Why Does Steve Sailer Write About Sports & Pop Music?

Aren’t these topics low-status? Not anymore. Writing about sports and pop is not low-status for intellectuals and has not been since the 1960s. Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag, Greil Marcus, Roger Angell, and David Halberstam all built careers there. Cultural criticism is a respectable lane. So Sailer’s choice of subject, on its own, signals neither security nor insecurity.
What sets him apart is not that he writes about pop. It is what he brings to pop. He applies race, demographics, IQ, and population genetics to terrain where polite opinion forbids those frames. The column on why Kenyans dominate distance running, or this one on the sub-Saharan pop deficit, works as an empirical wedge for a larger heterodox project. Sports and pop hand him tests where the data are public and the rankings undeniable. You cannot argue away the medal stand or the Billboard chart.
So the security he shows is not philistine slumming. It is willingness to apply forbidden categories to subjects no one can pretend are trivial.
Most intellectuals who avoid Sailer’s kind of pop writing are not avoiding it from snobbery. The snobbery left two generations ago. They avoid it because the racial analysis costs jobs. Sailer pays no such cost because he has no institutional perch to lose. He writes on Substack from his house. His coalition does not gatekeep elite credentials, so he can ask why Burna Boy took so long without losing tenure, a grant, a column, or a dinner invitation he wanted.
His willingness has a structural source as much as a psychological one. He has the freedom independents have, which is also the freedom you have. The Sailer question and the Luke Ford question share a shape: who can write what, and what did they have to give up to keep writing it?
When people talk about a great pop song and an average pop song, what do they mean? I understand greatness in classical music, and I understand the pop songs I love, but I need clarity on what constitutes greatness in pop music.
As I understand it after some AI research, pop greatness is not one thing. It is at least four things that get bundled together, and the confusion comes from people using the same word for different claims.
The first is craft inside a tight form. A pop song has roughly three minutes, a verse-chorus structure, a small harmonic vocabulary, and a need to land fast. Greatness here means doing more inside the constraint than the constraint seems to allow. A hook that locks in on first hearing but does not wear out on the hundredth. A bridge that opens the song into a place the verses did not predict. A chord substitution at the right moment. A drum sound nobody had used that way before. Classical listeners hear this as compositional economy. The Brill Building writers, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Bacharach, McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Max Martin all work at this level. You can analyze it on paper.
The second is the recording as the work. This has no real classical analog. In pop after about 1965, the song and the recording become the same object. “Good Vibrations” is not a composition that was then recorded. It exists as that recording. Phil Spector, George Martin, Brian Wilson, Dr. Dre, Rick Rubin, Timbaland are great because they made sounds that did not exist before they made them. The greatness lives in timbre, space, compression, the specific snare hit. A cover version of a great record is almost always worse, because the record was the point. Classical music has nothing quite like this. A great Beethoven performance is one rendering of a fixed score. A great pop record is the score.
The third is voice and presence. Sinatra phrases a lyric in a way nobody else can. Aretha enters a song and the song becomes hers. Dylan’s voice should not work and does. Marley sounds like he means it, and most singers do not. This is closer to what classical listeners get from a great soloist, but in pop it fuses with songwriting and persona in a way the classical tradition keeps separate. The singer is often the writer and the icon at once, and the greatness braids these strands together.
The fourth is cultural timing. A great pop song arrives at a moment and names something the audience did not know it was waiting to hear. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is not greater on the page than fifty other songs from 1991. It became great by detonating. “Respect” was a decent Otis Redding song before Aretha turned it into the sound of a movement. This dimension drives classical critics crazy because it seems to make greatness a sociological accident. But pop is a popular art. Reaching the people at the right moment is part of the form, not external to it.
Most arguments about pop greatness are people weighting these four differently without saying so. A craft-first listener ranks Bacharach high and Nirvana low. A recording-first listener ranks Dr. Dre and Brian Wilson at the summit. A voice-first listener puts Aretha and Sinatra above almost everyone. A timing-first listener cares about what a song did in the world, not what it sounds like in a vacuum.
Bob Marley scores on all four at once. That is rare, and it is why Sailer reaches for him as the standard.
Love collapses the four into one experience. Pulled apart, they are four different kinds of achievement that happen to share a name.
I grew up in a Seventh-day Adventist Australian home where listening to pop music was a sin. How many homes are like that today in the USA?
Very few, and the number has dropped sharply over the last forty years.
The strict no-pop-music position was never mainstream American Protestantism. It lived in a cluster of conservative holiness and adventist traditions: Seventh-day Adventists of the older school, Independent Fundamental Baptists, the Pentecostal Holiness wing, Church of God in Christ in some streams, conservative Mennonites and Amish, Free Methodists, parts of the Wesleyan tradition, and some Reformed Presbyterian groups that sing only psalms. Add conservative Churches of Christ, who oppose instrumental music in worship but vary on home listening.
Estimating households is guesswork, but the brackets are tractable.
Seventh-day Adventists in the United States number around 1.2 million members. The fraction holding the older strict line on pop music is a minority of that, perhaps 15 to 25 percent in the most conservative congregations and homeschool networks. Independent Fundamental Baptists number perhaps 2 to 4 million. The strict music position is more common there, maybe 30 to 50 percent of homes, though it has eroded. Conservative Mennonites and Amish together are around 600,000, and most still restrict pop music. The Holiness Pentecostal stream that maintains the older standard is a small fraction of broader Pentecostalism, perhaps a few hundred thousand. Add scattered conservative Reformed and Church of Christ households.
Adding the conservative slices and adjusting for household size rather than membership, you might land somewhere between 400,000 and 900,000 American households where pop music is treated as sinful or close to it. That is roughly half a percent to one percent of the country’s roughly 130 million households.
That number was much higher in 1970, when my childhood standard was widely shared across conservative evangelicalism, fundamentalist Baptist circles, and most adventist and holiness homes. The collapse came in stages. Contemporary Christian Music in the 1970s and 1980s gave conservative parents a permitted alternative and shifted the argument from “pop music is worldly” to “secular pop music is worldly.” Then praise and worship music in the 1990s adopted pop production wholesale, and the line dissolved further. By the 2000s most evangelical homes had given up the categorical objection. What remained was a much smaller core of separatist communities.
The strict position survives more in homeschool subcultures and in immigrant streams of these traditions than in the suburban congregations the same denominations run. A Filipino or African Adventist family in California today might keep the standard my father kept. A fourth-generation white Adventist family in the same state probably does not.
So my childhood was unusual then and is rare now. The world I was formed in has shrunk to a remnant.