Welcome to another installment of Ask A Music Critic! And thanks to everyone who has sent me questions. Please keep them coming at [email protected].
I feel like back in 2016/2017, there were so many of those compilations of indie rock artists reacting to the impending Trump presidency. Did they actually do anything? Are we going to see that again? Were there any examples of good music that came about as a reaction to Trump? Sorry, that’s probably too many questions, I’m in a weird space right now. — Joe from Philadelphia
Hey Joe, no need to apologize. Our collective space is definitely weird this week. I appreciate that you would turn to me, a music critic, for insight, though that might be the most illuminating example of just how weird the space is right now.
I’m intrigued by the wording of your first question: “Did they actually do anything?” If by “do anything” you mean “persuade the majority of voters in the future to not pick Donald J. Trump to be their 47th president,” then the answer is clearly no. Though I think that probably puts too much pressure on music to save humanity. Protest music at best can galvanize individuals by showing them that they are not alone in recognizing a societal wrong, and therefore inspire them to do something collectively to correct that wrong. Bob Dylan sings “The Times They Are A-Changin,’” an audience of young people agrees that the times are indeed a-changin’, and the rest is history.
What protest music can’t do is move those who don’t already see the wrongs. Right now, there are more Americans who view the latest election as a triumph, not a tragedy. Not much an ethically minded troubadour with a fiery political song in his heart can do to counteract that, at least not in the short-term, electorally prescriptive sense.
Looking back to the protest songs of the first Trump presidency, I think your question about “good political music” has a self-evident answer: If there were good songs, we would probably remember them. I consulted this round-up from Pitchfork of anti-Trump songs from 2017, and out of the “20 urgent tracks that spoke truth to power” I couldn’t recall a single one beyond Kendrick Lamar’s “XXX.” And I only remember that track because it’s the one Kendrick song that features Bono singing on the chorus, which in retrospect seems unfortunate for all involved parties.
As for the others … does anyone remember “Tiny Hands” by Fiona Apple? (“We don’t want your tiny hands/Anywhere near our underpants.”) How about Broken Social Scene’s “Protest Song,” Downtown Boys’ “The Wall,” or Eminem’s “The Storm”? Can anyone hum me a few bars from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Almost Like Praying”? Actually, I’m good, please don’t hum.
I mean no disrespect to these artists — speaking your mind and taking a chance on possibly alienating your audience in service of a political cause is not easy. But the challenge of protest music is that tying a song so specifically to a moment in time automatically implants it with a limited shelf life. If your lyrical content resembles a political tweet, it will age like a political tweet.
One artist not mentioned in that Pitchfork article is Father John Misty, whose 2017 album Pure Comedy is an exception to the anti-Trump music rule, in that it endures as worthwhile music outside of the year it was released. And that’s because the record was only accidentally anti-Trump — it was written, recorded and mastered before the 2016 election, though it came out five months later. Certainly, Josh Tillman must have been inspired by the campaign as he worked on Pure Comedy — this Trump-inspired rant from a concert in July of 2016 presages the album — but the lyrics never reference the president directly. Tillman instead writes about bigger, more universal subjects: the emptiness of contemporary show-biz entertainment, the self-defeating ideologies to which people willingly shackle themselves, the cyclical innocence-to-corruption hamster-wheel humanity has been on since inception. These ideas were relevant in 2017, and they are relevant now. I’ve been playing Pure Comedy a lot this week, and I would recommend that you do the same, whether you hate Trump or not. It’s just a great album. (That the record is also funny, albeit in a “whistling past the graveyard” sense, helps.)
But what about the future? The election was only a few days ago, and no matter how you voted, there hasn’t been enough time to fully process what is about to happen for the next four years. So, any speculation on how Trump’s second term will affect culture seems premature. Nevertheless, I am going to prematurely speculate.
I expect two things to happen. No. 1, I don’t think we’re going to see the same rash of anti-Trump songs that we did in the 2010s. Again — it’s early and people are feeling dazed and confused in that weird space we talked about earlier. Four years is a long time — four weeks is a long time — so a lot can change. But right now, there are palpable feelings of exhaustion, defeat and retreat, at least culturally. (And not just on the left — voting for Donald Trump isn’t typically regarded as an act of joy.) In 2016, Trump’s win felt fluky. He didn’t win the popular vote, and there was the feeling that the media (and maybe the Russians? Remember those dastardly Russians??) sandbagged Hilary Clinton at the last possible minute.
But in 2024, it feels like something more significant and definitive has shifted. What exactly has changed remains to be seen. But that full-throated “charge into the breach and fight!” energy from eight years ago isn’t evident this time. People, for now, appear to be ducking into the nearest, warmest hole with their bottle of choice.
No. 2, I think we’re going to see a significant wave of anti-PC, knowingly provocative, and proudly offensive music. One of the revelations of this election is that 42 percent of voters under the age of 30 went for Trump. Many (though not all) of those people are young men. At the risk of being incredibly reductive, I think it’s fair to say that popular music in the 2020s thus far has been left-leaning and dominated by female artists, which one could reasonably assume reflects the audience for that music. Young men, meanwhile, apparently are listening en masse to podcasts hosted by Joe Rogan and Rogan-adjacent comedians.
I predict that these worlds are about to collide. This could manifest in any number of ways. We might be hearing more country songs in the vein of Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town” that profess an unabashedly reactionary Trumpian worldview. Actually, I would be surprised if we don’t hear more songs like that. But I can also envision the rise of an Eminem 2.0-type artist — a rapper (or maybe country/hip-hop hybrid) who becomes famous for saying the worst things about any number of non-white guy demographics, just for the sheer thrill of it. Like Tony Hinchcliffe with even more smarm and a Trap beat.
I want to be clear that I don’t think Trump will cause any of this. I actually feel like culture is already moving in this direction, and it might have been even more pronounced if Kamala Harris were elected, as a “rebellion” against the dominant political ideology. Electing Trump, if anything, might actually reduce the heat in this corner of pop culture.
To me the most important cultural event of 2024 — not the best, but the one that signified a bellwether for where culture was heading — was Netflix’s The Roast Of Tom Brady. So many people watched that, and they heard the crude jokes and the “ironic” racism and the unapologetic flaunting of naughty “non-woke” posturing, and they absolutely loved it. Around that time, I heard the same refrain, over and over: “We get to be funny again!” What they really meant was “We can say what we want again!” without consequences. Or maybe it was, “This roast is making America great again!” At any rate, I can envision that spirit taking more prominence in popular music. Call it R-pop, a roast with a catchy hook. The audience is certainly there for it.
I make this prediction without judgment. I love a lot of transgressive art, so maybe we’ll get another Guns N’ Roses, N.W.A. or Pulp Fiction out of this moment. No matter where you fall politically, you’re probably at least a little bit sick of all the lecturing and shaming that’s been taking place in pop culture for the last several years. This could be the remedy.
Or it could just be a heaping dose of poison. My gut — the same gut that suspected that Trump would win this time — tells me that what we are about to hear and see will likely be incredibly obnoxious. Like Bob Dylan once sang (in a non-protest song): Bring that bottle over here.