Rät
Song Meaning

Penelope Scott has said Rät is “really a song about being complicit in things that you later regret,” and about “being between worlds, and going back and forth between the old belief, and the new belief.” 1 The old belief is an almost overzealous love of science and technology she was taught growing up near Silicon Valley; the new one is that this “faux-rad West Coast dogma” is elitist, often leads to corporate work, and does not address poverty. 1 Elon Musk functions mainly as “a symbol of tech worship” rather than a biographical subject, even though listeners have centered the song on him more than she intended. 1 Chorus lines about love, being used, and being abused are, in her words, “kind of a see through attempt at deflection” for feeling “stupid for being involved” when she was still young. 1

The meaning

At its core, Penelope Scott describes Rät as “really a song about being complicit in things that you later regret.” 1 She also frames it as a song “about being between worlds, and going back and forth between the old belief, and the new belief.” 1 The old belief is the almost overzealous love of science and technology she was taught (“Things that I was taught, ‘Just like a daddy should’”), which “makes sense at the time” even if it was excessive. 1 The new belief is a critique of that same culture as elitist, “as flawed as any church,” and built on “faux-rad West Coast dogma”: fake radicalism, the popular idea that going “full force into technological advancement is radical.” 1

Listeners have treated the song as a takedown of one man, but Scott says it “wasn’t meant to center around one person to the degree that it’s been interpreted”; she “just thought that people would like the meme.” 1 She did no research on Elon Musk and has “no idea, pretty much anything about his life,” picking him because “he’s a good pick for a symbol of tech worship.” 1 The title itself comes from a 2014 meme that Elon Musk is short for “elongated muskrat,” then shortened to rat. 1 That theme is also personal geography: it “plays really well in places like where I grew up, near Silicon Valley, which really love technology.” 1

The tragedy she names is “the slow realization that what you do with a coding, or, not coding, but a computer science degree often is pretty corporate.” 1 She questions whether building “great machines that do incredible things” without addressing “the problem of society, which right now is poverty,” even counts as science. 1 The Thomas Malthus name-drop is an Easter egg from her econ class, tied to the paradox that increased food production did not end hunger: “You would think that when that occurred, the immediate next step would be, like, ‘And then they ended hunger!’ Because they could, and why would they not? But that’s just not what happens!” 1 She also deliberately compared planetary colonizing to historical colonization (“I wanted to just kind of draw that comparison”), which surfaces in the verse about not wanting the stars if they are “just one more piece of land / For us to colonize.” 1 The song also asks whether that forward-thinking line of thought “is, in general, used to justify elitism.” 1

The chorus’s romantic language is a mask. “The language of used and abused, and I loved you, and all of that in this song is meant to be kind of a see through attempt at deflection.” 1 Under it is shame: “trying to kind of deal with the sense that you feel stupid for being involved. And nobody made you do it, but also you were little, so, how were you to know?” 1 One lyric angle is “I also feel bad about having privilege in society, and don’t really know what I’m doing,” paired with “I don’t need your help” to cover “both angles” of bias and refusing assistance. 1 She also describes phases of wanting “to revert to a time before they understood what things were,” and she calls adults dismissing young people’s naive moral questions “trauma. That’s like, pretty clearly trauma.” 1

The line “I hope someday Selmers rides her fucking train” is a direct reference to Selmers in *Night in the Woods*, a character “so sick of hearing about tech God, boy billionaires in Silicon Valley” who might take a train there and start fires. 1 Scott knew early that the track would be “sarcastically sweet, overproduced, kind of crunchy,” with “a lot of video game sounds.” 1 Not every barb is thesis-heavy; she has said at least one lyric was “just a little bit of salt, and a little bit of vitriol.” 1

Last updated 2026-09-02