The Weekend Mumbo: The continuing history of ill-suited Presidential campaign song choices
Every four years, three things are certain: We’ll get an extra day on the calendar, everyone pretends to care about athletics for two weeks during the Olympics, and a Presidential nominee will make a terribly ill-suited musical choice during their campaign.
Now, Beyonce would have been a great choice to perform during the Democratic National Convention, as had been rumoured all week.
TMZ certainly thought so, reporting this rumour as fact during the final day with the triple-examination-pointed headline ‘BEYONCÉ PERFORMING AT DNC’S FINAL NIGHT!!!’
Numerous other outlets dutifully spread the rumour as news, forcing the singer’s management to issue the official denial: “Beyoncé was never scheduled to be there. The report of a performance is untrue.”
Instead, the Democratic National Convention chose Lil Jon, last thought about in 2002, the year of our Lord Ashanti.
On Tuesday evening, during Day 2 of the DNC, Michelle Obama gave a rousing speech, during which she referenced her famous “when they go low, we go high” quote by suggesting Trump is “going small”, compelling the supporters to “keep moving our country forward and go higher – yes, always higher”.
It was a smart, beautiful speech, and it was only slightly undercut by Lil Jon busting out a song called ‘Get Low’ later in the evening.
Lil Jon’s appearance during the Dem Conference wasn’t as nonsensical as it seems. And, as with many ill-advised decisions, it started with a TikTok trend – in this case, people celebrating Harris’ selection of Tim Walz as her VP pick by changing the lyrics of ‘Get Low’ from “to the window, to the wall” into “to the window, to the Walz.”
Genius.
Political operative Ashley Spillane explained how the performance quickly came together once the meme caught fire, telling Variety: “We immediately started texting each other all the memes that were coming out. The social media component of this blew up in that way, so we got in touch with each other to see what we could figure out in real time together.
“I asked Tamar [Juda, Lil Jon’s publicist] if she thought Jon would be interested in doing something with it, and I said I would check with the campaign to see what they think. I first talked to Colleen Loper at the White House, who connected me with Carla Frank, who was the director of surrogate engagement for the campaign, now working for the Walz team. She wrote back immediately and said, ‘This would be amazing. Like, let’s make it happen.’”
Now, memes spread rapidly, and dissipate just as quickly, so time is of the essence when jumping onto something like this. But, at no point did any of these political masterminds stop to consider that, in Lil Jon’s song, the line directly following “to the window, to the walls” is “til the sweat drop from my balls”.
Perhaps if they did notice this, they may have then noticed the line after that is “til all these bitches crawl” .
Thankfully, things get a lot less offensive during the next line, which is “til all skeet-skeet motherfucker”.
It’s a bit awkward, isn’t it? But it’s following a time-honoured political tradition – choosing a song based off the vibe, not the message.
The all-time clunker was Ronald Reagan’s use of the then-current hit, Born In The USA, in 1984 during his rallies.
It should have been a home run, as those born in the USA would say. It had all the hallmarks of American success – it was the title track on a record that sold 17 million copies. It was during a year in which Reagan’s home state of California hosted the Olympics, at which America won 83 gold medals (Russia boycotted).
But underneath Springsteen’s flag-waving, chest-beating sloganeering, was a tale of a broken veteran struggling to reintegrate into life a decade after being drafted into the Vietnam War. Perhaps if Springsteen had kept the song’s working title, Vietnam Blues, Reagan might not have picked it. Or, if he’d toned down the flag waving a bit.
In 1992, independent candidate Ross Peret went for Patsy Cline’s Crazy, a depressing song written by Willie Nelson with the refrain, “I’m crazy for trying and crazy for crying, and I’m crazy for loving you.” That’s too much crazy for any sane campaign.
Luckily, Perot’s run was anything but sane, with the Texan billionaire funding his entire run himself, using talk show appearances to spruik his campaign, and basically serving as a proto-Trump warning shot, an example of how enough money and momentum can really mess with the two-party system in America.
He ended up scoring 18.91% of the popular vote, compared to Clinton’s 43.01%, and Bush senior’s 37.45% – the highest ever third-party percentage.
As for Bill Clinton, he famously went for Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop. A good choice, despite being from the most famous album ever about marital betrayal and disharmony.
It’s not just an American problem, this not-listening-to-the-words thing.
Even Germany’s ex-leader Angela Merkel – who served as Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021 and won Time Person of the Year in 2015, accompanied by an article titled Chancellor of the Free World – couldn’t look past the fact that the Rolling Stones had a song named Angie and perhaps peruse the lyric sheet before using the song heavily in her campaigns.
Had she done so, she may have paused at lines like “ain’t it time we said goodbye?” and “all the dreams we held so close seemed to all go up in smoke” and wondered if it was sending the correct message. “With no loving in our souls, and no money in our coat, you can’t say we’re satisfied” is hardly a rallying cry, either.
It seems like a trap for many of the great minds, this whole ‘lyrics’ things, so why not just write your own campaign song?
I mean, obviously you’d farm the musical part out – unless you’re a saxophonist like Bill Clinton, of course – and maybe, just maybe you’ll end up with a stone cold jam like the 1972 anthem, Nixon Now, which is so good it could have legitimately tussled for a spot on a lesser McCartney Wings album.
Plus, when the song is commissioned, you can rest safe with lyrics such as “Reaching out across the sea/ Making friends where foes used to be /Giving hope to humanity /More than ever, Nixon now for you and me”. No downtrodden Vietnam cold turkey here.
They even released it as a single.
1972 must have been a good year for music (it was), ’cause in Australia, Gough Whitlam’s Labour campaign also contained a musical classic – the psychedelic It’s Time, which sounds like a sister song to The Real Thing by Russell Morris.
Labour took power for the first time since 1949 – and although it was driven by the promise to remove the troops from Vietnam, eliminate sales tax on contraceptive pills, end racially segregated sporting teams, and flood the arts with funding – the song must have helped a bit. Listen to that chorus!
If penning your own classic is too tall an order, you can always do what JFK did, and just get Frank Sinatra to adapt his swingin’ hit, High Hopes, with new lyrics about the Presidential hopeful.
Now, the changes to the original are subtle, see if you can pick them up:
“1960’s the year for his high hopes/ Come on and vote for Kennedy/ Vote for Kennedy /And we’ll come out on top! /Oops, there goes the opposition – kerplop! K–E–DOUBLE N–E–D–Y.”
No wonder Sinatra ordered that hit on Kennedy soon after, making him bastardise his classic like that… but I digress.
Obviously, these commission jobs can go terribly, too – in fact, the past 20 years has seen some of the most egregiously bad examples so far.
Take Republican presidential hopeful John McCain’s fiddle-driven country hoedown, Raisin McCain, where the lyrics are mostly the nonsensical “we’re all just raising McCain”.
Or the worst of the bunch: Hillary Clinton’s 2016 DNC anthem, Our Fight Song, a cloying celebrity-drenched Glee-pop song that makes We Are The World sound like a knife-fight by comparison, featuring Elizabeth Banks, Julie Bowen, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jane Fonda, and numerous other out-of-touchers singing earnest auto-tuned a capella, with the main refrain being the unironic ‘dumb/dumb/dumb/dumb’ that drones throughout. I refuse to embed the video.
Now, I understand there’s a low percentage of Presidential hopefuls in our readership, so hopefully the overall point is transferable to a large swathe of the audience, say anyone who commissions music for anything.
Listen to the lyrics. All of the lyrics. Yes, that’s a great beat, and the tambourine cuts through nicely, but You’re The Voice is actually about nuclear power, and The Smiths are hip and all, but that song on the Nissan Maxima ad might just be about suicide, and even that la-da-de-da song by The Swingers on the Kmart ads contains the line “I’m bleeding to death” among the merriment.
And if you’re responsible for one of the dozens of commercials that have used Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones, then nothing can save your mortal soul.
On second thoughts, it’s safer just to stick with skeet skeet.
Enjoy your weekend.
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