By the way, The Castellows have one of my favorite lines of any song in “Freeway.”

And it is: “Don’t know what you’re feelin’ til you hear it in a song.” Those girls understand art and its use. Yeah, it’s just a throwaway lyric in a pop country piece, but it hints at why so much leftist art fails and apolitical but now right-coded art like The Castellows’ succeeds: what matters (to also steal from Bo Diddly) is how it makes you feel.

Nearly all good art, by the way, is apolitical even if the person creating it is extremely politicized. And by this I don’t mean that art cannot or should not contain political content. Not at all. I mean that the work must treat whatever side it is portraying as fully human, fully realized, with actual motivations and not just as some cackling evil caricature.

Good artists can’t help but do that, even if in their everyday lives they are raving lunatics.

I said more than I intended, but so does that line in The Castellows’ little song. Which is exactly what good art does.