Last night, weird Twitter darling and Kurdish militia volunteer @PissPigGranddad tweeted out a screenshot of Last.fm user JKushner. He deduced that Jared Kushner—alleged cuck, Observer ruiner, and son-in-law to the president—was listening to a particularly crap Wire album right around the time he was caught posing in body armor in Iraq like an absolute clod.
It was about as withering as as music nerd insider burns go. Similar investigations into the senior advisor’s tastes had been conducted by 4chan’s /pol/ board, turning up the same Last.fm user, JKushner, who has been “scrobbling” his favorite jams since late 2009.
Since this discovery, the “shouts” section of JKushner’s profile has since been defaced with comments like:
if you want a vision of the future, imagine a real estate developer who married into the aristocracy pretending to listen to dogshit pop music about how white people are gross while bombing peasants for the house of saud — forever
As much as everyone should be encouraged to clown on Jared Kushner at any and all opportunities, the vitriol might be misplaced. Jared happens to have a brother whose name also begins with a J, and Joshua Kushner is a Democrat and healthcare startup owner who spends his days dating a model instead of getting screamed at by overflowing barf bag Steve Bannon.
Which (if either) of the brothers is listening to an inordinate amount of Beyoncé? Let’s investigate.
While JKushner’s profile gives a pretty good indication of what this mystery person listens to (lets call it entry level garbage) it lacks meaningful identity clues. Hidden in the “following” tab though is a single deactivated user—valentine85. We can speculate that this person was most likely born in 1985, the same year as Josh (Jared was born in ‘81). “Valentine85" doesn’t turn up much on other platforms so let’s stick that in our figurative back pockets and move on.
What else do we know about the Kushners and the music, generally? While Jared was off fucking up major real estate deals just like his father-in-law, Joshua started Thrive Capital, an investment firm that has made lucrative bets on companies like workplace messaging client Slack, streaming platform Twitch, and Spotify. Josh even has some public playlists on Spotify (“summer” and “fall.”) Taste-wise, the artists that ended up in on these—Lorde, CHVRCHES, alt-j, Sam Smith, HAIM—all fit in with JKushner’s scrobbles.
We can guess the “summer” was likely made in 2013 (when “Royals” and many other songs on the playlist first came out) but strangely these songs in this order do not appear on JKushner’s profile during that time. Could someone else be impersonating the son of a real estate mogul on a music streaming service for laughs? Possibly, but the playlist was tweeted out by Spotify’s founder and CEO.
More likely, Kushner hasn’t linked Last.fm to Spotify and it merely scrobbles whatever locally-stored media he listens to. Like most people, I’d imagine he forgot his Last.fm password years ago and this thing’s been running on autopilot, which squares with the fact the JKushner hasn’t favorited any tracks since 2011.
We’re getting there.
Josh’s larger internet footprint offers few clues, but it’s far more extensive than that of his older brother—who has no social media presence whatsoever aside from a Twitter account with no tweets. (Gawker, our late sister site, is among the 41 accounts he follows, for whatever reason.) What little we do know of Jared’s music taste comes from an account in Cosmo of Jared and Ivanka playing the song “This Year’s Love” by David Gray during both their wedding and the birth of their first child. Gross. Not that Imagine Dragons are much better, but wow, this song truly sucks ass. It’s also not the sort of thing that would be scrobbled by the JKushner account.
While his less attractive brother’s ascended, many of Josh Kushner’s tweets were scrubbed. Luckily, the Wayback Machine has archived some of the deleted tweets, including references to what he likes, musically-speaking: Kanye, Drake, inspirational quotes from Kurt Cobain etc. But on June 3rd, 2015, he gave it to us point-blank: I, Joshua Kushner, am very much feeling the new Jamie XX album, which received a 9.3 from Pitchfork, a site I undoubtedly read religiously.
Like Valentine85, the above Instagram link has gone dead, but JKushner’s scrobbles confirm In Colour (and the XX, in general) was getting some plays sporadically in June, and then a lot in July.
Can we say definitively that JKushner is Kushner the younger? It would require a very unlikely series of coincidences for that Last.fm profile to belong to anyone else. Events line up, tastes coincide, songs from Hamilton—a musical Josh’ supermodel girlfriend Karlie Kloss has definitely seen—make appearances. And let’s be honest, who’s more likely to be listening to Adele on the regular, the softboy who’s gunning for single payer healthcare and making appearances at the Women’s March, or the shifty chode tucked behind the shadow of America’s worst president?
Jared, you’re off the hook. For this, anyway. But if you have any pressing thoughts about that new piece of shit Bon Iver record your brother is probably spinning nonstop, we’d love to know.