Mac DeMarco: The Lazy Canadian Soundtrack to the World’s Slow-Motion Nervous Breakdown

The Ballad of Mac DeMarco, or How One Slack Canadian Became the Soundtrack to a Planet’s Collective Quarter-Life Crisis

PARIS—On a recent Tuesday night, the line for DeMarco’s free pop-up gig outside Shakespeare and Company bookstore snaked past the Seine, where earnest Americans in thrifted Carhartt compared visa nightmares with French philosophy majors clutching dog-eared copies of Barthes. A lone Japanese tourist live-streamed the queue to 40,000 viewers back home, captioning it “the global sigh.” Inside, the Canadian troubadour ambled onstage in flip-flops, launched into “Salad Days,” and the world exhaled in perfect, slightly off-key harmony. Somewhere in that cigarette-scented exhale lies the geopolitical miracle of Mac DeMarco: a man who turned bedroom ennui into soft-power diplomacy without ever bothering to button his shirt.

DeMarco’s rise coincided with the collapse of the post-Cold-War soundtrack. As the Berlin Wall fell, we got “Wind of Change.” After 9/11, we clutched “The Rising.” By 2012, when the globe had thoroughly metabolized the 2008 hangover and was busy mortgaging its future to Instagram filters, along came a gap-toothed Edmontonian muttering “Ode to Viceroy” over a warped cassette. Suddenly every Airbnb in Lisbon had the same warble drifting from its windows—proof that late capitalism’s true lingua franca is not English but the sound of someone too broke to fix their tape deck.

The numbers confirm the infiltration. Spotify lists DeMarco in the top 20 most-streamed Western artists in South Korea, Thailand, and Chile—countries where his lyrics about Canadian cigarettes and suburban boredom are presumably studied like Rosetta Stones of North American malaise. Indonesian wedding DJs report that “Chamber of Reflection” now rivals local dangdut at receptions, prompting Jakarta’s religious affairs ministry to issue a fatwa against “sad white boy reverb.” Meanwhile, Berlin’s club kids have adopted “Salad Days” as the ironic comedown anthem after 36-hour ketamine benders, proving that nothing unites Europe like mutual disappointment dressed as nostalgia.

If that sounds trivial, consider the soft-power vacuum he’s filling. America’s State Department once sent Louis Armstrong to the Congo; now it sends TikTokers who cry on cue. Into that void glides DeMarco, armed only with a guitar that looks rescued from a dumpster and the diplomatic finesse of a man who once crowd-surfed in a dress. When he toured Argentina last year, inflation was chewing through pesos faster than fans could reload their digital wallets. Yet 5,000 porteños still paid to sway together, united in the shared recognition that economic collapse is marginally more bearable when accompanied by a jangly riff about nothing in particular.

Of course, the international appeal of “nothing in particular” is itself a bleak commentary. DeMarco’s songs don’t protest drone strikes or supply chains; they shrug at dirty sneakers and broken hearts, which apparently translates across borders better than manifestos. In Seoul, his sold-out show drew both conscripted soldiers on leave and Gen-Z dropouts dodging the draft, all chanting “I’m always feeling tired” like a UN resolution against ambition. The Korean Ministry of Culture later cited the concert as evidence that “low-growth hedonism” is now a national security concern—filed somewhere between North Korean nukes and the declining birth rate.

Back in Canada, the irony is richer than maple syrup. DeMarco’s entire aesthetic—slack, broke, charmingly derelict—has become a cottage industry. Vancouver real-estate developers now market “DeMarcore” condos: exposed brick, neon palm-tree signage, and a built-in cassette deck that streams Spotify via Bluetooth. Units start at CAD 1.2 million, which is roughly what Mac paid for his entire house in Los Angeles back when he still claimed to be “just some jizz-jazz guy.” The condos sell out to Chinese investors who’ve never heard Salad Days but appreciate the brand synergy between gentrification and faux authenticity.

So what does it mean that a man who sings like he just woke up from a nap now serves as the Muzak for late-capitalist decay? Perhaps that the global mood has shifted from revolutionary anthems to resigned lullabies. Or perhaps—and this is the darker joke—we’ve simply realized that every empire ends not with a bang but with a reverb-soaked chord progression that sounds best when you’re too numb to dance.

Either way, the cigarette burns on. Somewhere tonight, a kid in Lagos is learning “Chamber of Reflection” on a beat-up Strat, while a retiree in Reykjavik hums “My Kind of Woman” to her iPhone’s cracked screen. Both are citizens of DeMarco’s accidental republic: a nation of beautiful losers who’ve agreed, at least for three minutes and thirty-one seconds, that being tired together beats being tired alone. And if that isn’t international cooperation, what is?