Texas is great and couples dancing.
00:03:14.000 And they'll be good looking. 0.99
00:03:15.000 Like that.
00:03:17.000 And the song will be fine.
00:03:19.000 It'll just be okay.
00:03:20.000 Like that's kind of what people are looking for right now.
00:03:22.000 You know what?
00:03:22.000 That's okay.
00:03:24.000 You know how hungry this country is for normalcy?
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00:04:22.000 Art and preference for art tends to reflect what people are looking for.
00:04:26.000 People are looking in the movie theater to be entertained and not slammed over the head with politics.
00:04:31.000 People in music are looking for something that just is relaxing and normal without having to be slammed over the head with your woke or unwoke tastes based on the politics.
00:04:41.000 And that's just, that's all that people are looking for right now.
00:04:45.000 Now, CNN has an entire article about this.
00:04:50.000 And one of the questions here that CNN asks is why does it feel like people don't know her face or name?
00:04:55.000 Clayton Durant, an adjunct professor of music business at NYU, says what's really happening is there's hits in what we call subcultures.
00:05:01.000 If you're not involved in a particular subculture, Or your feed isn't giving you that particular subculture, you as a consumer may not feel that there's an actual hit.
00:05:08.000 I mean, I think that's always been true.
00:05:10.000 If I don't listen to rap and then there's a rap hit, I'm probably not going to find out about it.
00:05:14.000 I think what's actually happening here is that people are just turning away from these sorts of daily ugliness that characterizes American political life right now.
00:05:25.000 And rap is very involved in that sort of stuff.
00:05:28.000 No matter what you say about rap, rap is certainly not apolitical as a general matter, it carries an underlying value system.
00:05:36.000 So, for example, just to take some lyrics from some of the better selling rap songs of the recent past, there's one called Dead Fresh by Lil Baby, as opposed to Big Baby or Medium Sized Baby.
00:05:47.000 The chorus to which reads, Okay, I'm dead fresh, Carlton, dead fresh.
00:05:51.000 Bodiga cardigan, yeah.
00:05:53.000 Virgin Mary flower scent, yeah.
00:05:55.000 I pull up fresh as hell, yeah.
00:05:56.000 And every one of us got M's, M M.
00:06:01.000 Talking about Senzel, yeah.
00:06:02.000 Ho, get out my ear.
00:06:04.000 Money coming in. 1.00
00:06:05.000 I put my nanny in Chanel. 1.00
00:06:08.000 Why is your nanny in Chanel?
00:06:09.000 I don't understand.
00:06:11.000 Is she taking care of your kids? 1.00
00:06:12.000 Made it out the slum. 1.00
00:06:13.000 I got my granny pushing a Maybach. 0.98
00:06:15.000 If I lose it all, is you going to hold down for real?
00:06:18.000 Hold up, hold up.
00:06:19.000 This beat came for Pharrell.
00:06:22.000 Inspiring things happening in the world of rap.
00:06:26.000 So it's all about spending lots and lots of money.
00:06:28.000 And cool.
00:06:31.000 Affordability, I guess, is at the top of everybody's mind in the rap community.
00:06:35.000 But again, all people want is just to take a breath.
00:06:38.000 And that's what's happening with this song.
00:06:39.000 This is my proposal.
00:06:41.000 Country, by the way, has basically become this country is just normalcy.
00:06:47.000 It's been normalcy for quite a while.
00:06:48.000 Country music.
00:06:49.000 And so when people are seeking kind of the wild side, they're not going to look at country.
00:06:52.000 When they're looking for.
00:06:53.000 It's like the comfort food of music, country music.
00:06:55.000 I remember when I actually got into country music for a while, during my teenage years, my dad and I and a couple of my sisters, we had to take a road trip.
00:07:05.000 My grandmother gave us like an old Crown Vic, the old car, like the cop car.
00:07:10.000 And for some reason, they owned a Crown Vic.
00:07:11.000 And we had to drive it back from Chicago all the way to LA.
00:07:17.000 And so we ended up driving cross country.
00:07:19.000 This is the days before, you know, internet radio, really.
00:07:23.000 And so we ended up Just listening to whatever was on the radio.
00:07:26.000 And it turns out that in Vasse Walls of the country, the only station that is available is a country Western station, which is when we fell in love with Brad Paisley.
00:07:33.000 Because Brad Paisley's great.
00:07:35.000 And we enjoyed it.
00:07:36.000 It wasn't like the music was groundbreaking.
00:07:38.000 Again, one Beethoven.
00:07:40.000 But it was giving you kind of pretty solid family laden messages, kind of normy stuff.
00:07:45.000 Normy is okay, gang.
00:07:46.000 Normy is okay.
00:07:47.000 Maybe that should be the theme.
00:07:49.000 I've talked about the normy revolution, but maybe what we actually just need is not even a revolution, it's just a normy refusal to abide by the precepts.
00:07:56.000 That we need to engage in radical politics and radical virtue signaling and radical signaling of every sort every single day.
00:08:02.000 Like, it's perfectly fine to have a pretty girl on camera playing the guitar and talking about why Texas is great and then people dancing.
00:08:10.000 It's totally fine.
00:08:11.000 It's just fine.
00:08:12.000 And just fine is okay.
00:08:13.000 It's actually okay.
00:08:14.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
00:08:16.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:08:17.000 Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.