Songs in U.S. Presidential Campaigns: Function, Signification, and Spin
THESIS
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By Garrett Amzi Brown, B.M.F., B.A. Graduate Program in Music
The Ohio State University 2017
Master's Examination Committee: Arved Ashby, Advisor Graeme Boone Robert Kraut
Copyrighted by Garrett Amzi Brown 2017
Abstract
In this document, I examine the history of the campaign song in presidential elections in the United States, finding its changes in function as a result of the changing American electorate and advancing technology. As voting rights get extended to a greater percentage of the total American population and as popular mediums for dissemination of information change, the format of an effective campaign song changes from contrafacta of a well-known song to unaltered popular songs. I also identify the various signifying elements of popular songs that allow them to complement campaign rhetoric. Finally, I provide an exegesis of several popular songs whose original political meaning has changed as a result of their being used in the context of American presidential campaigns. In providing this analysis, I show how popular songs come to represent shared American ideals in the absence of any broad agreement as to what form those ideals should take.
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Dedication
Dedicated to my loving wife Haley Harris-Brown.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express appreciation for the guidance and constructive criticism provided by Arved Ashby. I would also like to thank Graeme Boone, whose class on emotions and music first interested me in the relationships between politics and music. I also extend thanks to the Musicology faculty at The Ohio State University for making me aware of a wide range of issues in music history and to Dr. Kraut for introducing me to controversies in artwork interpretation.
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Vita
May 2009 ...... Darlington Upper School 2013...... B.M.F. Music Performance, Samford University 2013...... B.A. Philosophy, Samford University 1980 to present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Physics, The Ohio State University
Publications
Brown, Garrett A. "Politicizing Popular Songs: Understanding Emotional Responses to Popular Songs in Presidential Elections." Journal of Ewha Music Research Institute 20.4 (2016): 99-122.
Fields of Study
Major Field: Music
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Table of Contents
Abstract ...... ii
Dedication ...... iii
Acknowledgements ...... iiv
Vita ...... v
Chapter 1: The Changing Role and Form of the Campaign Song ...... 1
Chapter 2: Understanding Signification in Popular Songs ...... 21
Chapter 3: Reconstitution of Song Meaning in the Context of Presidential Campaigns .. 42
References ...... 62
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Chapter 1: The Changing Role and Form of the Campaign Song
In 1800, the second election after George Washington’s presidency, presidential campaign songs entered the American political scene. With Washington’s presidency, the Electoral College was decided before any need for a campaign arose, and in the campaign of 1796 actively campaigning as a presidential candidate was generally considered inappropriate.1 By the time presidential candidates started actively campaigning for Electoral College votes in the election of 1800, campaign songs sprang up in support of party, candidate, or platform. These early campaign songs were generally contrafacta of previously existing songs, with songs like “Adams and Liberty” set to the tune of “To Anachreon in Heaven” – better known now as the tune to “The Star
Spangled Banner” – and “The Son of Liberty” set to the tune of “Variety.”2 These songs were tools for disseminating information that supported a particular candidate’s claim to the presidency, and the lyrics of the song presented explicit, if simplified, arguments in favor of one candidate over another. But it is initially unclear why campaigns should have turned to song at all, as opposed to more directly persuasive and detailed mediums such as speeches or essays. It is even less clear why campaign songs have changed from presenting newly-composed lyrics in direct support of the candidate and his platform to the unaltered, pre-existing popular songs employed on the campaign trail today, seen
1 Taylor, C. James. "John Adams: Campaigns and Elections." Miller Center. University of Virginia, n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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most recently in President Donald Trump’s employment of The Rolling Stones’ “You
Can’t Always Get What You Want” at campaign events.3 In order to understand the political soundscape of presidential elections today, we must understand the conditions that gave rise to campaign songs as a fixture of the campaign trail, and the technological, cultural, and electorate changes that changed the persuasive function of these songs from disseminators of information about the campaign and candidate to popular culture artifacts introduced into the political arena to support a candidate’s message inexplicitly.
The types and number of voters that elected the U.S. president gave rise to the need for campaign songs. While electors for the Electoral College were chosen by state legislatures for 10 out of the 16 states that participated in the election of 1800, candidates needed to make a direct appeal to the voting public in the entire state for Kentucky,
Maryland, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Tennessee. Additionally, two of these states, Kentucky and Tennessee, had no economic-based qualifications for voting rights as long as the potential voter was a white male, which further complicated the task of spreading information to the voting public that would prove relevant to deciding on a candidate.4 In requiring the candidates to get their message out to not only the mostly literate propertied class, but also to many illiterate non-propertied white males, Kentucky and Tennessee imposed a burden on the candidates: to spread information convincingly, simply, and broadly as opposed to requiring candidates to make more concentrated efforts to sway smaller concentrations of political power, to sway the legislatures that
3 Suebsaeng, Asawin. "Mick Jagger on Trump Using Stones Songs: I 'Can't Stop' Him." The Daily Beast. The Daily Beast Company, 12 Oct. 2016. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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appointed the electors as they did in ten states, or to sway only the propertied class in
Virginia, Rhode Island, North Carolina and Maryland. This requirement meant that verbal communication, in form of either live speech and argumentation or song, would best persuade a large segment of the voting population in at least these two states. This is not to say that no candidate employed print media in an attempt to make his appeal to the more literate propertied classes in the four previously mentioned states, but print would prove an inefficient means of disseminating information for entirely different reasons in those states.
The main reason for the difficulty with print dissemination had to do with the economics of newspaper distribution in early America. In order to be guaranteed pay for their labors, the editors of newspapers had to gain subscriptions from the local populace, keep track of who wanted to receive the paper regularly, and collect the dues. Without such lists of subscribers, newspapers had trouble selling advertisement space and, consequently, struggled to stay in business. As an additional problem, the postal service did not deliver these papers for free in early America. Every facet of print news dissemination was thus monetized, hiding the information about national affairs behind both a literacy requirement and a paywall – usually between $6 and $10 annually out of wages ranging from $100 – ~$350 annually.56 Newspapers, thus, only reached a small segment of even the literate population, though the exact number of subscribers is unknown because newspapers inflated subscriber lists in order to sell more advertising space. As a result of the monetization of the information contained therein, spreading
5 Steffen, Charles G. "Newspapers for Free: The Economies of Newspaper Circulation in the Early Republic." Journal of the Early Republic 23.3 (2003): 383. Jstor. Web. 26 Mar. 2017. 6 Lebergott, Stanley. "Wage Trends, 1800-1900." Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century. N.p.: Princeton U Press, 1960. 462. Print.
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campaign information through newspapers would largely be an attempt to make a case to a relatively small segment of the voting population until later changes in newspaper distribution made public information more affordable. Even if this small segment of the population was, in fact, persuaded by arguments presented in newspapers, this information would be unlikely to spread widely, because of the relatively slow speed at which this information spread verbally in discussions between subscribers and non- subscribers.
Speeches, meanwhile, would allow the candidate to directly address those who would come to hear him speak, making speeches valuable tools in large population centers where many people could gather in a single place at a single time. At speech events, the candidate could benefit from perceived sincerity through direct appeal to the voting population, with all of the understood effort that went into making such appeals in person, as well as from any personal charisma. This singularity of speech event, however, was exactly what made it ineffective at persuading masses of people at the same time. First, the candidate would have to travel to the population center where he could reliably expect to draw a crowd at considerable expenditure of time and funds.
Second, speeches were limited in crowd size by the volume with which the candidate could project his speech, as amplification technology was not sufficient for projecting a message to large crowds. Third, the speech event had to gather a crowd at a specific place at a specific point in time, requiring substantial effort in coordinating a community to attend such an event before the candidate even arrived. Finally, speeches could spread information in support of the candidate directly only once, and relied on summaries of the information being spread verbally by supporters or detractors of the candidate that were
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present at the speech. This mode of information transmission made control of the information spread and its subsequent reception less reliable in comparison to print, and, as a result, it limited the persuasive force of speeches primarily to the initial speech. Of course, these concerns did not eliminate speeches as an important tool in the electoral process; they just limited the efficacy of speeches in spreading information broadly, and required candidates to look for other ways to secure the spread of their campaign messages.
In short, the campaign song began as a tool to spread information, helping to counter the weaknesses of speeches and print. The first reason for the emergence of the campaign song as communicator has to do with the reliability of memorization of exact detail of information when that information is paired with music. In studying the effect of musical frameworks on texts, Purnell-Webb and Speelman found that texts paired with familiar melodic and rhythmic structures – with rhythmic structures including the accent pattern used in the original rendition of the familiar melody – tended to be much more accurately recalled than text alone or text paired familiar melody and unfamiliar rhythmic structures (i.e. familiar melodies where the accents of the music do not line up with the accents of the texts), and text paired with familiar rhythmic structures faired similarly well.7 From this, we can conclude that properly fitting new texts to familiar songs would serve as a constraint on the possible choice of words, aiding the person trying to recall the lyrics by placing already-learned rhythmic constraints on what word fits into the song, but we also find a method through which information can be transmitted with similar
7 Purnell-Webb, Patricia, and Craig P. Speelman. "Effects of Music on Memory for Text." Perceptual and Motor Skills 106.3 (2008): 954. Sage Journals. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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accuracy to print without relying on the literacy or purchasing power of the audience.
The intuitively-known mnemonic advantage of setting information to song with rhythmic accents matching text accents, demonstrated in our tendency to teach children about the alphabet with the alphabet song or counting information with the five little monkeys song
– I still remember the order of the months of the year to the tune of a song I learned in kindergarten – might explain why many of the first campaign songs were contrafacta of widely-known pre-existing songs.
Another reason for the use of campaign songs as an essential part of campaign rhetoric might have to do with music’s ability to increase implicit memory of campaign message or candidate when these are paired with songs in any fashion – the kind of long- term memory that guides action without being consciously recalled, the kind that enables you to tie your shoes without consciously thinking about how the knots are formed. This is to say that, when someone recalls music, they are likely to recall the way that the music made them feel together with the music-external features surrounding their consumption of the music. In a 2006 study, Margarita Alexomanolaki, Catherine Loveday, and Chris
Kennett found that consumers unfamiliar with an advertisement that was played to them only once were more likely to make implicit memory connections between music used in an advertisement and advertisement-associated words afterwards than they were to make implicit memory connections between advertisements containing only voices and sound effects.8 This ability for music used in an advertising context to condition future associations of that music with the advertised ideas might lead us to posit a politics of
8 Alexomanolaki, Margarita, Catherine Loveday, and Chris Kennett. "Music and Memory in Advertising : Music as a Device of Implicit Learning and Recall." Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 1.1 (2007): 51- 71. Project Muse. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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musical taste; the more likely someone is to recall a song positively, independent of political message, the more likely that person is to recall the associations of that song – implicitly remembered through having heard the song used for advertising purposes – positively. Musical tastes can then be exploited to gain positive reception of campaign messages as the extra-musical program becomes inextricably tied to the musical; the glow of the music becomes implicitly tied with the advertised political platform or candidate.
The final reason for the initial rise of the campaign song has to do with its relative ease of spread due to the fact that music is entertaining. Campaigns would distribute entire songbooks full of information in support of the campaign, and needed to rely only on a small musically literate population for the initial public distribution of the song.
Afterwards, catchy songs could spread verbally to even the illiterate populations. This fact, taken with the value of the song as entertainment as opposed to overt proselytization
– which would be less likely to find a ready ear – means that songs would be readily heard and, provided they were well-set and catchy, remembered at election time, providing an early source of American “infotainment” that spread information widely and accurately without paywalls or literacy barriers. Campaign songs, in this way, became a viral marketing tool in ways that print or speech could not, guaranteeing spread of information contained in the song from a small number of initial consumers to the broader population due to the entertainment value found in reproducing it.
This practice was not very widespread in the 1800 election where campaign songs first arose due to the relative scarcity of states that gave full suffrage to all white males in addition to allowing all white males to vote for their electors directly instead of through
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previous picks for legislatures. But songbooks were widespread by the election of 1840: by this time, all states except for South Carolina had rules that allowed voters to directly choose their electors, and the increasing suffrage for non-propertied white males grew the size of the electorate by sixty percent.9 This large electorate, combined with the difficulties of print as a means of spreading information widely – compulsory education was not enacted in every state in the nation until 1918 – and the time and money constraints that come with giving speeches kept political songbooks full of contrafacta of familiar tunes as an important means of informing the public about the presidential candidates until the radio dominated elections of the 1920’s.10 These songbooks that provided multiple songs for each candidate campaigning also provide a model for the recent turn to campaign playlists, employed by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the
2012 election as well as by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
The nature of effective campaign songs changed dramatically with the advent of the radio as disseminator of public information in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Previously, candidates had had to be concerned with the quick memorization of lyrics by relying on songs with melodies and rhythmic structures already embedded broadly in the consciousness of much of the American electorate. As mentioned earlier, any music helped spread the campaign’s message, and we have examples of newly-composed campaign songs from as early as 1840 with the song “Van Buren.” Radio, however, changed the entire soundscape of presidential elections for several reasons. The first
9 Schoening, Benjamin S., and Eric T. Kasper. Don't Stop Thinking About the Music: The Politics of Songs and Musicians in Presidential Campaigns. Plymouth, UK: Lexington, 2012. 47. Print. 10 Provenzo, Eugene F., and Asterie Baker Provenzo. "Compulsory Educational Attendance Laws." Encyclopedia of the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2009. 168. Print.
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reason for this change is that radio brought the song’s particular instantiated characteristics under control of the candidate, thus opening up new possibilities for widespread and consistent song reproduction so that the candidate could control factors such as the timbre and accent of the voice – candidates regularly chose to have their songs sung by already popular entertainers as can be seen with Warren Harding’s choice of singer Al Jolson and John Kennedy’s choice of crooner Frank Sinatra – while also guaranteeing lyrical constancy of the song over numerous transmissions. It also removed the need for relying on a musically literate population to spread the song initially, providing certainty about a baseline amount of times a song would be heard in specific locations. Radio gave candidates the ability to target specific regions and rural populations quickly and efficiently, as an enormous number of people – roughly 40% of all American households – in the 1932 election forward were paying to bring a means of campaign advertisement into their homes, transcending the limitations of localized live performances.11 Though illiteracy had decreased to around four percent of the population in 1930, and newspaper readership increased along with this decrease in illiteracy, political radio advertisements became an important tool in spreading campaign information because they required a smaller investment of directed attention from the consumer – only the consumer’s passive listening as opposed to reading and processing – in order for them to be effective.12 All of these factors eroded the need for songbooks full of simple, familiar tunes, which often failed to play to current musical tastes. The decline
11 Smith, Stephen. "Radio: The Internet of the 1930s." American RadioWorks. American RadioWorks, 10 Nov. 2014. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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of the necessity of live performance of campaign songs in the wake of the radio opened up the possibility of exploiting the electorate’s changing musical tastes through the use of newly-composed songs in popular music genres.
Another reason for the change from culturally-inherited tunes like “Gobby-O,”
“Auld Lang Syne,” or “The Star Spangled Banner” has to do with the fact that musical genres themselves serve as bearers of certain values that bind communities together, despite geographic location or the differences in how those values are realized in different locales. A clear recent example is presented in country music singing about urban life. In the song “Hard Workin’ Man” (1993), Brooks & Dunn sing about a man removed from farm life in an industrial job who retains a working-class grit despite the fact that he does not “work the land” like the character in Alan Jackson’s “Small Town
Southern Man” does. Country music uses the genre – manifested through similar instrumentation, simple song structure and common working-class values – to signify a community performing a mythologized rural identity regardless of actual geographical location. The values espoused in this music are of particular interest, as they tend to be taken to play out in largely determinate ways politically, though this need not be the case, and presidential campaign music in definite genres makes an indirect appeal to communities, to musically model the way those values should be politically played out on the national stage. Campaigners can then target people likely or unlikely to be sympathetic to their message by composing in a specific genre using the musical rhetoric and often values-scheme common to the lyrics of the genre to make their case as the candidate for consumers of such music. This is no hypothetical linkage either, as Echo
Nest, a musical data gathering company, found a strong correlation between musical
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tastes and party preference in 2012, a correlation that Pandora employed to allow parties to target consumers for advertisements with which they would likely be sympathetic.13
Several changes happened to the makeup of the electorate from the 1800s to the
1920s that changed both the style of music employed as well as the lyrical content of the songs. The first major change was the ratification of the 15th amendment of the
Constitution in 1870, which introduced at least some black voices into the electoral system, though the black vote would continue to be suppressed in the South, with the creation of state laws requiring voters to pass literacy tests or pay poll taxes, until the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. Nevertheless, popular musical styles in America changed as a result of the increasingly colliding musical cultures of black and white Americans following the Civil War, culminating in the creation of popular ragtime and jazz musical genres. In 1900, William McKinley was the first candidate to employ this genre for his campaign with the newly-composed song “Hooray for Bill McKinley and That Brave
Rough Rider Ted.”14 By 1920, Warren G. Harding’s campaign song “Harding, You’re the Man for Us” was written by Al Jolson, a white musician popular for performing in black musical styles – often while in blackface makeup that made the racial origin of his music clear to the live audiences present at these shows. More specifically, Jolson's songs were in a popular jazz style, reflecting America’s growing taste for black- influenced music as integration slowly occurred after the civil war. The change with a more quickly-felt effect on the contents of songs happened in 1920 with the 19th
13 Dwoskin, Elizabeth. "Pandora Thinks It Knows if You Are a Republican." The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, 13 Feb. 2014. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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amendment guaranteeing the universal suffrage of women. Political rhetoric in addressing the electorate changed to include more specific mentions of women and increased usage of gender-neutral terms, and lyricists largely followed suit.15
Using radio rather than songbooks to take advantage of the changing musical tastes of the electorate was one part of the turn to newly-composed campaign songs.
After all, campaigns could still take widely-known pre-existing popular songs in the current popular style and alter the lyrics to support their cause, – as Lyndon Johnson did with his 1964 campaign song “Hello, Lyndon,” a contrafacta of the song “Hello, Dolly” published the same year – which leaves uncertain what drove the change of song format from contrafacta to newly-composed piece. Another motivation had to do with the advantages of tying the tune of the message to the message itself, instead of relying on variable connotations of pre-existing popular songs and having to make concessions of clarity in lyrical substance to fit the rhythmic pattern. As previously mentioned, changing the accent pattern or slightly warping the rhythm to accommodate more syllables has an adverse effect on recall; this adverse effect can be eliminated entirely provided the melody is newly composed to fit the accents of the text. Melodies can then be naturally constructed to fit an exactly crafted text, where that text would otherwise be so specific that it struggles to find a good fit in a pre-existing melodic line. An example of such a line might be given with “he’ll knock out prohibition with repeal, not resubmission” from Roosevelt’s “We Want a Man like Roosevelt,” which is crafted so as to make the campaign promise explicitly clear, though it is not well-fitted to the rhythmic
15 Schoening, Benjamin S., and Eric T. Kasper. Don't Stop Thinking About the Music: The Politics of Songs and Musicians in Presidential Campaigns. Plymouth, UK: Lexington, 2012. 93. Print.
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pattern of one of the popular songs already embedded in the American consciousness.
Additionally, tunes of songs embedded in the American consciousness could just recall the song rather than the platform or candidate, due to the pre-existing lyrics of the music; multiple songs could be recalled by listening to the same tune, weakening the tune’s tie to the specific candidate, and while this tradeoff was acceptable earlier, when guaranteeing transmission of song and campaign message thereby was more difficult, the ease and guarantee of radio transmission allowed candidates to look for ways to musically embody their campaigns in less ambiguous ways. Tying the tune essentially to the message served as a guarantee that, while exact lyric and full melodic gesture might be forgotten, the musical material when played or fragmentarily remembered would recall the candidate and some ideas from that candidate’s political platform; there are no alternate words for the song that allow the tune to be heard as outside of the campaign context.
This fact, however, could be a double-edged sword, as tying a tune essentially to message does not allow pre-existing taste for the tune to temper the reception of the political message, thus allowing aesthetic condemnation of the song on the basis of political program; it is much easier for a listener to entertain negative feelings about a message if he or she does not already find the message's medium to be enjoyable.
Furthermore, the song might not be catchy enough to hook the listener, or it could fail to be a popular addition to the genre, making it much less likely that the message of the song will be remembered in the voting booth and possibly making the song a complete failure of musical taste, a music that the audience finds unenjoyable, which can also tie itself essentially to the candidate’s message.
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These problems, avoided in the use of pre-existing music, combined with the even easier spread of information in the age of television to quickly change the model for campaign songs from newly-composed works to unaltered pre-existing popular songs, though radio ownership could have enabled the same move; it did, in fact, for Franklin
Roosevelt, who played the hit “Happy Days Are Here Again” from the movie 1930
Chasing Rainbows, though he also played other newly-composed pieces to bolster his campaign. I believe the delay in moving to pre-existing popular songs can best be explained by understanding newly-composed campaign songs as continuing the tradition established by early campaign songs of spreading information about the political goals or character of the candidate. Opting for the use of unaltered, pre-existing popular song alone as campaign song does not require the song to give information about the campaign itself, but instead requires the candidate to spin off the message of the song to help it condition reception of political message; while contrafacta of songs embedded in the
American consciousness runs the risk of making the candidate appear out-of-touch, unable to appeal to the changing tastes of the electorate. Newly-composed songs with informative lyrics set to popular musical styles represented a middle way between abandoning campaign song as disseminator of campaign-specific information in the turn to pre-existing popular song, and abandoning campaign song as a broadly-consumed form of entertainment that effectively conditions reception of political rhetoric.
Though newly-composed campaign songs have not completely disappeared from the presidential campaign soundscape – Rick Santorum played “Take Back America” at campaign events during his short-lived bid for president in the 2016 Republican primary
– the transition to unaltered pre-existing popular song as campaign song was complete by
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1980, with no major party nominee since then failing to use unaltered pre-existing popular song.16 This shift radically changed the function of campaign songs in that these unaltered, pre-existing songs will often make no specific mention of policy or candidate’s name or virtues; instead, these songs provide a backdrop against which the campaign’s motivations and character can be understood by a public already exposed to candidates’ policy information. In fact, due to the amount of information available to the public about campaigns, voters end up needing this kind of shortcut to understanding policies about which they understand little.17
This information saturation can be attributed to changes in the types of media commonly consumed in America. The first television channel aired in America in 1928, but television’s impact on American life was not fully felt until the 1960s, by which time the cost of the technology had decreased to the point that ninety percent of all Americans owned a television set.18 Coupled with this increase in ownership came an increase in media consumption, with an increase in time devoted to media of three to five percent per year from 1960 on.19 Part of this uptick in time spent consuming media represents an increase in news consumption as well, which helped to remove limits on the efficacy of candidate speech by providing a set time and place where many viewers would be willing and able to hear such speeches with the physical image of the presidential hopeful
16 Kristian Kjærulff. “Rick Santorum takes back America in Pennsylvania Song.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 28 May 2015. Web. 26 March 2017.
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available; being seen could allow the candidate to benefit from personal charisma conveyed through body language and could help prevent the ambiguities that happen in the audio-only format of radio. Information about the campaign could be spread broadly and unambiguously from the candidate directly, with the tone of the rhetoric controlled by the tone of voice and physical presence of the candidate that was lost on radio. These facts helped to finally eliminate the usefulness of campaign songs as disseminators of campaign-specific information, so the roles left to campaign song now complemented other campaign rhetoric in helping ensure a positive reception for the campaign messages, helping to spin the way the values in the song should achieve political instantiation, and reminding candidates about the campaigner by serving as a sonic marker of the campaign.
As a result of these facts, the popular songs that candidates choose tend to either be celebrations of the country generally, up-tempo songs that use the name of the candidate, or songs meant to express a common, popular character trait or emotional state that the candidate wishes to claim for themselves. Examples of these types can be given with Donald Trump’s use of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” John McCain’s use of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” and Hillary Clinton’s use of Katy Perry’s
“Roar”. Ideally, the force of the song as persuasive tool is found in the easy, non- controversial, positive juxtaposition of the previously set lyrics and music-rhetorical features of the song with the message of the campaign, though this is not always the case.
Possible problems with such choices arise, however, because of the fact that these songs often say more than what the candidate might desire, sending mixed messages about the candidate and platform. “Johnny B. Goode” does have a chorus that energetically shouts
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“Go Johnny go, go,” but it also describes Johnny as having “never ever learned to read or write so well;” such a candidate would likely be unacceptable to the American voting public. The introduction to Katy Perry’s “Roar” tells us that the narrator “used to bite
[her] tongue and hold [her] breath, scared to rock the boat and make a mess, so [she] sat quietly, agreed politely.” If taken literally, this song casts Clinton as an ineffective politician earlier in her career, unwilling to fight for her political beliefs on the national stage. Finally, the song can claim character traits demonstrably not possessed by the candidate, as when the narrator of “God Bless the U.S.A.” asserts that he would “gladly stand up next to you and defend [America] still today.” This line might ruffle the feathers of military veterans who heard Donald Trump using the song, a candidate who deferred military service for college, then for a temporary malady in the form of bone spurs, which eventually served as a reason for permanent disqualification for military service, a reason unsatisfactory to some who labeled him a draft dodger during the campaign.20 Further problems in using a popular song can arise if the musical artist publicly opposes the candidate's political opinions, undercutting the validity of the candidate’s claim to that song being an appropriate musical symbol for his or her campaign. This leads to the need to either subvert song meaning or spin reception, an issue I will look at in more detail in chapter three.
In their capacities as sonic markers of campaigns, unaltered pop songs enjoy an even greater advantage in political advertising since the 1980s with the increased ease and portability of song consumption in the form of the tape, cd, and mp3. The Sony
20 Greenberg, Jon. "Was Trump a 'Draft Dodger'?" Punditfact. Politifact, 21 July 2015. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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Walkman came out in 1979 and enabled private consumption of music while being portable, overcoming the bulkiness and intrusion into public aural space of stereos, and portable cd players and mp3 players have enabled this convenient musical consumption for these other formats. With the assurance that popular songs sell outside of a political context, there is an additional advantage in advertising saturation. Fans of a song will listen to the song in times and spaces that the candidate did not even have to fund, and, provided the song has been commonly linked with the candidate, this guarantees free advertising that takes advantage of the implicit memory connections between song and political advertisement, pinging the listener with remembrances of campaign rhetoric whenever the song is voluntarily played. If the song is recent enough, or if it is a standard of a certain genre such that it can be heard on classic rock or rap stations around the country, radio will also provide free airplay of these songs, again providing advertising at no cost to the candidate.
One final recent development in technology has enabled candidates to further increase the number of useful songs. With the rise of free music streaming through sites like Spotify, candidates are able to create and disseminate playlists of campaign music at no cost to themselves, associating the candidate with all of the diverse musical tastes of the audiences to which they wish to appeal. This low-effort, no-cost marketing of many songs in conjunction with the candidate stands in stark contrast to the physical costs of compiling songbooks or creating a mixtape, and it enables many different kinds of people to see their value commitments as being represented by the candidate. In Hillary
Clinton’s 2016 campaign, her playlist was crafted to appeal to Spanish speakers, black
Americans, women, and Millennials as distinct interest groups, so she appealed to each
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group’s interests directly instead of trying to find one or a couple of songs that would appeal to all of them at the same time, allowing them to read her policy recommendations as sympathetic to specific demographics.
From this brief sketch, we can see that campaign music arose from political candidates' need to spread information, and as the candidate’s needs changed, so did the function of the music and, consequently, the type of music deployed. Candidates needing a quick, accurate spread of information to the public prior to the invention of the radio preferred contrafacta of songs embedded in the American consciousness that could be easily spread to even illiterate populations provided the text was well crafted. After the radio, newly-composed songs supplanted the earlier contrafacta in informing the public about the candidate’s image and platform, but this quickly became obsolete with the rise of cheap, reliable, broad, and detailed dissemination of information through television and the internet. Candidates then opted to continue the campaign music tradition by adopting pre-existing popular song to gain many of the advantages of the newly- composed campaign songs coupled with free airplay, voluntary music consumption for additional free saturation of advertising, and guaranteed success of musical taste and population targeting.
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Chapter 2: Understanding Signification in Popular Songs
Having addressed the change in function of campaign songs over time and how campaign song formats changed accordingly, I now turn my attention to understanding what songs signify, and understanding the rhetorical value of popular songs in the current national political environment of the United States. As touched on in the previous chapter, campaign songs are now rhetorically effective for doing something other than just disseminating information about the candidate or platform - a power witnessed by the turn to pre-existing popular song, a format that often fails to refer to the candidate or his or her platform in any specific way, as the dominant campaign music for the later part of the 20th century. Indeed, songs have become more and more valuable for their ability to set an emotional tone for the campaign that can condition audience reception of campaign message. Additionally, popular music helps politicians tap into narratives that a public uses to make sense of its own experiences, as evidenced by that music’s selling in enormous numbers.
Pinning down exactly what is meant by the deployment of a particular song by a particular campaign, however, can be difficult, as we must examine the elements of meaning-making in the song as well as how those meanings interact with the rhetoric of the campaigner. To accomplish this goal, we should determine the possible responses to a candidate’s use of popular music by paying attention to the songwriter’s expressed moral and political values, the values of the community that listened to the song, the
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lyrics of the song, the campaigner’s values, and the musical elements like timbre, tempo, register, dynamics and tonality that are able to affect the feelings of the listener. In the context of presidential campaigns, we must also pay special attention to the commonly shared American values the candidate or song references, and what the realization of those values looks like, as the homogeneous use of a value term can hide extant value heterogeneity; “freedom,” for example, can be realized in a freedom from taxes, government regulation, and the ability to sell your labor for whatever price you can find, acceptable or unacceptable, in unregulated economic circumstances, or it can be a freedom from the predations of an unregulated economy combined with social protections made possible by some legitimate coercive state power.
Determining what a popular song means when deployed in the context of a presidential campaign is not a straightforward process; campaign songs do not simply mean what is said in the lyrics. This point might be obvious, as there are political songs with sarcastic lyrics like Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” where the chorus calls for a continuation of a seemingly positive activity – rocking, slang for keeping everything awesome – while the portrayal of exactly what rocking in the free world consists in is remarkably bleak, with widespread hopelessness, homelessness, a depressed population, careless ecocide, and a narrative about a drug addict committing infanticide.
The lyrics below show the extent to which Young finds the United States to be failing.
There's colors on the street Red, white and blue People shufflin' their feet People sleepin' in their shoes But there's a warnin' sign on the road ahead There's a lot of people sayin' we'd be better off dead Don't feel like Satan, but I am to them So I try to forget it, any way I can.
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[Chorus] Keep on rockin' in the free world, Keep on rockin' in the free world Keep on rockin' in the free world, Keep on rockin' in the free world.
I see a woman in the night With a baby in her hand Under an old street light Near a garbage can Now she puts the kid away, and she's gone to get a hit She hates her life, and what she's done to it There's one more kid that’ll never go to school Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool.
[Chorus]
We got a thousand points of light For the homeless man We got a kinder, gentler, machine gun hand We got department stores and toilet paper Got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer Got a man of the people, says keep hope alive Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive.
[Chorus]21
We can know the text of the chorus to be sarcastically praising the current state of affairs before even hearing how the musical elements of the song contribute to an understanding of the lyrics. Any candidate using this song would not think the world depicted by the lyrics is a positive state of affairs, but even when we take the sarcasm of the lyrics into account, we have only managed to close off one state of affairs as inconsistent with a positive model for society. Young does not blame any particular person, policy, or value for the dire circumstances that he depicts, so discerning the alternative policies that will bring about a more hopeful and just society, is left open to interpretation, allowing the song to support different policy recommendations and fleshed-out value systems. This can be seen in the fact that the song was employed in the campaigns of both Bernie Sanders, a social democrat and Democratic primary candidate
21 Young, Neil. "Rockin' In The Free World." YouTube. YouTube, 05 Nov. 2014. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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who supported expansion of the social safety net, and Donald Trump, the Republican candidate who supported a minimal social safety net with cuts to welfare programs for the working poor citing widespread abuse of these programs. Here, Neil Young stepped in to offer his opinion on how the song should be properly deployed politically, disallowing Trump from using it at campaign events and publicly announcing his support for the policies espoused by the Sanders campaign; Sanders played the same song at his rallies shortly following this event.22
Sarcasm in a song’s text, however, is not the only barrier to interpreting a song’s meaning as a straight product of its lyrics, as the same text can mean very different things when delivered with a different tone of voice or musical accompaniment. For example, the import of statistical data about climate change will be received differently based on a speaker’s tone of voice when delivering those statistics. A speaker that delivers the statistics quickly in a high, strained vocal register would normally be interpreted as stressing the urgency, whereas a speaker that reads the same statistics in a normal, unstrained vocal register at a moderate tempo might signal that the statistics are unsurprising or having no specific way that these statistics should be received, as value neutral. Yelling facts and using aggressive body language imply an urgent value scheme, imply that some values are necessary for fully understanding the information being communicated. Statistics used in current national conversations about race provide another example where tone of voice influences reception of statistical data.
Commentators trying to explain racial disparities in the prison population present the fact
22 Kaye, Ben. "Neil Young Snubs Donald Trump, Gives ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ to Bernie Sanders.” Consequence of Sound. Consequence of Sound, 22 June 2015. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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that black Americans make up around forty percent of the prison population despite representing only thirteen percent of the total population with no outrage, normally situating that statistic in the context of other statistics that they believe should mitigate possible outrage, statistics like racial disparities in total crimes committed or types of crimes committed; commentators yelling the first statistic implicitly make a claim that there is no mitigating factor for this disparity, and situate their outrage within a common value system wherein racial discrimination is unacceptable.
Musical accompaniment of fact or narrative provides another way to affect the meaning of the text analogous to a tone of voice, once expressive musical conventions surrounding timbre, tempo, dynamic level, register, and tonality are taken into account.
Setting the same climate change statistics to music with a slow tempo in a minor key might portend grief or imply that a struggle against these facts has already been lost, while setting the statistics to music with a moderate tempo and a major key might serve to present the information as an affirmation that climate change actions have been successful. Even when it is agreed that action should be taken on climate change, musical calls for such action often employ different musical tones of voice to call for this action, as might be seen in the contrast between Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song” – mournfully slow, quiet to swelling, sweetly sung – and The Restart’s “No Escape” – quick in tempo, loud, and aggressively shouted.2324 Both carry lyrics calling for action to preserve the future of humanity and acknowledging the fact that we are all on this earth
23 Licker, Robin. "The Restarts - No Escape." YouTube. YouTube, 18 June 2011. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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together, but “Earth Song” is an impassioned plea while “No Escape” is an angry demand.
To be clear, the musical accompaniment cannot entirely govern how the message should be received, though neither can the musical accompaniment be ignored in a viable interpretation. Lyrics can be set to music that intentionally counters them. An example of this can be seen in Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life,” where the uptempo, positive-sounding music masks the distress of the singer who is struggling with crystal meth addiction and depression. The full text is important to understanding the import of the song, so I have included it below.
I'm packed and I'm holding I'm smiling, she's living, she's golden She lives for me, says she lives for me Ovation, her own motivation She comes round and she goes down on me And I make her smile, like a drug for you Do ever what you wanna do, coming over you Keep on smiling, what we go through One stop to the rhythm that divides you
And I speak to you like the chorus to the verse Chop another line like a coda with a curse Come on like a freak show takes the stage We give them the games we play, she said...
[Chorus]- I want something else, to get me through this Semi-charmed kinda life, baby, baby I want something else, I'm not listening when you say good-bye
The sky was gold, it was rose I was taking sips of it through my nose And I wish I could get back there, someplace back there Smiling in the pictures you would take Doing crystal meth, will lift you up until you break It won't stop, I won't come down I keep stock with the tick-tock rhythm, I bump for the drop And then I bumped up, I took the hit that I was given Then I bumped again, then I bumped again I said...
How do I get back there, to the place where I fell asleep inside you How do I get myself back to the place where you said...
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[Chorus]
I believe in the sand beneath my toes The beach gives a feeling, an earthy feeling I believe in the faith that grows And the four right chords can make me cry When I'm with you I feel like I could die And that would be alright, alright
And when the plane came in, she said she was crashing The velvet it rips in the city, we tripped on the urge to feel alive Now I'm struggling to survive, those days you were wearing that velvet dress You're the priestess, I must confess Those little red panties they pass the test Slide up around the belly, face down on the mattress
One And you hold me, and we're broken Still it's all that I wanna do, just a little now Feel myself, heading off the ground I'm scared, I'm not coming down No, no And I won't run for my life She's got her jaws now, locked down in a smile But nothing is alright, alright
[Chorus]- slightly altered And I want something else, to get me through this life Baby, I want something else Not listening when you say... Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye
The sky was gold, it was rose I was taking sips of it through my nose And I wish I could get back there Someplace back there, in the place we used to start
I want something else25
In this case, the contrast between the music and the tone of the lyrics invites the listener to interpret the musical accompaniment as a sort of musical sarcasm, suggesting the narrator is unable to make normal emotional sense out of his current situation because of the effects of crystal meth; the bright, poppy, cheerful tone of the musical accompaniment masks the ugliness of the story in the lyrics and should obviously not be
25 Jenkins, Stephan. "Third Eye Blind - "Semi-Charmed Life" [Official Music Video]." YouTube. YouTube, 23 Feb. 2017. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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the overriding factor in interpretation of song meaning, but it continues to color the interpretation of the lyrics once the mask is removed.
The fact that cheerful musical accompaniment doesn't make a song cheerful doesn't mean we should doubt music’s ability to express emotions and set moods.
Indeed, in the example above, the ability to read the mood of the music is necessary to understand how it affects the meaning of the song overall. This should serve to point out that musical features with conventional meanings can be undercut by the lyrics because the final interpretation of a musical-lyrical combination must treat these elements as conjoined with possible oxymoronic effects to be interpreted. Examples of these oxymoronic combinations of behavior and meaning can be seen in the same way that one might mirthlessly laugh at a serious state of affairs as a way to pick out the absence of humor in that state of affairs, in the same way one might be calmly outraged with the evenness of tone not to be confused with the calm reception of information. When there is no meaningful lyrical content, these musical conventions have a demonstrable impact on behavior and mood, as can be seen from research on the music constantly played in public spaces from gyms to cafes to shopping centers, music to which we intuitively respond. Fast tempo music encourages faster completion of actions compared to slow tempo or no music at all.26 Familiar popular music creates a more positive mood and people listening to such music display an increase in readiness to help others compared to unfamiliar music or music with many uncommon tonal features.27 Though no complete
26 Milliman, Ronald E. "Using Background Music to Affect the Behavior of Supermarket Shoppers." Journal of Marketing 46.3 (1982): 86-91. ProQuest. Web. 26 March 2017. 27 North, Adrian C., Mark Tarrant, and David J. Hargreaves. "The Effects of Music on Helping Behavior: A Field Study." Environment and Behavior 36.2 (2004): 266-75. Jstor. Web. 26 March 2017.
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catalogue of mood influencing musical elements exists, once tendencies for an element of music to affect moods in a specific way are identified, they can be employed for their rhetorical value regardless of ideological divisions in audiences, because they allow songs to create a commonly-experienced mood that will condition message receptions in ways complementary to non-musical campaign rhetoric. This is due in part to the fact that emotions themselves are not tied essentially to certain states of affairs. While you might be angry at some particular state of affairs at one moment, the angry emotional state directed at that state of affairs is indistinguishable from an angry emotional state directed at another state of affairs. When feeling a certain emotion is part of the shared experience of hearing a specific song or sound quality, the sound or quality of sound can come to serve as a kind of keystone, anchoring the appropriate emotional responses.28 In cases where a song’s association with a specific emotional state is deemed appropriate, the song might be easily redirected to political ends, so that the campaigner can make sure that the audience feels angry about the things he or she wants them to feel angry about.
Music may not be a universal language cutting across all cultures, but it is certainly effective across political-ideological lines in creating similar moods in a public that shares a musical background. As a result, candidates wishing to deliver a message of inclusion and political activism will choose music that makes people in attendance feel comfortable and energetic, leading them to consider uptempo, popular songs as essential to rhetorical effect before looking at lyrical content. This can be taken to an extreme, where the musical features of a song, taken together with its genre and target audience,
28 Truax, Barry. Acoustic communication. 2nd ed. Westport: Ablex, 2001. 25. Print.
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lead the candidate to consider songs with lyrical messages that run counter to campaign rhetoric, an example being seen in Mitt Romney’s use of “Panic Switch” by Silversun
Pickups, a song that, while driving, energetic, determined, serious, and in a genre popular with young people – all things that the Romney campaigned desired to convey –, has lyrics that would cast Romney as anxious and about to suffer a panic attack.
The genre of the music employed also needs consideration, as there is no unified popular genre but rather many genres of music competing for popular appeal, each with possibly distinct values, narratives, experience, accent, imagery and so on.29 Country songs like Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise” will find themselves on the billboard top 40 at the same time as Fall Out Boy’s Emo Pop song “My Songs Know What You Did In The
Dark (Light Em Up)”; whereas “Cruise” explores a relationship in a rural environment, using mainstay imagery of the country genre like trucks and backroads, in a pan-southern accent, “My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up)” struggles with the difficulties of self-expression, using mainstay imagery of the emo genre like fire, blood, and fantastic beings, employing strained vocals that occasionally scream melodically.
These differences between popular music genres show the different conventional narratives and allude to the defining ways and life-struggles for different popular musical cultures. The symbols in these genres also have different connotations depending on the way they are situated in the genre. While drug-related imagery in the emo genre can serve to represent pleasant passions as addictions, the same imagery in a country song would generally be interpreted in a more negative light, with the passion likely to be
29 Patch, Justin. "Notes on Deconstructing the Populism: Music on the Campaign Trail, 2012 and 2016." American Music 34.3 (2016): 370. Muse. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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deemed harmful or false. As a result, the candidate must choose not from a list of pop songs with homogenous values, imagery, conventions and audiences – a pure mass culture expunged of smaller, dissimilar communities – but instead from a list with competing popular narratives and values in order to be effective to a variety of audiences.
It is important to note here that this analysis of popular music relies on a definition of popular music as music mass-produced for mass consumption, identifying sales instead of style or highbrow/lowbrow distinctions as the aspect essential to identifying popular music.
Just like musical elements divorced from genre classification, the genre of music played in a given location influences the behavior of the audience to which it is played, separate from associations created by its tempo, timbre, or the like; people are likely to perform the types of actions that are thought to be congruent with behavioral norms of the specific genre of music being consumed. People shopping at a wine store tend to buy higher priced bottles of wine when listening to classical music as opposed to Top 40 pop music.30 People listening to country music tend to be willing to pay a higher price for utilitarian products like toothbrushes or towels than people listening to classical music, and people listening to classical music are more likely to be willing to spend more for social identity products like hair gel and greeting cards compared to country music listeners, regardless of musical consumption preferences.31 Customers at restaurants are
30 Areni, Charles S., and David Kim. "The Influence of Background Music on Shopping Behavior: Classical Versus Top-Forty Music in a Wine Store." Advances in Consumer Research 20 (1993): 336- 40. Association for Consumer Research. Association for Consumer Research. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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more likely to purchase three or more alcoholic drinks when listening to jazz than they are when listening to classical music or no music at all.32 Identifying the behavioral regularities associated with the genre of the song allows the campaigner to control for the variability of individual opinion, to control for the different value sets brought to the political event, which, in turn, allows the candidate to set up the scheme according to which campaign rhetoric will be judged. If the candidate wants to make a speech about how he or she will help working class Americans, it helps to musically suggest that everyone present is a member of that working class, perhaps by playing country music or working-class-concerned rock like Bruce Springsteen or Tom Petty; if the candidate wants to cast him or herself as a candidate for the well-educated, thought-out voter, then it helps to musically suggest that everyone present is well-educated by playing classical or jazz music. Proper selection of genre to encourage the associated behaviors allows the candidate to create the audience’s political preferences by providing a musical cue that suggests each listener occupies the role that the candidate claims would cast its vote for the candidate; the candidate musically reinforces group identification of all listening to the advertisement or campaign event, and then models the political preferences of that group as a consequence of group membership.
There are, of course, difficulties in identifying congruent behavior as a pure product of popular musical genre consumption. At the same time that we imitate the stereotypes associated with musical genre consumption, the musical genres are already appealing to groups with these preexisting mindsets, these differentiations that prevent
32 Wilson, Stephanie. "The Effect of Music on Perceived Atmosphere and Purchase Intentions in a Restaurant." Psychology of Music 31.1 (2003): 93-112. Sage Journals. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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complete assimilation into broader culture. In modeling these differences, in an already shared musical genre, these differences become part of the acceptable variety within the sonically affirmed community. This interplay between genre as providing an approximate list of congruent behaviors and genre responding to preexisting cultural markers by incorporating them into the practice of that genre reveals popular music to be a contested homogenizing project, both responsive to and creative of group identities that are cohesive in taste and thus action, while differentiated from other tastes and actions.
This interplay allows musical tastes to “give individuals ‘the sense of one’s place’ within the structure of other tastes, cultural artifacts and persons.”33
Over time, as political party rhetoric solidifies around a handful of central rhetorical themes and voter identity commitments, entire genres of American popular music can come to identify the political party commitments of its consumers. This is not to say that consumption of the musical genre necessarily entails consumption of the political ideology with which that music is associated, as might be shown by the fact that
Paul Ryan – the Republican Speaker of the House with a distaste for socialism and a professed love for much of the capitalist philosophy embodied in the work of Ayn Rand – listed Rage Against the Machine as one of his favorite bands – a publicly anarcho- communist political band whose guitarist sarcastically asked if Ryan’s favorite song was
“the one where we call on the people to seize the means of production?”34 Instead, this is
33 Lahusen, Christian. The Rhetoric of Moral Protest: Public Campaigns, Celebrity Endorsement, and Political Mobilization. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996. 64. Print. 34 Chait, Jonathan. "7 Ways Paul Ryan Revealed His Love for Ayn Rand." Daily Intelligencer. New York Mag, 10 July 2014. Web. 26 Mar. 2017
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to say that like-minded political communities tend to agglomerate around certain musical genres and not others. Country music, for example, is a popular genre of music that is so primarily consumed by Republican leaning voters that Democratic leaning country music producers felt the need to form an organization – Music Row Democrats – to draw awareness to possible different political identities for consumers of the genre.35 In fact, because of the strong correlation between country music consumption and Republican party preference, looking at the number of country music stations in a specific state can give an indication as to which of the two major parties a state will support.36 Similarly, rap music is so identified with Democratic Party voting commitments in America that
Republican outliers to this genre’s commitment, like 50 Cent, Nicki Minaj and LL Cool
J, are noteworthy for the fact that they are political outliers of the sonic community, violating political-artistic norms from which the genre generally grows.
This solidified conflation of musical genre consumer with political identity serves two purposes in determining efficacious political deployment of music. The first implication of this tie between musical genre preference and political identity is that candidates can choose to use a song from a specific genre in order to signal continuity of party values and commitments regardless of changes to actual policy recommendations or political actions. Often, candidates will update their position on issues as new facts or necessities come to light, coming to be labeled “flip-floppers” as a result. George W.
35 The efficacy of this group, however, was minimal, as might be seen from the group’s inability to obtain representation at mainstream country music events; Morris, Edward. "CMA Denies Booth to Music Row Democrats." CMT News. Country Music Television, 19 Apr. 2004. Web. 4 May 2016.
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Bush claimed that he would not negotiate with North Korea about their military programs as a matter of principle; he negotiated anyway. John Kerry voted for the Patriot Act as necessary to American interests before decrying it as removing American liberties in the
2004 presidential race. In January of 2016, Donald Trump claimed that he would want to appoint Supreme Court Justices that would overturn the 2015 ruling that legalized same- sex marriage in the entire United States before claiming that the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage was settled and final. Many of these changes in course come from political pressures to appeal to different segments of the voting population as well as pressures to respond to international political necessities, but each of these changes carries the risk of showing the candidate to have abandoned their earlier values.
Music provides a subtle mechanism through which the commitments that led the candidate to make a decision in the first place can be reaffirmed and repurposed toward the new concrete policy recommendation. The permanence of the genre and the seemingly unchanging character of the song deployed serve to underscore the permanence of the character of the campaigner as well as the permanence of the ideals and the voter identities to which he is committed, even though those professed ideals change substantially in their implications for how they should be instantiated.
The second implication of this tie between musical genre consumption and political preference is that candidates, as advertisers of a political brand, can target likely political sympathizers or voters that need to be swayed at election time. In a time when media streaming sites like Pandora or Spotify enjoy an enormous amount of traffic, politicians are more able than ever to tailor political message to likely consumers of music and message. Since 2010, Pandora has targeted its users with political
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advertisements toward which listeners are more likely to be sympathetic based on musical taste, allowing an even more focused targeting of advertisement audience than aiming for just mothers in Nebraska or men 35-50 in urban centers in Georgia; while that information is given or likely inferred from information required to register account, zip code and date of birth, the musical preferences and community identities revealed by the stations the user creates allows candidates to examine whether the user’s listening skews more toward Republican or Democratic commitments.37 Heavy consumption of
Christian rock allows a candidate to tailor advertisements on those channels with a rhetorical appeal to common Christian values while also revealing that Republican advertisements will likely be more effective to these media consumers. This kind of targeted advertising allows candidates to reinforce political identities based on musical tastes, to reinforce the message that the political affiliation advertised is congruent with the behavior of listening to the specific genre of music, thus coordinating groups centered around shared musical habits into powerful political blocs.
There are two final group identities created by popular songs that can be targeted by presidential hopefuls: ethnicity and age. As previously mentioned, types of popular music grow out of multiple, distinct cultures, and bear the marks of their origins. In the case of hip-hop or rap music, the fact that it grows largely out of the shared experiences of black communities in America helps to identify this genre of music as a locus of black
American group identity. Similarly, music with Latin American rhythms and Spanish
37 Kang, Jaewon. "How Pandora Will Make Millions on Election 2016 With Targeted Ads: Internet Streaming Service Pandora is Expecting Political Advertising Revenue to More Than Double in 2016, Particularly as Campaigns Realize the Attractiveness of Pandora to Multicultural Voters." TheStreet. TheStreet, 08 June 2016. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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lyrics helps create a Hispanic musical identity, though both types of music are consumed by listeners with other ethnic backgrounds. The fact that the production of this music occurs in an ethnically distinct context, however, allows candidates to appeal to or remediate their image with certain ethnic minorities in the United States by specifically targeting these minorities with specific musics in their events and advertisements. An example of this strategy can be seen in the 2012 campaign, where Mitt Romney struggled to capture any black support – in one case even giving a speech to the NAACP where he told the predominantly black audience to vote for Obama if they wanted “free stuff,” seemingly racializing the topic of welfare.38 To attempt to show that his rhetoric was not anti-black, Romney included K’naan’s song “Wavin’ Flag” as part of his campaign rhetoric to hint at commitment to America’s black population, though he later removed the song from his campaign playlist at the artist’s request.
We owe the age-based communities that form around music to the fact that people generally form stronger emotional connections with the music they consumed as adolescents beginning around age 10 and young adults up to around 24, periods when identities are thoroughly changing, than with music that they consumed at different points in time.39 This is in part because adolescents become aware during this time of the social consequences with their peers for expressing different musical preferences, making it
38 Hartmann, Margaret. "Romney Accused of Racism After Saying NAACP Wants 'Free Stuff'" Daily Intelligencer. New York Mag, 12 July 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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extremely important to establish a musical identity consistent with that of peers.40
Popular music that dates from a time period when a person was an adolescent is, thus, more likely to garner an enthusiastic, positive reception than music from other time periods, as that music appeals to a musical identity that was cultivated in adolescence and is unlikely to change without significant social pressure.41
Unsurprisingly then, the popular music used in presidential elections is rarely drawn from the most recent radio hits, with candidates instead preferring to use music that has stood the test of time for a few reasons. The first reason is to guarantee the enduring relevance and popularity of the song, so that the campaign is not perceived as a fad in the same way that the latest hit might be. The second, and more interesting reason has to do with the possibility of targeting specific voters by age range, as different age ranges make up different percentages of the total electorate at different times. For example, Baby Boomers made up 40.8% of the total electorate in Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.42 Even assuming that this age range voted less often than other, older generational age ranges in the electorate, this generation accounted for an enormous amount of the total votes cast in this election. In order to appeal to this age range, Bill
Clinton campaigned with the song “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” by
Fleetwood Mac, their highest charting single from the 1977 Grammy award winner for album of the year Rumors, a time when Baby Boomer ages ranged from 13-31 and would
40 North, Adrian C., and David J. Hargreaves. "Music and Adolescent Identity." Music Education Research 1.1 (1999): 75-92. Taylor and Francis Online. Web. 26 Mar. 2017. 41 Burns, Gary. "Popular Music, Television, and Generational Identity." The Journal of Popular Culture 30.3 (1996): 129-41. EBSCOhost. Web. 26 Mar. 2017. 42 United States. The Bureau of the Census. Census and You: Monthly News from the U.S. Bureau of the Census. Ed. Neil Tillman and Jackson Morton. By Molly Abramowitz, Robert Bernstein, Geraldine Blackburn, Robert Clair, John McCall, and Mary G. Thomas. 9th ed. Vol. 27. Washington, D.C.: The United States Bureau of the Census, 1992. 6. Print.
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represent the largest consumer base of this music. In doing this, Bill Clinton turned a strategic generationally-potent musical identity into a keynote sound of his campaign, inviting listeners to make sense of his platform as appealing to the interests of this age group.
One final aspect remains in determining song meaning and the rhetorical value of popular songs in the context of presidential elections; for this, we need some account of
American culture, some account of the specific form that our presumably shared value assertions should take. It is not exactly clear what I mean when I say I support “equal opportunity,” because it is not exactly clear where the equality must be before the race for unequal statuses begins. Is it morally permissible, according to the American valuing of equal opportunity, for the race for unequal statuses to begin in childhood, or should all
Americans have similar levels of education and achievements during childhood? What sorts of protected classes – race, gender, sexuality, etc. – must exist in order for us to have truly equal opportunity? Though popular music can appeal to universal values like equal opportunity, specific genres and songs model these values with particular realizations. Moreover, these realizations help to resolve perceived and real conflicts between some of the main features of the American consciousness: belief in the
“American Dream,” patriotism, equality, opportunity, and belief in America’s moral superiority.43 Each reproduction of an American value is an implicit claim on the meaning of that American value.
43 Scheurer, Timothy E. "Introduction." Born in the U.S.A.: the Myth of America in Popular Music from Colonial Times to the Present. Jackson: U Press of Mississippi, 1991. 3-15. Print.
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To see an example of this, look at the contrast in ideas of what American freedom necessitates between Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” and Rage Against the
Machine’s “Freedom.” In “God Bless the U.S.A,” Greenwood asserts that he would be thankful just to be living in America even if he lost all of the material goods that he had previously enjoyed because America is a land of freedom that has been hard won through the blood of patriots. His conception of freedom is that it is already present in America’s history of military action, and it is separate from economic wellbeing, as we can see in the lyrics below. Freedom is, by definition, the thing that is present in America.
If tomorrow all the things were gone I'd worked for all my life And I had to start again With just my children and my wife
I'd thank my lucky stars To be living here today Cause the flag still stands for freedom And they can't take that away
[Chorus] - And I'm proud to be an American Where at least I know I'm free And I won't forget the men who died Who gave that right to me And I gladly stand up Next to you and defend her still today Cause there ain't no doubt I love this land God bless the USA
From the lakes of Minnesota To the hills of Tennessee Across the plains of Texas From sea to shining sea
From Detroit down to Houston, And New York to L.A Well there's pride in every American heart And its time we stand and say
[Chorus]- x244
44 Greenwood, Lee. "God Bless the U.S.A." YouTube. YouTube, 03 July 2011. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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“Freedom,” by contrast, talks about the forced assimilation and purging of Native
Americans as a part of America’s history, criticizing America’s military and police actions as not preserving freedom for all Americans, but violently enforcing identity, specifically white identity, and annihilating diversity of culture instead. Freedom, Rage
Against the Machine claims, lies in choice of culture without conformity being violently enforced; to this end, the band encourages collective action against the current status quo.
Solo...I'm a soloist, on a solo list All live, never on a floppy disk Inka, inka, bottle of ink Paintings of rebellion, drawn up by the thoughts I think!
Yeah! C'mon!
The militant poet in once again Check it It's set up like a deck of cards They're sending us to early graves for all the diamonds They'll use a pair of clubs to beat the spades With poetry I paint the pictures that hit More like the murals that fit Don't turn away, get in front of it Brother, did you forget your name? Did you lose it on the wall playing Tic-Tac-Toe? Yo, check the diagonal, three brothers gone C'mon, doesn't that make it three in a row?
Anger is a gift
C'mon! Ugh! Check that! Uggh! C'mon! Yeah! Uggh!
Brother, did you forget your name? Did you lose it on the wall playing Tic-Tac-Toe? Yo, check the diagonal, three million gone C'mon, cause you know they're counting backwards to zero Environment, the environment exceeding On the level of our unconsciousness For example, what does the billboard say? "Come and play, come and play! Forget about the movement!"
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Your anger is a gift
Freedom Yeah Freedom Yeah right45
Appeals to American values, then, can take very different forms explicitly in songs, but the use of a homogenous value term like freedom can at other times serve to hide differences of opinion about what exactly freedom should entail. In order to get at what these values mean in the context of the song where they appear, then, it will be necessary to understand how the value term is situated in the lyrics of the song, the politics of the songwriter, the performer, and the audiences that appreciated the song – divided by age, ethnicity, genre preference as well as the emotional tone surrounding the song as a result of its non-lyrical elements. By the time that these songs are introduced into presidential campaigns, we must also look at how the song can be consistently situated within the values of the campaigner. All of these factors taken together make understanding the meaning and rhetorical value of campaign songs a difficult task, and – as there are so many factors to determining meaning – this allows for changes in the meaning of a song used in different political contexts. In the next chapter, I will examine three cases where a song’s meaning has been changed by its usage in different political contexts.
45 Rage Against The Machine. "Freedom." YouTube. YouTube, 26 Mar. 2011. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
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Chapter 3: Reconstitution of Song Meaning in the Context of Presidential Campaigns
This chapter proceeds from the understanding that the importance of unaltered popular songs in presidential elections stems in large part from the fact that context changes interpretation of a song. I will look at three specific examples where the political meaning of a popular song changes according to the context of a specific presidential campaign. These songs either originally contained explicit political messages that were suppressed when juxtaposed with the political rhetoric of the campaign, or they have had alternate spins put on their political message by their being used in multiple, ideologically distinct campaigns. Looking at both the motivations for campaigns using the particular song, the values and rhetoric of the campaign into which the song is fitted, and the contexts in which these songs arose, my goal is to understand the specific ways these songs were spun to look consistent with the political narrative of the campaigner. In so doing, I hope to show the means by which these types of politically-contested songs become politically polysemous, representing shared American commitments between hostile ideologies that do not actually exist. This examination should not be taken as a judgment against the campaigners that repurposed these songs, nor should it be taken as a judgment against the population swayed by the song in its new context; rather, it is an acknowledgement of the fact that song meanings can change based on context and an attempt to understand the reasons for such changes.
I. “Born in the U.S.A.” in the Campaigns of Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole
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Bruce Springsteen released “Born in the U.S.A.” on the album of the same name in June of 1984. The album received an overwhelmingly positive reception, finishing at number 28 on Billboard year-end album rankings in 1984 and at number one the following year.46 Its initial success translated into a lasting popularity, and the album is currently one of only thirty-two to sell more than thirty million copies. The title track itself peaked at number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 in January of 1985.47 Shortly after its release, Reagan referenced Springsteen’s song – though not explicitly by name, as a
Reagan advisor had already asked to use the song as a part of the campaign and been denied – as being congruent with his hopeful, pro-America campaign platform when he said that “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own
Bruce Springsteen.”48 It would later be used in full in the campaigns of both Bob Dole in
1996 and Pat Buchanan in 2000, though I will not deal with Pat Buchanan’s usage of the music as he withdrew before the Republican primary elections.
46 "Billboard 200 Albums - Year-End 1985." Billboard. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
Before looking at the campaigns using this song, it is important to understand what this song’s message was, as well as the way it was communicated. The lyrics are included for reference below.
Born down in a dead man's town The first kick I took was when I hit the ground End up like a dog that's been beat too much Till you spend half your life just covering up
[Chorus] – Born in the U.S.A., I was born in the U.S.A. I was born in the U.S.A., born in the U.S.A.
Got in a little hometown jam So they put a rifle in my hand Sent me off to a foreign land To go and kill the yellow man
[Chorus]
Come back home to the refinery Hiring man said "son if it was up to me" Went down to see my V.A. man He said "son, don't you understand"
I had a brother at Khe Sahn Fighting off the Viet Cong They're still there, he's all gone
He had a woman he loved in Saigon I got a picture of him in her arms now
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary Out by the gas fires of the refinery I'm ten years burning down the road Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go
[Chorus – slightly altered] – x249
49 Springsteen, Bruce. "Born in the USA." YouTube. YouTube, 04 July 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
The narrator of the song tells a story of being born poor in an American town with no opportunities. This young man was pressured into the military after getting into trouble with the law, falling victim to a now illegal practice of making young offenders choose between military service or jail time.50 While in Vietnam, the narrator loses a friend fighting for a cause that was uncompleted, and he comes back to an America that won’t employ him; the final verse shows the narrator either in jail or feeling likely to go to jail as a result of his lack of opportunity. This worry about prison was not uncommon for
Vietnam veterans, with 24% of all prisoners being veterans in 1978 and veterans being
37% more likely to serve jail time than civilians from 1978-1985.51 Throughout, the story is punctuated by the seemingly positive chorus where he shouts “I was born in the
U.S.A.”
The possibility for misconstruing the song as a celebration of America comes from the conflict between the musical rhetoric and the lyrical content, resulting in a sarcastic chorus that can easily be misconstrued as sincere. While the lyrics of the verses tell a story that no rational person would wish on him- or herself, the song is played in a major key at around 120 beats per minute with a driving backbeat. These factors,
50 This practice was requested ended by the army in 1972, though it was not uncommon for the first three years of the war; "Army Asks End of "Enlist or Jail"." The Pittsburgh Press. Google News, n.d. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
combined with the rough, shouted, southern-accented voice of the singer help to make the song sound like an inspiring, patriotic anthem when put with the chorus. In fact, the song was so energetic and positive in the musical elements that Springsteen later began playing the song with an acoustic guitar “so it wouldn’t sound so rousing anymore” in an attempt to better match musical elements to song message and, thus, remove possibilities for confusion.52
The genre itself, heartland rock, draws from country roots that were already associated with more conservative political alignments since the music industry of the
1950’s designated country music as music for rural Americans, and it typically celebrates the lives of working class Americans. The instrumentation for this song was peculiar when set against other heartland rock artists, as it prominently featured synthesizers popular in other commercially-successful 80’s genres. This successful navigation between conflicting genre stereotypes made the song appealing to general popular music consumers, working class audiences, and rural audiences. Uniting such an enormous number of people with diverse listening habits, the song was immediately a prime candidate for political spin based on its genre features.
As for Springsteen’s politics, he often depicted the hard life of working class people, and responded to Reagan referencing his name by asking what Reagan’s favorite
52 Brennan, Allison. "Campaigns Rock at Their Own Risk." CNN. Cable News Network, 16 Aug. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
album of his was. He said that he did not think it was Nebraska before he launched into a rendition of Johnny 99 from that album, which is a story about a man who loses his job, turns to crime to protect his economic wellbeing, and, when caught, pleads with the judge that he be sentenced to death because his life was not worth anything; Springsteen took this song as opposed to the sort of “supply-side” economic policies that Reagan championed, which took care of people other than working class Americans first. The
Mondale campaign, Reagan’s opponent in 1984, took the opportunity to claim that
Springsteen’s refusal to support Reagan amounted to his support for Mondale, which
Springsteen denied in turn; he would refuse to publicly promote a presidential candidate until 2004 when he endorsed John Kerry for president. Though Springsteen commonly sang about issues important to working class Americans, he resisted telling his fans how these issues should be addressed on the national political scene.53
The way that this song was reinterpreted for Springsteen fans in the political arena in Reagan’s 1984 campaign as well as Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign relied on suppressing the explicitly negative story the verses tell about the problems of America by emphasizing the rousing, seemingly-patriotic chorus. Once the song has been established as patriotic, it is up to the campaigner to cast their specific policies as being in line with common American values, which, as mentioned in the previous chapter, can be cast as
53 Dolan, Marc. "How Ronald Reagan Changed Bruce Springsteen’s Politics." Politico Magazine. Politico, 4 June 2014. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
achieved in mutually contradictory ways. In 1984, this song about the social ills faced by a man coming back from Vietnam was spun as patriotic, with patriotism entailing a strong American military for defense of the country against nations espousing Marxist and Leninist ideologies. With a campaign slogan of “It’s Morning Again in America,” referring to America’s improved economic situation under Reagan’s leadership, spinning the song also meant emphasizing the economically well-off more than Americans struggling for employment, emphasizing the exact opposite situation from the narrator of the “Born in the U.S.A.”54 In 1996, with Bob Dole’s slogan “A Better Man for a Better
America,” patriotism meant commitment to the common American value of honesty realized by voting Dole instead of “Slick Willie” Clinton, completely tangential to the critique of American values that allowed the working class to struggle in “Born in the
U.S.A.”55 From this, we can take it that a song can become politically polysemous by casting lyrics as patriotic, without giving specific attention to any concrete musical examples in the song as to what should inspire that patriotism.
II. “Only in America” in the Campaigns of George W. Bush and Barack Obama
Coming out in 2001 shortly after the September 11th attacks, “Only in America” was a song that received enormous airplay on country stations together with similarly
54 Roberts, Robert North, Scott John Hammond, and Valerie A. Sulfaro. "Campaign of 1984." Presidential Campaigns, Slogans, Issues, and Platforms. Vol. 3. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Greenwood, 2012. 1068-072. Print. 55 Roberts, Robert North, Scott John Hammond, and Valerie A. Sulfaro. "Campaign of 1996." Presidential Campaigns, Slogans, Issues, and Platforms. Vol. 3. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Greenwood, 2012. 1101. Print. 48
patriotic songs composed in response to the attacks, such as Alan Jackson’s “Where Were
You (When the World Stopped Turning),” Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and
Blue (The Angry American,)” and The Charlie Daniels Band’s “This Ain’t No Rag, It’s a
Flag.”56 Listeners to these songs on country radio would be confronted with constant visions of American identity and responsibility, with Keith’s song presenting the
American military response as being just and noble, Jackson’s “Where Were You” giving a picture of this national tragedy as a defining moment that caused grief, fear, a return to
God and Christian values, and “This Ain’t No Rag, It’s a Flag” addressing terrorists directly and letting them know that retribution is coming from the “the land where the good guys live,” ending with a child reciting the pledge of allegiance. Unlike these others, “Only in America” neither calls Americans to a virtuous war nor emphasizes an
American Christian response to the attacks, in part because it was written and debuted before the September 11th attacks and was meant simply to extoll the virtue of opportunity in American life in general, with no defining event in mind for the composition. While it had charted on the country charts beginning in June of that year, it rose to the top position on the U.S. Hot Country Songs a little over a month after the attacks, even crossing over and charting at number 33 on the U.S. Hot 100 chart as the
56 "Alan Jackson." Billboard Chart History. Web. 26 March 2017.
emotional climate of the nation veered toward unwavering patriotism represented by a commitment to American security.57 Its enormous popularity and non-specific patriotic theme helped make it a perfect candidate for use as a presidential campaigning song, while the political climate of the genre out of which it came helped to color interpretations of the song toward a rhetoric of conservatism.
Before we look at how this song was used in the Bush and Obama campaigns, it will prove helpful to get some general idea of the musical and textual elements of the song to see the nuance of emotion communicated by the song. The song is played in a moderately fast tempo, coming in at around 138 beats per minute. It is set in a major key played by an ensemble of electric guitars, piano, southern-accent inflected vocals, and drum set, with the addition of steel guitar and banjo heading into the key change before the last iteration of the chorus, presumably to add a bit more “authentic” country feel by including traditionally country and bluegrass instrumentation in the country-rock song.
The register is neither high nor low until the entrance of the steel guitar for the last chorus, which is in a high register. The key change that happens at this time is up a half step and happens with no preparation, adding extra emphasis to this last statement. The text of the song is as follows:
Sun comin’ up over New York City School bus driver in a traffic jam
57 "Music: Top 100 Songs | Billboard Hot 100 Chart." Billboard. Web. 05 May 2016.
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Starin’ at the faces in her rearview mirror Lookin’ at the promise of the promised land
One kid dreams of fame and fortune One kid helps pay the rent One could end up goin’ to prison One just might be president
Only in America dreamin’ in red, white, and blue Only in America where we dream as big as we want to We all get a chance. Everybody gets to dance. Only in America
Sun goin’ down on an LA freeway Newlyweds in the back of a limousine A welder’s son and a banker’s daughter All they want is everything
She came out here to be an actress He was the singer in a band They just might go back to Oklahoma And talk about the stars they could have been
Only in America. Dreamin’ in red, white, and blue. Only in America Only in America Where we dream in red, white, and blue Only in America Where we dream as big as we want to We all get a chance Everybody gets to dance Only in America
Only in America Where we dream as big as we want to58 In this song, the lyrics share a vision of America as a land of opportunity, if peculiarly so. America is presented as a place where there is equality in the opportunities
58 Brooks, Kix, Ronnie Dunn, Ronnie Rogers, and Don Cook. "Only In America." YouTube. YouTube, 02 Oct. 2009. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
of children who are able to pleasantly dream about fame and fortune and children who work to help their parents pay the rent. Even with drastic differences in quality of life and time commitments for these children, we celebrate the theoretical truth that both could have the same economic or social successes later in life, and both could fall so far as to end up in jail. The theme of endless opportunity and hope is driven home with the chorus line of “we dream as big as we want to,” where the implication is that an
American citizen enjoys unlimited possibilities. It conveys a sense that everyone has an equality of possibilities available to them as an American, and it’s great that they have those possibilities in spite of inequalities in their means to obtain those opportunities, a type of celebration that might mirror the equality portrayed in the opening scenes of the
1971 version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where children compare how many
Wonka Bars they have bought in an attempt to find the golden ticket, and though Charlie had bought relatively few compared to his peers due to his family’s financial hardship, he still ends up finding the ticket in his second Wonka Bar purchase.
The political affiliations present for this song’s background are a bit complicated.
Performed by Ronnie Dunn and Kix Brooks, the song was written in collaboration between Don Cook, Kix Brooks, and Ronnie Rogers. Whereas Brooks & Dunn had played at George W. Bush’s inauguration early in 2001, before “Only in America” made its debut, and would go on to headline the 2004 Republican National Convention, actively promoting Republican candidates with their music, Don Cook would go forth to
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be a co-founder of the Music Row Democrats. Additionally obfuscating any political context for reading values from this song and aligning them with either Republican or
Democrat values is the fact that Ronnie Dunn voted for George W. Bush when he was running against Kerry in 2004 and for Barack Obama when he was running against
McCain in 2008.59 When asked about the political values expressed in the song, Ronnie
Dunn responded, "The song was never intended to be partisan, and it isn't.”60 It was, however, used to direct emotional response in different and party- or candidate-specific ways in the campaigns of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
George W. Bush used “Only in America” as a part of his 2004 campaign together with the slogan “A Safer World and a More Hopeful America.” Campaign issues centered on winning the war on terror, visions for protecting the American economy, and
American security against terrorists, presenting a picture of a nation that was under attack and worth protecting.61 By this point in Bush’s tenure as president, he had made the controversial decision to invade Iraq, he had signed the Patriot act into law, and he was advocating for tax cuts to encourage private sector job creation as well as to open international trade as a means of addressing the American debt. The songwriters’
59 Edsall, Thomas B. "The Cost of Living Blues." Campaign Stops. The New York Times, 2 Sept. 2012. Web 26 March 2017.
political values were not important for the interpretation of the song in this situation, because their differing political preferences were not publicly announced. The facts that mattered in this instance were that the tempo and tonality of the piece were supposed to evoke a positive feeling in listeners, that the lyrical message painted a positive picture of
America that painted every American as enjoying fair opportunities for success, that the song appealed to working class and rural Americans – a key demographic for
Republicans in 2000 and still today – by virtue of its genre, and that the candidate publicly espoused a notion of America as constantly virtuous, as shown in his 2004 State of the Union speech where he claimed that “America has always been willing to do what it takes for what is right.”62 When “Only in America” was played against this rhetorical context, it used the lyrical message of the song to associate the opportunities Americans enjoy with the policies of the candidate; it served as an assurance that the candidate is a continuation of and believes in the positively connoted America pictured in the song.
Barack Obama, by contrast, used the song to close his acceptance speech for the
Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Campaigning with the slogan “Change we can believe in,” Obama’s central campaign issues at this point were providing healthcare to more Americans, closing tax loopholes for the wealthy, withdrawing the United States from the conflict in Iraq, and responding to economic issues surrounding the 2007
62 Bush, George W. "Third Presidential State of the Union Address." Online Speech Bank. Americanrhetoric.com. Web. 26 March 2017.
housing bubble collapse.63 His use of the song was not tied to a vision of America where fairness was already extant; his speeches focused on the unfairness of life in America, with many of his proposals rhetorically supported by an appeal to making America fairer to less economically advantaged Americans. Examples of this last included his supporting the idea that we should raise the capital gains tax, envisioning a healthcare system where every American can afford health insurance and insurance companies cannot discriminate against the already sick, and advocating greater public support for public education. He did, however, want to appeal to moderate Republicans and independents in order to help keep his image moderate, to counteract rhetoric from the opposing party that painted him as a socialist. With this rhetorical backdrop in mind, we should also note that the president’s image was important in this race, as he was the first black man to be nominated for president by a major American political party. To the people attending this speech, the song connected a positive portrayal of American opportunity with the idea that Obama's "change" would be necessary to bring it about and the idea that a black man running as a major party’s candidate could serve as an example of the exceptional opportunities provided by American ideals. Increased opportunity is both the ideal the campaign aims for, and the backdrop against which the campaign became congruent with the message of this song.
63 Prysby, Charles, and Carmine Scavo. "Campaign Issues and Candidate Positions." Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. University of Michigan. Web. 26 March 2017. 55
III. This Land Is Your Land in the Campaign of George H.W. Bush
Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land is Your Land” in 1940 as a response to the popularity of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”64 Berlin’s “God Bless America” exhorted God to look favorably upon America in its natural beauty and virtue and called for citizens to “swear allegiance to a land that’s free.” Taking its tune from “When The
World’s On Fire” as recorded by The Carter Family, Guthrie’s original draft of “This
Land is Your Land” ended every verse with “God blessed America for me” instead of
“This land was made for you and me,” and found the singer affirming that God blessed
America in natural features, but wondering whether God had blessed America when
Americans were going hungry with their movements and actions restricted by the claims of private property. Instead of an uncritical praise of America, Guthrie’s original version of “This Land is Your Land” – the version performed by his son Arlo Guthrie, Pete
Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, and other artists today and in the 80’s when it was used as the official campaign song of George H.W. Bush – presents a picture of America as troubled because it has not yet accepted socialist political stances that will fulfill the promises of
America as a land of opportunity and freedom. This version, however, was not and is today not the most played version, with most artists choosing to omit the two more radical verses, following the tradition of folksong in which lyrics can change depending
64 Spitzer, Nick. "The Story Of Woody Guthrie's 'This Land Is Your Land'" NPR. NPR, 15 Feb. 2012. Web. 26 Mar. 2017.
on the tastes of the singer at different points in time. The lyrics to the song as it was originally written are as follows:
This land is your land. This land is my land From California to the New York island; From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and Me.
As I was walking that ribbon of highway, I saw above me that endless skyway: I saw below me that golden valley: This land was made for you and me.
I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts; And all around me a voice was sounding: This land was made for you and me.
When the sun came shining, and I was strolling, And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling, As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting: This land was made for you and me.
As I went walking I saw a sign there And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." But on the other side it didn't say nothing, That side was made for you and me.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, By the relief office I seen my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking Is this land made for you and me?
Nobody living can ever stop me, As I go walking that freedom highway; Nobody living can ever make me turn back This land was made for you and me.65
In the song's popularizing 1951 Folkways release, however, the verses about private property and hunger were removed in order to create a song as uncritically
65 Guthrie, Woody. ""This Land Is Your Land"" Woody Guthrie. Woodyguthrie.org. Web. 26 March 2017.
patriotic as Guthrie perceived “God Bless America” to be.66 This cut was likely a result of the anti-communist climate in America heading into the 50’s, as defined ideologically by the McCarthy era. The cut allowed for the song to be received and popularized by an
American listening public without the burden of Guthrie’s political agenda. The original lyrics were not completely lost, because performers inspired by Woody Guthrie’s personal politics – Guthrie was engaged in the politics of the American Communist Party as he saw them fighting for working men and women – continued to perform the original version. One notable example of this can be found in the 1984 documentary Woody
Guthrie: Hard Travelin’, which included a rendition of the song that included all verses sung by a group of well-known folk artists including Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. The fact that the song was sung in both complete and incomplete versions depending on the performer resulted in a song that was known to have different political import depending on the public to which it was played.
The instrumentation of the song is just an acoustic guitar, picked and strummed, and Guthrie’s accented, natural voice. There is a major mode melody, a moderate tempo of around 102 beats per minute, though this tempo varied over the course of the song, and a moderate dynamic level. The song’s timbre and texture is constant and decidedly folk- style throughout. The song is strophic, and the register is neither high nor low. These
66 Spitzer, Nick. "The Story Of Woody Guthrie's 'This Land Is Your Land'" NPR. NPR, 15 Feb. 2012. Web. 26 March 2017.
factors, taken together, create a happy listening experience for the audience, and the folk style of the song, – commonly associated with simplicity and rural culture – as well as its direct mode of address in the lyrics, leads listeners to hear an ethos of earnestness or authenticity. The song can then be used as a symbol of the straight-talking nature of the politician, a means to encourage the audience to value simplicity in solutions the candidate offered as opposed to artful, sophisticated propositions, and a symbol of the unchanging goodness of America, since the song was fairly old at this point.
By the time George H. W. Bush used Woody Guthrie’s classic song, it had become a classic whose politically charged verses were able to be glossed over in favor of a patriotic reading. With a campaign slogan of “Kinder, Gentler Nation,” Bush’s campaign focused on cultural issues appealing to and trying to create a sense of shared
American commitments. Bush came out in support of saying the Pledge of Allegiance and having prayer in schools, he opposed abortion, he presented himself as tougher on crime than his opponent Michael Dukakis, – especially in regards to the death penalty – and he promised that there would be no new taxes. Bush also supported volunteer efforts to address poverty in America instead of government administrated welfare, and he favored private enterprise and limited government involvement as a result of his desire to keep taxes low. His use of “This Land is Your Land” served to represent the campaign as expressing the values shared by America, as gentle through the fact that the music was neither urgent and incisive nor sad in any way, and as representing the continuation of
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Woody Guthrie’s legacy of standing up for the common man. Through ignoring
Guthrie’s political activities and the verses of the song that contradict his political stances, George H. W. Bush was able to tap into the happy, communitarian emotions engendered by the song and repoliticized them in favor of a drastically different view of
America’s promise, leaving most none-the-wiser while creating an irony recognizable only to those who knew the song’s origin.
IV. Conclusion
In the above examples three strategies were used to spin a popular song toward a different political orientation: suppression of some lyrics in favor of other, less obviously political lyrics in the case of “Born in the U.S.A.,” relocation of common American values in a different campaign context in the case of “Only in America,” and failing to play the entirety of a song in “This Land is Your Land.” In all cases, the candidate’s goal was to impose a political filter on the interpretation of a song, and this was accomplished by using a song that was or was made to seem generally patriotic – i.e. lacking concrete exemplification of the national values to which the candidate appealed – so that the candidate’s campaign goals could be seen as stemming from those unassailable values.
The natural or engineered lack of specificity in the songs allowed candidates to effectively direct the emotions and identities of the audience while appealing to the audience’s pre-existing musical tastes, creating a natural flow from music consumption to political identity. Retained lyrical elements that played a central role in the rhetoric of 60
the candidate tended to have non-political support of common American values or simple pride in American citizenship, which could be cast as fulfilled in the campaign or character of the specific candidate. The songs themselves maintained the genre peculiarities of musical style that allowed them to capture the attention of specific taste- communities and encourage modes of behavior complementary to the rhetoric of the campaigner. Insofar as the candidate was successful in spinning the song, the song takes on political signification stemming from the common values expressed in the song that the candidate claims to realize. This political usage of popular song, then, can create songs that motivate people toward opposite political ends, symbolizing shared commitments where none exist.
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