Lately I’ve been inhaling novels about scam artists, confidence men, grifters—an archetype that looms so large today that you forget they’ve been around since basically forever. In Charles Portis’ Masters of Atlantis from 1985, a World War I vet trades a bum a pack of smokes for a book whose arcane math equations allegedly provide the basis for the ancient Gnomon Society—a Freemason/Scientology hybrid into whose ranks the veteran-turned-prophet initiates a flock of rubes for his own personal enrichment.
Or there’s Jim Thompson’s 1963 crime novel The Grifters, whose nihilistic hustlers abuse the trust of everyone around them, perpetually working either the short or long con at the expense of real friendships and a real sense of self. Conveniently, they view their exploits as not so much a matter of morality, but fate: some people are grifters, others are fools, and in the theater of life, everyone must play their part.
But my favorite is William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley from 1946. It’s a study of a career swindler that begins in a shabby 1930s carnival, where a grotesque posse of illusionists and freaks cheat hard-working Americans out of their nickels and dimes, meanwhile exploiting each other with mind games and power trips. The protagonist begins as an ambitious magician, later transforming into a spiritualist preacher who earns a following preying upon his congregation’s fear and grief, though his life ultimately unravels into Tár-esque degradation before arriving at the most abject end of any book I’ve read. Gresham, age 37 upon its publication, would lose himself in his own mystic self-help spiral—Christianity, occultism, Freud, Buddhism, AA—before he killed himself at 53 in a Times Square hotel, with a business card in his pocket that read, “No Address. No Phone. No Business. No Money. Retired.”
It isn’t just that Nightmare Alley’s sideshow hucksters seem familiar; so too does the image of America as a tragi-comically decrepit county fair managed by unscrupulous, weird-looking frauds. Even the music news has been carnival-esque lately, by which I mostly mean this year’s answer to the Kendrick vs. Drake beef of 2024. But this time, the warring rappers speak more precisely to the character of the moment: two young ladies of the sort you might typically encounter wearing SpongeBob SquarePants pajama bottoms outside of the gas station, dispassionately vaping or belittling their man. I generally try to remain vigilant around these types, as they usually sense weakness, fear nothing, and are so good at being mean that you almost can’t be mad.
Only, wait, let me rephrase: the rap beef of the year so far features one such girl, and then another one who seems to play the part online. The latter, 19-year old Alabama Barker, is currently an influencer who made her showbiz debut the same year she was born (2005) on the second and final season of Meet the Barkers, her family’s reality show. “It shows everything from us basically fucking at the Playboy Mansion, to our son’s first steps,” pitched her father, Travis, Blink-182 drummer turned resident unc of the cursed pop-punk revival of the early 2020s. He and his second wife, former Miss USA Shanna Moakler, got their daughter’s name from a great movie, 1993’s True Romance, in which Alabama Whitman, call-girl with a heart of gold, proclaims winningly to her husband-to-be: “I want you to know that I am not damaged goods! I’m not what they call in Florida ‘white trash!’”
Since December of last year, Alabama Barker has been feuding with 21-year-old Bhad Bhabie, the sometimes-rapper and high-dollar OnlyFans model who lived a past life as a meme, having debuted in the public eye alongside her distraught mother in a 2016 Dr. Phil episode titled, “I Want To Give Up My Car-Stealing, Knife-Wielding, Twerking 13-Year Old Daughter Who Tried To Frame Me For A Crime.” By 2017, the South Florida teenager had transformed into a rapper (an Atlantic A&R called her the day after the episode aired) whose songs were nowhere near as bad as they could have been. At least they were on the level of the other SoundCloud rap songs that beset the Billboard charts in 2017, the year that memes overtook music by way of social media stars and TV personalities.
I can admit I’ve had a soft spot for Bhad Bhabie ever since I profiled her in the fall of 2017. She was 15 at the time, and strikingly candid in a way that both impressed me and made me profoundly sad. In a nail salon in Brooklyn, she casually admitted she’d had no designs on rapping until Atlantic called. “I have this platform, being famous. I can see how I want to use it,” she’d shrugged, picking at a bacon-cream cheese bagel. But she’d always been creative when it came to storytelling, and her truest talent, as she cheerfully told me, was deception. “I’m a really good liar, so I end up snitching on myself,” she said. Did she like the feeling of being in trouble, I wondered? “I don’t know if I like the feeling of being in trouble, or if I just like the feeling of you knowing that I just tricked you,” she answered with a smile.
The content of the three diss tracks that have so far been exchanged between Bhad Bhabie and Barker is almost besides the point. (At the crux of the matter is Bhad Bhabie’s ex, Le Vaughn, with whom she had a daughter in 2024, and whom she accused Barker of stealing in an Instagram story last year.) And yet they somehow have the scope to take in 10 to 15 years of Calabasas-driven culture, replete with references to this century’s foremost Venusian fertility cult (as Courtney Love called the Kardashians) and their various musician husbands, including Kanye West and Travis Barker (whose marriage to Kourtney Kardashian makes her Alabama’s stepmom), plus Tyga and Soulja Boy. Some of these are names that you don’t hear much anymore, or names that now inspire eyerolls where they used to command awe. In any case, they tell a story about the influencer era, whose seeds you might say were planted in 2005, when a teenage Soulja Boy uploaded his first song to SoundClick. The era reached full bloom somewhere around 2015, the year a coffee table book of Kim Kardashian’s favorite selfies was critically received as a Warholian masterpiece.
Listen closely to “Ms. Whitman”—the best of the three existing diss tracks, in which Bhad Bhabie mocks Barker for “almost overdosing on a vape” last year—and you can practically hear the death rattle for the era in which culture was downstream of the Kardashian/West clan as they rebranded grifterhood as artful, empowering, fresh. (West cleared the sample of “Carnival,” a soccer hooligan anthem from VULTURES 1 last year, though he drew the line when Bhad Bhabie teased a remix that featured what appeared to be an AI-generated West verse.) The way I see it now is closer to how The Grifters put it back in 1963. “He was his own victim, his own slave,” Thompson wrote of one of the titular grifters. “He had made personality a profession, created a career out of selling himself. And he could not stray far, or for long, from his self-made self.”
What I’m listening to:
