Taylor Swift's Endorsement and the Role of Music in Politics
20:18 Share

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Whether you love true crime or comedy, celebrity interviews or news, you call the shots on what's in your podcast queue. And guess what? Now you can call them on your auto insurance too with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive. It works just the way it sounds. You tell Progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. Get your quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law.

I'm Brooke Gladstone, and this is On the Media's Midweek Podcast. Last Tuesday, as audience members and press were still milling around the presidential debate stage in Philadelphia after the spotlights dimmed, the real bombshell of the night dropped.

Taylor Swift, with 283 million followers on her Instagram account within the last five minutes, has just publicly come out in favor of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, saying that she will be voting for them. Tim Walz at a rally in Superior, Wisconsin on Saturday. Here's my life hack for all of you, all the guys out there, whatever, here's my life hack.

Surround yourself with smart women and listen to them and you'll do just fine. That includes my fellow cat owner, Taylor Swift, too, by the way. And this week, pop star Billie Eilish and her brother Phineas took to Instagram. We are voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz because they are fighting to protect our reproductive freedom, our planet, and our democracy. We can't let extremists control our lives, our freedoms, and our future.

Swift and Eilish stand amid a sea of pop stars, including, among others, Beyoncé, Charli XCX, and Cardi B, who have cheered on the Harris campaign, which has felt more like a weeks-long rave than the usual pre-election slog. The cool AF DJ Cassidy provided the soundtrack for the Democratic convention, while the RNC featured a slew of performances by Kid Rock and bands like Six Wire.

Politics and music, this year especially, seem inextricable. There has been political campaign music as long as there have been political campaigns. Mark Clegg is a professor of musicology at the School of Music, Theater, and Dance at the University of Michigan. We're talking about the days of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson. And it was about bringing emotion and passion into public life.

It was actually quite common to write topical lyrics about current events. Could be a military hero or a battle or a particular celebrity. Music and politics have been synonymous in American life from the very, very beginning.

You said that when the popular vote started in the 20s, in the 1820s, with Andrew Jackson, he had a tune called The Hunters of Kentucky. Andrew Jackson was a military hero, and he was from the West. And the West at that time was Kentucky. That song was celebrating his military heroism.

And so those themes of patriotism, military sacrifice have always been a single standard of campaign playlists. In the 19th century, before the invention of recording, if you wanted music, you had to sing it or perform it or play it yourself. And so you say a lot of political songs circulated as text?

What's common in the 19th century was something called the broadside ballad. So broadside being another name for like a newspaper ballad. And so these were sets of words. They look like poems on the page.

but they're actually lyrics. They're meant to be sung to specific melodies. So if you thought of it today, like if everybody knows the tune to Happy Birthday or Take Me Out to the Ballgame, if you wanted to comment on daily happenings today, if you wrote lyrics to those tunes and just say, sing these words to the tune of Happy Birthday, everybody would know how to do it, right? And so before the invention of

political songs circulate in sets of words, right, that are sung to well-known popular melodies. Once we get recording, then we can start to have political playlists that really focus on specific artists, specific songs, and performed in a certain way. You're referring to something that I would call the Alan Sherman or the Weird Al Yankovic approach.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. But you say the national anthem was actually new lyrics applied to a known tune? Yeah, a lot of people think that Francis Scott Key wrote a poem that somebody else set to music, but that's false. He actually wrote a set of words to be sung to a melody that was used for Fourth of July songs and military heroism and political campaigns. In fact, some of those

famous political campaign songs, like for John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, conveniently called Adams and Liberty or Jefferson and Liberty, were actually sung to the tune we know today as the Star-Spangled Banner. So Key was not the first one to use that melody by any means. In fact, like over 130 songs had been written in American history using that exact same tune. Well, the obvious one that most of us would know is God Save the Queen became...

something we all sang in our classrooms as my country tis of thee. Yeah, my country tis of thee or America. So that's a great example. So exactly the same melody with different words. One celebrates the king of England or the queen of England and the other one celebrates America. Say God, gracious king. Say God, all his style. He will cry out in silence.

So the invention of radio and recording changed things a lot. You say that songs at that point became tied to the celebrity who sang them, which actually presents a direct line to where we are today. Yeah, so in the 19th century, you know, if you're going to have music, you have to make it yourself. So community singing was really common. You have Edison inventing recording in 1877, and then you have in the 1920s,

the growth of radio, which you're able to not only have a specific recording of a famous artist, but then you're able to take their one performance on record and broadcast that to the entire nation. So that's really a game changer in the world of political music. So rather than having these sets of texts that travel around, you have specific recordings.

And so something like "I'm Just Wild About Harry," which was a Broadway tune, got adopted as a song for Harry Truman. ♪ Say I'm just wild about Harry ♪ ♪ And Harry's wild about me ♪

But the real game changer in terms of the celebrity connection to a specific candidate, I think, is Frank Sinatra in 1960, who re-records a song that was already famous. So that's important. You've got to have a hit song. And so he re-records High Hopes with a lyric that's customized for John F. Kennedy. ♪

The whole Rat Pack embraced Kennedy. They became known as the Jack Pack. Their celebrity and that specific tune gets tied to John F. Kennedy's campaign.

Would you relate this directly to the celebrity endorsements we get now from pop stars, specifically Taylor Swift endorsing Harris after the presidential debate?

There's definitely a connection culturally from the way in which a candidate sort of graphs onto the popularity of a figure who already is in the culture and already has these fans. And so I think what we're seeing now is a kind of shift from political debate to political fandom.

and the way in which music is almost becoming more important today than ever because it's about energy, it's about your tribe, it's about getting your fans of your political candidate and motivating them to motivate others to go to the polls. There's some signs of that I think are concerning and some signs that are exciting. So you have Ariana Grande, Beyonce, John Legend, Charlie XCX in her viral Kamala is Brat tweet, Billie Eilish.

They've all come out for Harris. You've had Jason Aldean, Kid Rock, and others continue to throw their support behind Trump. How much does this really matter, though? You say that it matters a lot because of the enthusiasm. Enthusiasm matters more than it did before. What's interesting today is that we have such a razor-thin difference between the candidates, at least according to the polls. We're at a particular moment where small things can make big differences, but

Here's one place where I see some interesting developments that might even suggest that musical contribution to democracy could be helpful. And it's about allowing people to speak to the candidates. So typically with a campaign song, you have your consultants, you historically have had a theme song. Right now, we actually have a whole playlist, a cacophony of music that surrounds each candidate. And I think one of the sources of those choices is actually the fan group itself. So someone like

doesn't endorse Harris first. What happens is that her fans remix Femininomenon, one of her hit songs, using video clips and audio of Kamala Harris speaking. You exist now. Get into the context.

And then that becomes something that the Harris campaign responds to. So, you know, Kamala is Brat is a great example. It starts with the fans remixing Charlie XCX's songs to audio with Harris.

Then Charlie XCX tweeting that Kamala is brat. And then the Harris HQ adopting that chartreuse bright green color as part of its banner. In that case, the campaign is actually the followers responding to its fans rather than the other way around. If we'd see democracy as the responsiveness of our candidates to

the needs of the people. This is at least a pathway. It's a musical pathway and does it open up other pathways, I guess is the question. So tell me more about the musical choices of the campaigns and the candidates. They each have playlists. You have noted that Trump's got a very long playlist because those rallies are very, very long.

Trump is an entertainer who's picking these sort of classic rock tunes, really hits from almost Trump's own childhood. It's like hits from the 60s, the 70s, the 80s. For instance, he picked Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On, right, which is from the movie Titanic. Which is a

Very odd choice for a political campaign. It's a very unusual choice. I mean, do you want to be associated with a sinking ship, right? You know, probably not. But this was a hugely popular blockbuster film. It's almost the popularity, the ratings, if you will, of the song that matters more to Trump

than the content of the song or the associations of the song. So there's a way in which the Trump playlist is very much all about nostalgia, nostalgia for when America was great, this sort of mythical notion that they're going back to. The soundscape creates a sense that that's true, right, that that's believable because the music reinforces that sense of connection to the past. Let's talk about another song that Trump really likes. Born in the USA has become a bit of a Republican anthem song

Springsteen isn't thrilled with him using it, obviously. But you think it's a little odd that Trump has chosen it. Trump isn't the first one to make this mistake. This repeated chorus, you know, born in the USA, I was born in the USA. Superwoman USA!

It has this kind of powerful patriotic hook, and it does appeal to this sort of nativist, keep the immigrants out ideology. What the song's about is something very different, right? It's about working class, economic justice. It is not a song about the glory and exceptionalism of America. It's actually the way the song is used politically is to sort of cover all that up.

One of the things that's interesting is that Born in the USA was also used by the Democratic National Convention this year. It was part of the roll call. Really interesting that the DNC is reclaiming one of these Republican anthems as its own.

So let's talk a bit about the Democratic playlist and especially about that DNC roll call, which you found mind-blowing. I did. It was incredible to me that music would be used to sort of create a dance party out of what's really a pretty boring procedural. And so for every single state and territory that was called to present their votes, the state would be called out. And then emblematic music that reflected the state would be played in response.

Do you happen to know whether the states picked their songs or the campaign did? I think the states picked the individual songs. There were some interesting mixes, like Sweet Home Alabama was used for Alabama. No surprise there. But it's just really interesting, again, that the Democrats embrace sort of Southern country rock when country music is more clearly associated with the Republican Party. Part of this campaign of co-optation. Was there a standout moment for you?

The standout moment for me was certainly Little John responding to the call to Georgia. Georgia, how do you cast your vote? Having this guttural scream. Yeah! Coming down and singing his party anthem, Turn Down for What. And just marching through the crowd. That was stunning. I don't think there's any precedent for it.

You noted that within hours of the completion of the roll call, Axios had a playlist of the DNC roll call songs on Spotify. That goes back to Obama, who started using playlists at least as early as 2012. By not having just a single song, you in a sense try to appeal to a whole range of Americans rather than just a very specific demographic.

And the theme song is less important than the playlist these days. "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow," the Clinton theme song. Today, they would have a whole lot more than a single message. I think so. I mean, Trump doesn't seem to really have a single song at the moment. With Harris, Beyoncé's "Freedom," I think, has been the theme song. ♪ Freedom ♪ Was used in an early campaign ad, was the song that was played as she came out to accept the nomination and after she finished her speech at the convention.

I think the fact that Kamala Harris got permission to use Beyonce's song and that Trump did not is a significant moment, at least within the musical warfare that is the current campaign. So let's talk about the way that artists have complained mostly about how Trump has used their music.

A record number of artists have complained or even sued his campaign for using their songs so far this year. That includes ABBA, Adele, Celine Dion, Foo Fighters, Jack White of the White Stripes, and the heirs of Isaac Hayes. Now, artists have been objecting or even suing over Trump's unauthorized use of their songs since at least 2016. But, you know, he just keeps playing the tunes, right? Yeah.

These artists' objections, if anything, end up playing into the Trump brand, right? That he's not the conventional candidate. He doesn't do the things the way that typical politicians do. They don't seem to take any effort to pre-clear any of these songs with the artists. They just use them, and if an objection comes up, they roll with it. Have any of those artists actually won?

Pretty much all of them have won. Beyonce just threatened the lawsuit. Isaac Hayes' family, his heirs, did win their case that forced the Trump campaign to stop using his songs as well. So you noted that on the upside, this emphasis on music and celebrity pop star endorsements jazzes up the energy within the electorate, even helps with the turnout.

And you suggested that the downside is really about the fact that maybe that music and celebrity is a distraction from the issues. Did we really need that to distract from the issues? Having covered campaigns since 1980, a focus on the issue has always been a struggle for the electorate, partly because it's often a struggle for the political press, which will focus more on the horse race than on policy.

I just don't know whether that's a real problem. It's not like the kids are going, oh, I love this Taylor Swift song, so I'm going to close this policy paper on housing. Yeah, I think you're right that it's not taking people away for the issues. For me, it's more emblematic of the fact that the issues are even further in the back. Music, in a sense, can almost cover up for the lack of policy debate. It creates a sense of...

and engagement and sort of devotion that supersedes and doesn't require any kind of discussion. There are some messages, I think, that are being subtly communicated. I mean, like feminineomenon, right, which is...

really putting gender front and center in the campaign. And the Trump campaign, of course, uses James Brown as a man's man's man's world. The details of the song are about devotion to a woman, but on the surface, it seems to be a claim that only a man could lead the country, right? Whereas Feminine Omenon is really about the fact that men in many ways have fallen short in meeting the needs of the world and the needs of women. Anybody

And women need to become the leaders who are going to fulfill those needs. There are messages that actually do reflect really substantive campaign issues that are right under the surface of some of these songs. And they speak to the fans who know the lyrics, who know the details. And they're pretty much run completely over the head of someone who doesn't know Chaparron.

If you know that she's like a female drag queen, you realize that the sort of genderqueer, the expansiveness of her message, the embrace of youth culture, like all those things are there. If you just know it as sort of a fun, upbeat song and you don't actually know the words or who she is, that positive energy hits you, but all of the detail washes over you. There's interesting ways in which music can say very specific things to specific supporters, but

but becomes part of this generic energizing force for everybody else. It has the ability to speak policy without offending those who would disagree because they don't know the joke. They don't know the message. There's always been a kind of presidential fandom. As you've established, there's always been campaign music. What's going on now, you suggest, is an intensification, a matter of degree, right? It isn't something new or different, or is it?

Well, I think it's different in its scale. It's different in its volume. So you're right, this is not something new. But part of it is the focus on these giant arena rallies, which has now become, through Trump, a lot of this is his influence on what it means to be a political candidate these days, right? That it means to be a celebrity, that it means to command a crowd, that it means to entertain, right? And music's being used as sort of the motivator, as the catalyst, right?

of this sort of battle of crowd size. Right. Trump says that if Harris gets crowds, it's because she has the entertainment. Because she has the live artists there, right? There definitely is a democratic advantage in the soundscape because top 40 tends to track young people and tends to track, therefore, progressive new ideas, the crucible of culture where things are changing.

that more sort of fluid notion of self-definition of identity. Harris is very much tapping into that. So the artists who are speaking to that generation are happy to be affiliated with the Democrats. They are not happy to be affiliated with Trump. Mark, thank you very much. Thank you, Brooke. It's been a pleasure.

Mark Clegg is a professor of musicology at the School of Music, Theater, and Dance at the University of Michigan. He wrote the book, Oh, Say Can You Hear?, a cultural biography of the Star-Spangled Banner. Thanks for checking out the Midweek Podcast. Now check out The Big Show, which posts every Friday, roughly around dinnertime. Thanks.