By Alex Rosado
Generation-defining songs do more than please crowds. They reveal the emotions of their era and hold attention long after their release. Baby Boomers pioneered counter-cultural rock; Gen X took grunge and hip-hop mainstream; Millennials rallied around pop and R&B.
So, what does Gen Z have? And what song most accurately captures our moment?
The president’s granddaughter may have our answer.
Last month, Kai Trump posted photos from a Tame Impala concert she attended to her online accounts. She selected “Let It Happen,” the project’s critically acclaimed 2015 single, to play subin the background. According to Kevin Parker, Tame Impala’s sole creative force, the song is about trying “to control who you are, control the world that you’re in, but it comes to a point when it takes more energy to block it out than allow it to wash through you.”
Gen Z occupies a peculiar window where shifting norms have left many feeling astray. Against this backdrop is “Let It Happen,” an active choice to stop resisting life’s unchangeable currents and salvage meaning from the experience of moving on. No wonder millions of Gen Z find that message inspiring and replayable.
Modern-day America is the most prosperous time to be alive. The average U.S. life expectancy is the highest ever, with the infant mortality rate cratering to under 6 per 1,000 deaths by 2016. Real GDP per capita reached an all-time high in 2025, and U.S. household net worth hit a record high by the end of 2024. America’s violent-crime rate is at its lowest level since 1969, making this century the safest in world history. Altogether, health, wealth, and safety are the observable products of our institutions and stewardship, creating a quality of life that benefits all.
Behind this flourishing, however, is an epidemic of anxiety, burnout, and uncertainty among Americans —especially Gen Z. Gen Z delays major milestones like marriage and family-building for immediate gains. Yet they find stability, like a well-paying job, hard to obtain and keep. America’s youth have lurched inward, letting abstracts like identity and purpose take precedence. Gen Z wants to believe in progress, but only if personal transformation comes first.
These coexisting, complicated conditions catalyzed Tame Impala’s thesis.
Parker recalls conceiving the idea for “Let it Happen” in an Oklahoma hotel room, with the chorus coming to him at an overseas festival, and creating the middle portion on a train to France. The song was assembled piecemeal, at disparate locations with little connection, but charted through intuition and adventure. Clarity arrives without warning, and the path to finding it is messy, confusing, and daunting.
When testing out song lyrics, Parker “s[ang] gibberish and ma[de] sounds with [his] mouth.” He left this nonsense in for months, “planning to go back and re-record it with real lyrics,” but “speaking in tongues” felt right to him—so he left it in. Improvisation also dominated the instrumentals. The song’s midsection sounds like a skipping CD, looping and glitching repeatedly to capture Parker’s fascination with feedback errors. “Let It Happen” adopts an unconventional 6/8 time signature and chord progressions from associated and parallel keys to find its own groove. The result is a song that goes “haywire,” basking in, but never succumbing to, the chaos it creates.
The composition of “Let It Happen” and Gen Z are similar in that they both can change with the realms they build. What “Let It Happen” lacks in cohesive meaning is made up by letting the piece flow and evolve organically. The music feels meticulously crafted and spontaneously alive, believing that reality, at large, is fluid.
From its creative onset, “Let It Happen” provides the philosophical toolkit for Gen Z’s agency and belonging. We see our lives as works in progress, seeing the “self” not as a noun but as a verb—a series of performances and adaptations across contexts. We’re a bloc that adjusted to the gig economy, social networking, artificial intelligence, a global pandemic, and renewed social justice to varied success. Our ability to revise is an asset, splitting our interests, motivations, and actions into many sections of a more nebulous identity.
However, Gen Z is risk-averse. Whether it’s our nostalgia-ridden senses or our fear of failure, our commitment to familiarity kills curiosity before it can prove itself worthy. Broader environmental circumstances—not our own volition—brought out all these new facets of life. We were forced to get with the times. Many of us tinker at the edges of society because we’re overwhelmed by its volatility. It’s difficult to grow and trust others when new obstacles like cyberbullying, cancel culture, and the gamification of dating make us sacrifice authenticity for widespread appeal.
Gen Z simply cannot “let it happen,” or we risk pacifying ourselves more than we already do. We shouldn’t sink into despair, but listen to those, like Tame Impala, who can help us escape it.
The music video for “Let It Happen” follows a man frantically running through an airport, only to collapse and hallucinate parts of his trip, including a plane crash that no other passenger notices. The protagonist is strapped in his seat, freefalling through the sky, but the defibrillator fails to revive him on the airport floor. Thus, he unstraps himself, accepts his fate, and the turbulence turns into a tranquil flight towards light in the clouds. Tone Deaf described the video as a “surrealist lament on the transient, overworked existence of the modern-day businessman,” culminating in what Paste Magazine sees as a realization: “when we relent, we might find peace.”
“Let It Happen,” for the whirlwinds and whiplash it produces, guides Gen Z to the eye of the storm to survive. Loosening the illusion of control takes strength, which Parker says is like “running around, I can’t fight it much longer. Something’s trying to get out, and it’s never been closer.” The noise surrounding everything you do, no matter how minute, is real. Tuning it out is exhausting. The first step of Tame Impala’s solution is recognizing that our worried state of existence is unsustainable.
What is “trying to get out,” then? At this mental crossroads, Gen Z must choose between resignation and surrender. Nihilism too often infects our thinking, with reported rates of insecurity, loneliness, and dissatisfaction eclipsing those of happier feelings. It’s easy to subscribe to the “nothing ever happens” or “doomer” mentality when life seems unrewarding, uneventful, and unchanging. With these thoughts, precarity is inevitable, and it is pointless to search, learn, and mature.
We still must participate in the ebbs and flows of our world. Tame Impala encourages us to travel with the currents, even though it “bear[s] down on [our] shoulders,” without giving up. Surrender is an active, creative choice that lets us redirect energy from defiance to acceptance while preserving our integrity. Change is the only constant; our agency lies in how we relate to it. We can’t control algorithms or global pressures, but we can control our interactions with them and our responses. And when we continue to invest in our mindfulness, “it’s gonna feel so good.”
“Let It Happen” doesn’t limit our influence, but sets realistic standards on our outside contributions. At the same time, when Gen Z puts our minds to it, we are remarkable at manufacturing projects and practices that steer society toward our passions. From smashing box-office records to grassroots campaigning and issue advocacy, we are aware of what matters, what lies in our grasp, and what doesn’t. We are a group torn between tolerating the status quo and reforming it. That conflict fuels our fall into flight. As Tame Impala concludes, we were “ready all along” to unleash our potential.
Eleven years after its release, “Let It Happen” is popular again in digital culture, thanks to Gen Z. Creators are using the audio in guitar covers, compilations of Better Call Saul and Project Hail Mary, inspirational messages, and coding edits across social media. We’ve taken a psychedelic epic and turned it into a meme, mantra, and mood regulator. It isn’t the song’s vibes that keep us hooked; it’s the release, transition, surrealism, and wonder that let us find catharsis and community in the face of anarchy. Kai Trump’s inclusion of “Let It Happen” on her concert posts was no accident. She knows the hit is cultural capital and the anthem of our generation.
In August 2026, “Let It Happen” surpassed an incredible one billion streams on Spotify, partly due to its renewed virality. The eight-minute piece was Tame Impala’s first new material in three years, and Parker had lofty expectations to meet. On his creative approach, he told Rolling Stone a decade ago:
“Making music is so spiritual. I’m not a spiritual person, but music is sacred to me. Trying new things and experimenting is something I push myself to do. It’s one thing to have love for all different kinds of music; it’s another thing to bring them together seamlessly and make them coherent.”
“Let It Happen” is a tale of expression, soulcraft, and faith in the unknown. If unclear boundaries do govern our lives, they’re worth discovering and shattering so we can fly. If we can’t break them, we should make sense of them and enjoy the ride. My generation’s backs aren’t against a void, but a wall. We mustn’t let the gifts of life pass us by unnoticed and unappreciated; we simply must let it happen—all of it.
Alex Rosado is an independent writer. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not represent those of any workplace or affiliate organization.