I went to a ZYN-exclusive concert in Nashville

Thank you all so, so, so much everyone for coming out to our very spooky Garbage Day Live last night. It was a blast. A reminder, we’re doing a special election-themed Garbage Day Live in DC in just a few weeks. Tickets are going fast for that. Click the big green button below to grab one before they run out.

The Garbage Day Live team is recuperating this morning, so please enjoy this dispatch from Gabage Day’s social media manager, Selia Hooten, who went to a ZYN-exclusive country music concert in Nashville and came back with quite the story to tell…

Addiction puts you in precarious situations. Chasing the thrill, seeking relief, compulsively pursuing pleasure — the addict finds themself in places that jeopardize the safety of their body and soul. I know this, because two weeks ago, my addiction brought me to the ZYN Presents Tyler Childers concert in Nashville, Tennessee. 

I first bought ZYN as a gag. It was the fall of my senior year of college when my friend pointed at the colorful plastic “tins” behind the gas station counter and asked if I’d ever had one. ZYNs were sort of like dip, she explained, but contained in a pouch and tobaccoless. They were really popular with frat guys, but neither of us had tried them, so cracking jokes, I bought us a pack. 

The federal smoking age was raised to 21 eight days before my 18th birthday. Close call, but not close enough. I’m from the peak moral panic JUUL generation. My early years of high school were back when you could tell your teacher the e-cigarette was a flashdrive, and they might actually be clueless enough to believe you. By college, I already entangled myself in an on-again-off-again affair with nicotine. I did successfully quit vaping, if you consider switching to cigarettes a success. 

After my first ZYN, I quickly ditched my cigs for pouches. I got a real kick out of people’s reactions to my choice of delivery. I liked to say, “It's subversive.” Or, once I learned they were created by a Swedish company, “It’s European.” Sometimes, I’d hit them with my most sincere, “It’s feminist.” A leftist girl in 2023 popping a Chad pouch was kinda like the suffragettes lighting their freedom torches. 

I’ve racked up a lot of rewards points in the years since. Enough to gain access to a ZYN exclusive live event, in fact — 3,000 points, or 200 cans worth, for two nonrefundable, nontransferable Tyler Childers tickets. During my 10 hour drive to Nashville I kept thinking, man, I’ve really committed to the bit. 

Since his rise to fame in 2017, Childers has served as a litmus test for the politics of white southern culture and country music. If you’re not from the south and have a hard time telling if someone is a red neck (non-derogatory) or a straight up fascist, ask if they like him. In my experience, Childers’ listener base is 20% NPR southerners and 80% people who are about as “apolitical” as southerners can get. Meaning they’ll occasionally say something that makes you cringe in shame and in equal measure, they’ll hit you with something that makes you seriously consider if they’ve read Marx.

According to my emails, ZYN Presents has held five other rewards-only live events in the past year to date: Lainey Wilson in Nashville, The Black Keys in New York City, The Red Clay Strays in Austin, Nate Bargatze in Nashville, and Noah Kahan in Denver. The Childers show was the only one I could find that explicitly said that it was “not sponsored by ZYN” and that the performer “does not endorse ZYN.” Which made the whole thing all the stranger.

I couldn’t figure out what Philip Morris International, who, in 2022, acquired ZYN creator Swedish Match as its subsidiary, was getting from hosting a country music concert. Even for the leading tobacco giant, this seemed like a lot of time, money, and effort to spend on a relatively small, sparsely publicized event. And despite the mainstream media whining about “Zynfluencers” promoting the brand on social media, I found very little content about it online.

At the door of the concert, the staff asked if my friend and I were both nicotine users (we are) and gave us blue wristbands. Had my friend said no, she would have been given a white wristband that restricted her from purchasing ZYNs at the event. At the end of check in, we were handed two drink tickets each. 

Directly to the left of the entrance, a collection of microphones were bolted to a circular board colored the brand’s signature blue. In the middle it had “The Sound of ZYN” and a nicotine warning. A touch screen to the side read, “Your voice. Reimagined.” I put in my email, recorded an audio snippet, and received a remix. A prim blonde wearing a ZYN lanyard manned the activation, looking like a kid who hoped someone would stop at her science fair booth. 

I don't know what I expected, but this is what I received in my email. Playing it out loud when I got home made my dog bark in fear and confusion. 

The second floor hosted a bar, a popcorn station, and wedding-level catering with trays upon trays of pulled pork, mac and cheese, rolls, potato salad, and coleslaw. Here, blue wristband wearers could also purchase ZYNs at a discount: $3, with a maximum of 3 per person. It was unclear to me if this meant three for $1 each or three for $3 each, but either way it would still be a discount in Nashville (they usually go for $4 a tin). 

The third floor had a similar layout, but was also manned by Cowboy Cannolis, a sexy, mustached man wearing a cowboy hat, tight jeans, and a vintage-cooler usherette tray who, according to Instagram, shows up to a bunch of events like this. He wandered around the floor, asking guests if they wanted a freshly made cannoli. When I asked him how he got this gig, he said he created the business himself. I clarified that I was curious about how he got this gig specifically. He only asked if I was looking for a job at Cowboy Cannolis. 

The floor led out to the balcony seating and 3/6 Club — the league of exclusive rewards members — aptly named after ZYN’s popular nicotine strength options, 3mg and 6mg. A guest outside the entrance who was part of the club, but hadn’t received the gold wristband, couldn’t get in. He pulled out a gold, reusable ZYN tin with 3/6 engraved on the front. He said he didn’t know how he got it, just maxed out his points every month and one day it showed up at his door. A ZYN lanyard wearer told me that you’re automatically added to the club once you’ve accrued 10,000 lifetime points. I will not disclose how terrifyingly close I am to reaching this milestone. 

As for the actual concert, Childers sounded great. It felt like a regular concert, except for when he briefly addressed the real reason we were all there. “I know there’s a whole lotta things you could’ve used them rewards on, and I’m glad that when it comes down to this show or a Dyson vacuum, you picked me,” Childers quipped. “Do you know how special that makes me feel?” 

Back in the days of Marlboro Bucks and Camel Cash, smokers could get branded merch to rep their loyalty. Cheap, mass-produced slop that doubles as free marketing seems like a pretty good business move to me. But aside from ZYN’s aforementioned metal cases, the brand’s other marketing choices have been a little more eccentric.

This summer they quietly unveiled the ZYN America250 Art Series, a collection of cases from five artists that represent “the diversity, individuality, and spirit of reinvention at the heart of American creative expression today.” Another baffling choice given the brand’s core demographic. Notably, not a single artist of color was chosen to interpret the American experience, and implausibly, the one woman selected is photographer and filmmaker Laurie Simmons, Lena Duhnam’s mother. The 250th anniversary of the US occurred over three months ago, but I received an email with “early access" to the collection this week. I expect to receive my 2,500 point, Simmons-designed case in a similar time frame. 

Another interesting publicity choice has been the philanthropic side of the business, which is called “We Care By ZYN,” which lets users donate reward points to nonprofits. In 2024, they donated a million dollars to those affected by Hurricane Helene. Which seems to complicate the reputation ZYN users have of being right wing, notwithstanding ZYNer Hasan Piker, or at the very least, vaguely manosphere coded. 

Under (alleged ZYNer) Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Department of Health & Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration authorized 20 ZYN Pouches to be marketed in 2025. And just this summer, the FDA authorized the same pouches to be classified as a modified risk tobacco product, allowing the company to advertise using reduced risk claims.

We’ve seen this film before. In the days of JUUL, it seemed smokeless tobacco was trying to cozy up to Democrat’s harm reduction sensibilities, straying from the larger industry’s traditional tie to Republicans. It looked as though ZYN might carry this flame, but it turns out the US customer base clashed with the company’s Swedish roots. 

Tucker Carlson, The One True Zynfluencer, has been an unofficial spokesman for the brand, and is often credited with its rise in popularity on the right. He turned on the company in 2024, however, saying ZYN was run by “humorless, left-wing drones.” But the same year, Chuck Schumer called for a federal crackdown on the pouches that the right deemed a “ZYNsurrection.” So the question of “who is this for?” runs deep, and the Childers concert has convinced me that ZYN has landed on a strange and noncommittal way to ignore answering it all together.

ZYN, like every corporation in the late-stage Trump era, is clearly desperate to find some kind of median America untouched by the culture war. The America you used to find in a Marlboro ad, incidentally. Full of the nice, affable, salt-of-the-Earth people who might have once been considered the middle class. People who like country music and are happy to travel to Nashville for a big night out. People who would prefer to not have cancer, but know that cancer happens. ZYNs are for people. And at the Tyler Childers concert, ZYN looked me in the eyes and unequivocally said, “You’re a person.” I caught myself thinking that maybe the larger goal of these stunts is truly to give loyal customers a good time. And maybe, just maybe, Philip Morris International actually cares whether I live or die.

But that’s how effective propaganda is supposed to feel. For those already primed for the full ZYN concert experience, it worked. At one point, in between songs, a portion of the crowd near the stage whooped and waved in Childers’ direction, pointing at something just beyond my eyeline. He then shouted, “Is that real? Congratulations!” 

Yes, somewhere out there in this great beautiful nation of ours, there exists a woman who entered the ZYN-exclusive Tyler Childers concert in Nashville as a girlfriend and left a bride-to-be.

In honor of the passing of prolific and beloved actor Tim Curry — and spooky season — we've decided to answer the question everyone has been asking since: Is Rocky Horror Picture Show problematic, or is Gen Z just a bunch of weird little prudes? Chelsey Weber-Smith of American Hysteria joins Panic World this week to dissect this iconic musical horror comedy film, and also of course, which characters we identify as. Check it out on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts.

P.S. here’s Chicken Soup For The Hole.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***