ZZ Top in Colorado, 2011. Bild: TDC Photography / shutterstock.com
The sound of the election campaign and the anthems that fit and don’t. From Beyoncé to ZZ Top – between healing the world and destructive rage.
Rock and roll, soul and hip hop, and at least a hundred other genres and subgenres of pop music were invented in the USA. And the kitsch, pathos and whining of pop naturally surrounds the election campaign in a country that always seems more credible in its pop cultural self-portrayal than in real life – at least from the outside.
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In the upcoming election campaign, we are faced with what appears to be maximum polarization: good versus evil, prosecutor versus criminal, people with a migration background versus racism, cheerful liberalism versus blunt conservatism, etc.
The holy fervor
What unites them, however, is their – albeit contradictory – approaches to pop. Anyone who saw the recent Democratic Party Convention, the brilliant speeches by Michelle and Barack Obama, the “Be nice to your neighbors” performance by vice-candidate Tim Walz and, of course, the performance of the candidate herself, could be reminded of the great anthems of Michael Jackson.
“Heal the world”, sang der einst, “make it a better place, for you and for me and the entire human race” oder “We are the world, we are the children, we are the ones who make a brighter day … ” Wer wollte damals – in den 1980ern, als diese Songs erschienen – widersprechen?
Michael Jackson hoped to heal the world and make days brighter. And millions of fans around the world believed in Jackson’s self-imposed mission. Some still do today.
This holy fervor has not been silenced in American culture since then. After the abuse allegations against Jacko, however, others had to carry the torch of healing.
Cry for freedom: Beyoncé
At the moment, this is mainly represented by the song “Freedom” by Beyoncé, which the singer actually had to wrest from the Republican candidate in order to then ceremoniously feed it into Kamala Harris’s canon.
This religiously motivated cry for freedom is more of an anthem of the African-American community and its message is likely to have a harder time getting through to middle-class WASP society than Jackson’s universally-targeted numbers.
The Wild Things: Kid Rock and Ted Nugent
Trump and his wild boys, on the other hand, have always had a harder time getting pop songs and stars to support their campaigns. Just remember how hard it was for the orange chief to get bands to play at his inauguration party in 2016.
In the end, all that was left was “3 Doors Down” and a few reactionary country singers (among them the late Toby Keith). The still very popular white hip-hop star Post Malone would have participated if the pay had been right (as he said in a radio interview), but they apparently neglected to ask him. At least Trump can still count on the support of reactionary old stars like Kid Rock and Ted Nugent.
The actual song
The real song for a Trump campaign, however, would surely be “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers” by the Texas blues rock band ZZ Top. Anyone who has ever seen the videos of the storming of the Capitol, where the now massive right-wing pop culture took to the streets wearing baseball caps and Indian costumes, saw beer drinkers and troublemakers, people who actually didn’t care about anything, especially the symbols of democracy.
In the song in question, Billy Gibbons describes a wild party, accompanied by heavy rock music, which sounds like a fight in the House of Representatives (“Sounding a lot like a House Congressional”) and where, although there is a fight in the corner, it’s okay because both parties are completely drunk (“Try to cover up the corner fight, but everything’s cool cause they’s just tight”).
That’s America, too, and millions of people can identify with that, even if drinking and stressing out won’t make the world a better place.
The wrong choice
At the most recent Republican convention, however, Trump’s vice-candidate JD Vance chose “America First” by country legend Merle Haggard as the anthem, probably because he remembered Trump’s inauguration speech.
Now Haggard is considered a classic pop star of the American right (in 1969 he released “Okie from Muskogee”, a notorious song against the Vietnam War opponents and hippies of that time), but “America First” from 2005 was actually directed against George W. Bush and the Iraq War, which Haggard considered unnecessary and would have preferred to see the money invested at home.
So now it’s Beyoncé versus Merle (who can no longer defend himself, he died in 2016). “Heal the World” versus “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers” would have been the more honest choice.
