13 minute read
The New Abnormal
THE MUSICAL DREAM OF THE SANDERS CAMPAIGN
BY ADAM KRASNOFF
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Bernie Sanders’s February 10th rally in New Hampshire marked a strange point in his campaign for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 presidential race. Accompanying the Vermont Senator’s usual speechifying about taking on corporate interests and fighting for the working class, a living wage, and universal health care was a performance from New York City indie-rock veterans The Strokes. For Bernie to put on a rally with a musical accompaniment has not been unusual during this campaign cycle—he has organized events alongside neo-folk and electronic tinkerer Bon Iver, banjoist Béla Fleck, and alt-rock guitar hero Jack White, among others—but this collaboration felt more pointed. Take, for example, the poster designed for the event, which redesigned the sparkling, chromatic Strokes logo to feature the Brooklyn-born politician’s name, the silhouette of his head contrasted against the poster’s black background. This was no mere partnership, but rather an adoption by one of the other’s image; this is politician as rockstar, as indie hero. More than that, too, it is an embrace by one of the indie scene’s most slacker-esque figures of a mainstream political figure—no matter how far left of any “establishment” Bernie may be, it’s hard to imagine the shaggy-haired, cigarette-smoking Julian Casablancas in the 2001 music video for the Strokes’ “Someday” wanting to have anything to do with a campaign for presi
dent, or vice versa. But these conceptions of what exists in or outside of the realms of politics and music have for the past several years begun to shift and blur, and Bernie’s recent embrace of this phenomenon perfectly exemplifies its spread. But why is it that the borders between these two seemingly disparate worlds have begun to come crashing down? In a moment when social media and Internet culture as a whole have totally invaded the public consciousness, it’s no surprise that politicians have tried to become savvier about the ways in which they interact with their base online—part of that transition being to enter into the world of online music communities. Of course, the intersection between music and politics is not a new phenomenon. For almost as long as pop music has existed, politicians have appropriated it for use on the campaign trail. In 1960, Frank Sinatra even rewrote the lyrics to his hit “High Hopes” from the previous year to make the song explicitly about and in support of John F. Kennedy’s bid for the presidency. But for the most part, relations have not always been so amicable—in 1984, Ronald Reagan became the first in a string of conservative politicians to be taken to court over the use of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” at campaign rallies, a particularly ironic case given the song’s critical examination of American patriotism. (After Reagan would follow Bob Dole in 1996 and Pat Buchanan in
THE TYPE OF MUSICIANS THAT CHOSE TO INVOLVE THEMSELVES IN ELECTORAL POLITICS WERE...USUALLY CUT FROM A MORE STRAIGHT-AND-NARROW, MAINSTREAM, AND EASILY DIGESTIBLE CLOTH.
2000; Dole would go on to face more legal action from soul singer Isaac Hayes after the Kansas senator used an updated version of Hayes’ “Soul Man” called “Dole Man.”) In general, the relationship between popular musicians and conservative politicians has been tenuous, to say the least. Over the years, a litany of classic rock groups and musicians have taken conservatives to task over the use of their music at rallies, including John Mellencamp, Boston, Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Jackson Browne, ABBA, the Eagles, Rush, Brian May, Sting, Journey, and Tom Petty, among others. Donald Trump alone has in recent years stirred up controversy for using the music of Neil Young, R.E.M., Prince, Twisted Sister, and Pharrell at his rallies and campaign events. This differential treatment of liberals and conservatives by the music world indicates something which has always been true—the songwriting world has always tended to skew left. However, even when liberals and musicians interacted in the past, the type of musicians that chose to involve themselves in electoral politics were very different than what we’ve seen in the past year and a half, usually cut from a more straight-and-narrow, mainstream, and easily digestible cloth than the likes of Casablancas and his New York-based band. But the S t r o k e s are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this new crop of m u s i c a l a c t s t e a m i n g up with t h e
Sanders campaign. Perhaps even more surprising collaborators than the petulant indie rockers are hardcore hip-hop groups Run the Jewels and Public Enemy, artists whose work has traditionally embraced revolutionary political messaging which encourages radical adversarialism and righteous violence—activism which falls pretty squarely outside the political mainstream. It was, of course, Public Enemy’s Chuck D who famously proclaimed “Farrakhan’s a prophet” on the aptly-titled, throttling anthem “Bring the Noise” from their 1988 record It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, an album rightly remembered not only for the experimental, gritty beat-making of the Bomb Squad, but also as a document of the black power movement as radical and sobering as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, which came out the following year. During their heyday, Public Enemy were not seen as musicians with casual interest in leftist ideologies, but rather as leftist revolutionaries who happened to express their views in the form of mean, trunk-knocking, hard-grooving rap anthems. They stood absolutely apart from hegemony, often sparring with media outlets, critics, and the music industry at large—Fear of a Black Planet’s “Leave This Off Your Fuckin Charts” is a good indicator of where they were coming from—and regularly facing denigration from mainstream news networks and publications. All this makes the fact the group decided this year to partner with Sanders for a series of campaign events all the more surprising. Has our political discourse progressed far enough that radicalism such as that espoused on Public Enemy’s most influential records could be seen as mainstream, or close enough to mainstream to fly with a young, hip, politically-savvy audience (note the events all took place in California)? Or, conversely, have Public Enemy in the years since It Takes a Nation of Millions… and Fear of a Black Planet softened their edges enough to
consider the traditional channels of political discourse worthy of their time and attention? Both or neither could be true. Following Public Enemy’s performance in Los Angeles at a Sanders rally, the group’s hype-man and co-founder, Flavor Flav, responded with a cease-anddesist letter to Sanders, attached to which was a note from Flav which read simply, “Hey Bernie, Don’t Do This!!” In a statement released by Chuck D the following day, it was announced Public Enemy would be “moving forward without Flavor Flav,” marking the culmination of a tense process of disagreement and feuding between the group’s founding members. In the weeks prior to the rally, after Flav complained about Sanders using his likeness to promote his event, Chuck D responded, “Flavor chooses to dance for his money and not do benevolent work like this.” Although Flavor Flav claims Bernie has nothing to do with his remarks, it remains clear that he is still more uncomfortable and unwilling to align himself with a political campaign than Chuck D, who views Sanders’ work as “benevolent,” and particularly salient for the communities and issues he addresses in his art. Even more interestingly, however, on April 1 Chuck D released a statement claiming that the entire charade—Flav’s firing, the controversy surrounding Sanders—was an elaborate April Fool’s prank and a publicity stunt to promote a new Public Enemy record. Flavor Flav, however, denies this, tweeting in response, “I am not a part of your hoax… there are more serious things in the world right now than…jokes and dropping records.” Interesting too is the Sanders campaign’s collaboration with Run the Jewels, a more contemporary hardcore hip-hop outfit. The group, comprised of El-P, producerextraordinaire, loquacious MC, and product of New York’s early-aughts “backpacker” scene, and the gravelvoiced, no-nonsense Killer Mike, who gained a following with a series of excellent features in the 2000s, perhaps represents a more mainstream, if still radical, approach to musical activism than Public Enemy does. Killer Mike has famously been a staunch backer of
Sanders since his 2016 campaign, often appearing at rallies and campaign events to voice his support, and Run the Jewels’ music has often addressed his and ElP’s political views in a way which is, shall we say, a bit more straightforward than their predecessors, although no less righteously foul-mouthed. “Choose the lesser of the evil people and the devil still gon’ win / It could all be over tomorrow, kill our masters and start again,” Killer Mike raps on “A Report to the Shareholders / Kill Your Masters,” the closing track from 2016’s RTJ3, making clear reference to the election cycle which has just come to a tumultuous close. And although both El and Mike commit themselves to remaining “hostile” at the end of each of their verses, both men have been markedly less hostile towards the world of politics than Public Enemy, or any number of rap icons of yesteryear. This is not to say that this means Run the Jewels represent a diluted form of those previous acts’ ideals, but rather perhaps that Mike might see in Sanders—and some of his progressive contemporaries—a figure that is, after all this time, committed to working towards enacting policy which would address the inequities that have long been major concerns in rap music. “Your policy is the only
policy that I have seen in my lifetime that matches up with…what is fair and just,” Mike told Sanders in a 2019 interview. It is also important to note that Killer Mike has faced considerable backlash from those in the Black community for embracing the Sanders campaign. But what, really, is the purpose of all these collaborations for Sanders in his bid for the nomination? In effect it seems he is trying to appeal to a younger, further left-leaning audience, and perhaps a Blacker one at that. It is certainly clear that his campaign—in a casual sense, setting aside its policies—has done a good job appealing to young people, or at least a better job than the other candidates in the field (Pete Buttigieg’s choreographed routine featuring Panic! At the Disco seems to have struck the wrong chord for most young
people), but to what end? It may be that the audience he was trying to impress by collaborating with such acts as Run the Jewels, Public Enemy and the Strokes was an audience which, for the most part, he already had. And as instantaneously cool and righteous as a poster featuring Bernie’s silhouette framed by the iconic Public Enemy “target” logo may seem to that audience, it is equally limiting in its potential to appeal to the kind of voters that Sanders really needed to win over. After a series of underwhelming, disappointing primary performances on
Super Tuesday and in the ensuing weeks, it seemed less and less likely that he would receive the nomination, and on April 8th, the Vermont senator dropped out, ending a campaign which in effect began over five years previous. I shouldn’t purport to put too much emphasis on the importance of these concert-rallies in forming any real outcomes; perhaps they just serve as ironic postmarks for what Sanders did and did not achieve with his campaign. Biden, as he usually does, plays it safe at most of his events by walking out to the tried-and-true Springsteen: “We Take Care of Our Own,” a corny, dilute track from the Boss’s 2012 album Wrecking Ball. It’s equally important to ask the question of the impetus of the artists that have partnered with Bernie throughout his campaign. Run the Jewels, Public Enemy and the Strokes were all in the process of promotional rollout for a new record, and the events for them were perhaps doubly effective—not only could they show support for a candidate they claimed to believe in, but they were also able to promote their art in front of an audience which likely had a lot of crossover with that at one of their own shows. How much, I wonder, does the Sanders campaign matter for the artists he’s worked with? In the case of Run the Jewels—and particularly of Killer Mike—and Public Enemy, the activist messaging which has always informed their work suggests that perhaps the campaign is in some way meaningful to them specifically. But for the other collaborators, Casablancas’ Strokes, Bon Iver, and Jack White chief among them, it’s a lot more difficult to gauge. Perhaps they do care—and if they do, what a fantastic opportunity to be able to self-promote and show support simultaneously. But otherwise the choice looks blithe and cynical, a recognition by each artist that their fans will probably eat up the decision to work with their Democratic socialist, “outside-the-mainstream” political hero. Sanders’ eventual failure in this campaign cycle is indicative of something else, too—when you’re ingrained in indie and alternative music circles, or indeed on a liberal arts campus in New England, it’s pretty easy to assume that the environment of leftism you’ve surrounded yourself with is representative of a norm. And that’s frustrating; during the most hopeful moments of Sanders’ campaign, it really did seem like a candidate who was willing to stand alongside figures like Chuck D and Killer Mike could win over an American majority. Perhaps that’s part of the Sanders mythos: that a 78-year-old Jew from Vermont could become a people’s hero and a symbol of indefatigable cool for a generation of indie kids. Suddenly the silhouette of Sanders on the chromatic poster for the Strokes rally starts to make a lot more sense, although that doesn’t make it any more sensible. One crucial component remains—the listener, the participant, the audience member. Part of the paradox of consuming political art, and particularly political music, is that it is sorrowfully easy to consume without much thought, or without any active participation. Listening to Dead Kennedys on a bike ride the other day, I had a strange realization: though I knew most of Jello Biafra’s lyrics by heart, I hadn’t ever thought of them as being of any consequence. This is not just to say that I hadn’t understood them, but rather that I had understood them and had decided to remove from them any kind of weight. Silly though they often were, Biafra’s songs were often written with a pointed finger, and that finger was at times pointed at people like me—white, middle-class, studying for a liberal arts degree. Had I chosen to ignore this fact, or had it simply not occurred to me? Similarly, the base appeal of Run the Jewels’ music is often in its coldblooded, harsh lucidity, in its rattling bass and intricate rhymes, things which I’d often appreciated but not given enough thought. It occurred to me then there exists a great privilege in the casual listener of politicized music, and I had to think that it was many such casual consumers who attended Bernie’s musical rallies. It was easy enough to be a casual “participator” in the Sanders movement without any tangible form of participation, just as it was easy to listen to angry, revolutionary music without being angry, or being part of the revolution. I called myself a Bernie supporter; I listened to the music of his collaborators; I was both a political and a musical hobbyist. So, I get the sense, were many like me. “Maya says I’m lacking in depth / Shit, I will try my best,” Casablancas famously half-crooned, half-snarled. “…No, I ain’t wasting no more time.” Well, we’ll see.
