Global Booty Diplomacy: How Meghan Trainor Conquered Earth One Bass Line at a Time
Meghan Trainor and the Global Bass Line of Late-Stage Capitalism
By our man in the departure lounge
Somewhere above the North Atlantic, between the in-flight sushi and the eighth rewatch of “All About That Bass,” it hit me: Meghan Trainor is the perfect sonic ambassador for an era when geopolitical borders are closing but pop hooks colonize every corner of the planet like glittery kudzu. The Massachusetts-raised singer-songwriter has spent the past decade teaching the world to clap on two and four while quietly illustrating how soft power works when hard power can’t decide whether to sanction, invade, or simply doom-scroll.
Trainor’s 2014 debut single was engineered in a Los Angeles bedroom, uploaded to YouTube, and—within weeks—blaring from tuk-tuks in Bangkok, wedding marquees in Lagos, and that one Irish pub in Ulaanbaatar that swears it’s “authentic.” UNESCO never held a vote, yet “Bass” became an unofficial anthem for body positivity, retro pastiche, and the universal human desire to pretend the 1950s were a wholesome time rather than a decade of backyard nuclear tests and legally mandated misogyny. If you want to see globalization in action, skip Davos and count how many languages you can hear butcher the phrase “treble makers.”
In a saner timeline, a throwaway doo-wop earworm would remain just that. But the algorithmic gods decided otherwise. By 2015, China’s Ministry of Culture had added “All About That Bass” to an internal karaoke blacklist for “encouraging unhealthy body images,” which is Chinese bureaucratese for “we can’t control the comments section.” Meanwhile, the Kremlin used the same track in a state-run fitness campaign to fight obesity, proving that authoritarian regimes can weaponize anything, even bubblegum feminism, provided the BPM is brisk enough to distract from collapsing ruble values.
Trainor’s subsequent catalog—equal parts self-empowerment slogans and Motown cosplay—has soundtracked everything from Filipino shopping-mall flash mobs to German supermarket chains’ back-to-school ads. Each sync deal is a tiny act of cultural imperialism, but the royalties flow both ways: she gets euros, pesos, and won; local economies get a serotonin spike that briefly outshines inflation graphs. Call it trickle-down dopamine.
And then there is the Meghan Industrial Complex. K-Pop trainees in Seoul dissect her cadences the way Jesuits once parsed Virgil. Nigerian TikTok creators splice her hooks over Afrobeats drops, creating hybrid tracks that rack up streams faster than the World Bank updates its misery index. In Argentina, a Marxist student collective rewrote “Dear Future Husband” as an agitprop tango about fiscal austerity—proof that even the most candy-coated pop can be reverse-engineered for revolutionary critique, assuming the Wi-Fi holds.
Of course, critics in the West have long dismissed Trainor as retro fluff, a nostalgia act for an era nobody under 70 actually remembers. But that critique misses the meta-joke: in a world teetering between climate collapse and crypto scams, manufactured nostalgia is the last renewable resource. While COP delegates argue over carbon credits, a billion phones auto-loop a 22-year-old singing about bringing booty back—as though booty ever left, or as though the planet will politely pause its meltdown for a key change.
In 2023, Spotify’s global year-end list crowned “Made You Look” the most-streamed workout song on earth. Translation: from São Paulo gyms to Dubai Pilates studios, humans are burning calories to a track about Instagram validation. If that isn’t a metaphor for late-stage capitalism, I don’t know what is—except maybe the fact that I’m writing this on a plane whose entertainment system just auto-played the acoustic version. Twice.
So here we are: a blue marble spinning toward ecological and political chaos, soundtracked by a woman who rhymed “treble” with “trouble” and accidentally built a soft-power empire. Meghan Trainor may not broker peace treaties or redesign supply chains, but she has achieved the minor miracle of making strangers in 200 countries shake the same body part in unison. In the 21st century, that counts as diplomacy—cheap, catchy, and mercifully free of summit photo ops. If civilization is going down, at least it’s going down with a brass section.
