Dr. Adam Behr
Reader in Music, Politics and Policy at Newcastle University.
Behr researches the connections between music, politics, the music industries, and cultural policy. This has included live music censuses, music sector mapping, work on the relationships between music and political campaigns, and investigations of digitisation, copyright, musical practice and regulation.
Email: adam.behr@newcastle.ac.uk
Twitter: @adambehrlive
U.S. Election 2024
78. Momentum is a meme (Prof Ryan M. Milner)
79. Partisan memes and how they were perceived in the 2024 U.S. presidential election (Dr Prateekshit “Kanu” Pandey, Dr Daniel Lane)
80. The intersection of misogyny, race, and political memes... America has a long way to go, baby! (Dr Gabriel B. Tait)
81. Needs Musk: Trump turns to the manosphere (Dr Michael Higgins, Prof Angela Smith)
82. “Wooing the manosphere: He’s just a bro.” Donald Trump’s digital transactions with "dude" influencers (Prof Mark Wheeler)
83. Star supporters (Prof John Street)
84. Pet sounds: Celebrity, meme culture and political messaging in the music of election 2024 (Dr Adam Behr)
85. The stars came out for the 2024 election. Did it make a difference? (Mark Turner)
86. Podcasting as presidential campaign outreach (Ava Kalinauskas, Dr Rodney Taveira)
87. Value of TV debates reduced during Trump era (Prof Richard Thomas, Dr Matthew Wall)
88. America’s “fun aunt”: How gendered stereotypes can shape perceptions of women candidates (Dr Caroline Leicht)
For an election where the outcome seemed to be both a shock and – for many – inevitable in retrospect, its soundtrack was a comparable mix of the familiar and novel. The long shadow of elections past was felt in the now traditional run of disavowals and cease and desist letters from artists objecting to the use of their music at Donald Trump rallies. An eclectic bunch from the Foo Fighters, Celine Dion, Jack White, ABBA, and the Isaac Hayes estate were amongst those, joining an extensive list from previous campaigns. As before, matters were complicated by venues’ public performance licenses and the licenses purchased by campaignsfrom performing rights organisations ASCAP and BMI, which cover millions of songs.
That still didn’t stop a copyright infringement being added to the long list of Trump’s other infractions as a federal judge found him to have breached the copyright in Eddie Grant’s hit ‘Electric Avenue‘ when using it on social media during the 2020 campaign.
A long history of endorsements has run alongside these objections and the sight of Bruce Springsteen and others on the campaign trail was part of established practice. Trump didn’t lack musical supporters, from the likes of Ye and Kid Rock – also par for the course – but the heaviest hitters in terms of star power, and sheer numbers, backed Kamala Harris, albeit to scant avail.
Celebrity and political cultures, then, have long been intertwined, not least given the winning candidate’s background in reality TV. But just as the media and social media contexts have evolved, feeding wider division in the electorate, so has the soundtrack. While both campaigns, as previously, used popular music in predictable ways that either aligned with their base demographics (classic rock for Trump, and Kid Rock at the RNC) or with their core campaign messages (Beyoncé’s ‘Freedom’ in Harris’ campaign launch video being a case in point), there was also evidence of shifting musical patterns.
Music became enmeshed in the wider culture of the campaigns beyond straightforward theme songs and advocacy. Surfing a wave of initial popularity, Kamala Harris’ X/Twitter account adopted the lime green from Charli xcx’s album cover when the singer described her as “brat” – a highly popular online lifestyle trope, rather than any kind of explicit policy-related statement.
Technological developments played their part too. For all the fears of AI-infused fakery being used around political candidates, it was machine generated images aligning Taylor Swift and her fandom with Trump, and reposted by him, that highlighted the complexity of regulating image likenesses in electoral contexts. Again, the debate was played out through the tropes of an online communicative culture. Amongst the fake images were those purporting to show the singer’s fans in “Swifties for Trump” t-shirts. Her own response – and endorsement of Harris – cited the reposted fakes, as well as featuring a photograph of her with a cat in an explicit rebuke of Vice-Presidential candidate JD Vance’s reference to “childless cat ladies”
The digitally mediated melange of political and musical content also involved two-way traffic. Trump’s controversial, and wholly unsubstantiated, statement about immigrants in the 10th September debate became fodder for musicians:
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats… they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
The adoption of Trump’s words, and phrasing, demonstrated online artists’ ravenous appetite for content, the fluidity of political messaging, and the speed with which it can be substantively recontextualized. From a trombone score to a makeover by virtuoso funk bassist and Grammy nominee MonoNeon, Trump’s wild claim served as the basis for a bevvy of ironic musical responses. South African act The Kiffness, the artist name of musician David Scott, had a viral hit with his parody remix of the comments and was playing it live in Munich barely a week after the debate. “My initial desire to remix the quote was because I thought it was amusing and outlandish” he told Newsweek, “but I also recognized the melodic element to the statement. I decided to give it a shot and I had the basic idea for the song in a matter of minutes.”
Scott shied away from overt political statements, noting both Republican and Democrat support, and that the main effect of his release was the money raised for a Springfield animal charity through donating his streaming revenues. The political nebulousness of online irony, though, allowed others to hook the remix trend to a more partisan stance. The Marine Rapper, a pro-Trump Marine Corps Veteran, also had playful, and viral, musical fun with the same sampled words. It would be difficult from the content alone to tell the difference between Trump critics, supporters or agnostics and, in a campaign amidst intense polarisation, each electoral tribe mapped their own predilections onto the ambiguous content.
This was 2024’s underpinning musical development, and one that aligned with the results on the ground. Headline acts at rallies and conferences harked back to analogue electioneering and continuity, while musical and online cultures reflected voters’ preferences back to them. Celebrity, music and politics remain entangled, but the terms of engagement have changed.