The Republican War on Music

The GOP's rejection of cultural modernity is just creepy.

“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work,” wrote Woody Allen. “I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”

I’m proud to be an American…

Someday, country singer Lee Greenwood, who is now 81 years old, is going to die. (Hopefully a long time from now.) But Greenwood has already cemented an immortality that is the envy of artists, politicians, and athletes alike. As long as there is a Republican Party in America, his song “God Bless the U.S.A.” will be played on a loop at every event the party holds.

Where at least I know I’m free…

So it was a few weeks ago in Milwaukee, when Greenwood opened the Republican Convention with his patriotic song from 1984. And Greenwood was there to close the convention by singing the song once again. In between performances, attendees could hear the song being blared out of loudspeakers on the convention grounds or being sung by young women on side stages outside the media room. And if that wasn’t enough, you could stop by the Lee Greenwood exhibition booth inside the Baird Center, where you could pick up some pamphlets and learn all about the country singer’s life.

And I won't forget the men who died…

Of course, Greenwood’s song has been ubiquitous at Republican events for decades. While the party itself has morphed into something completely different from (and antithetical to) its former self, the GOP’s love for the patriotic country song has not wavered.

Who gave that right to me…

While giving an account of a 2009 Tea Party rally in Madison, Wisconsin, I wrote this:

Then, the Conservative Bat Signal came. It is the inviolable rule of conservative events – nothing really happens until Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” plays. Once the final line plays, it’s go time. Only this time, there was a lag between the song and the speeches. The stage was still empty, although the sound checks had all been completed. It took every ounce of self control for me to not run up to the microphone and start yelling “don’t take the brown acid, man!” Sadly, I think few attendees would have gotten the joke. Or they would have been stabbed by the Hell’s Angels, who were providing security for the day.

But what is amazing is that Greenwood’s song is what counts as current music within the Republican Party.

During the convention, Washington Post reporter Dylan Wells walked the floor and asked some Republican leaders what they chose as the “song of the summer.” Their answers are…beyond cringe:

@dylanewellsI asked Republicans at the 2024 GOP convention their song of the summer…no brat summer here. #rnc #gopconvention #politics #songofthesummer @We are a newspaper.

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That is South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster listing artists he likes, such as the Beatles, “the Stones,” James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Carly Simon, Bobby Darin, Roy Orbison, and Bob Dylan, to name a few. Rep. Mike Lawler of New York inexplicably picked the 1974 song “Sweet Home Alabama.” Former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy said his song of the summer was “Streets of Bakersfield,” a song written in 1973 and further popularized by Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens in 1988. (McCarthy is from Bakersfield, California.)

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird couldn’t name a single song, but praised the music at the convention as “amazing.” Rep. Nancy Mace, who counts as “young” in the GOP, picked the 2003 song “Many Men (Death Wish)” by rapper 50 Cent, saying the song “resonates” with her after the recent assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump. (“Fiddy,” a former drug dealer, was famously shot nine times and survived.)

Needless to say, if you are picking a 21-year-old rap hit as the 2024 song of the summer because Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet, your brain may have been politically poisoned.

(Editor’s note: The song of the summer is obviously Chappell Roan’s love letter to lesbianism, “Red Wine Supernova.”)

The music in the arena was just as dated. Between speakers, a live band played old country and classic rock hits. During an afternoon walkthrough of the empty arena, I could hear the band practicing their version of Creed’s 1999 emetic hit “Higher.” Sure enough, they closed the convention with it that night.

And of course, before Trump accepted the nomination, viewers nationwide were treated to Kid Rock’s 2000 version of “American Bad Ass” - a song with a backing track ripped straight from Metallica’s 1991 song “Sad But True” - but with cleaned up lyrics. (Original verses from the original Kid Rock version: “Watch me kick, you can roll with Rock/Or you can suck my dick/I'm a porno flick, I'm like Amazing Grace/I'm gonna fuck some hoes after I rock this place.”)

Or maybe the original song was by Roy Orbison. I may be getting confused.

What America saw, though, was a Republican Party slavishly wed to the past. A party that can’t even conceive of a song written in the past two decades. One that thinks the “song of the summer” is a hillbilly anthem from 1974.

Of course, the rejection of popular culture is now a central tenet of Republicanism. By closing their eyes and plugging their ears, they believe they can turn the clock back on society to a time where gays and lesbians kept their business behind closed doors and real heterosexual men dressed like this:

Of course, a big reason Republicans reject popular culture is because popular culture rejects them. Democrats get big celebrities to show up at their conventions - the best Republicans can do is face-tattooed Only Fans models, anonymous reality show stars, and Hulk Hogan. You can bet your ass if Billie Eilish decided she was MAGA, suddenly her music would echo throughout the arena and full delegations would be sporting bandanas and oversized sweatshirts.

But instead, the GOP goes the other way entirely, repudiating any modernity as if it were a capitulation to dark forces. If you can’t get any celebrities at your convention, it’s certainly a strategy, and it may delight the convention-goers, but people watching the convention from home have to be saying:

Who the fuck are these people?

Granted, being a good president is not incumbent on knowing Charli XCX’s Apple Dance. But knowing the smallest bit about the world in which you live would seem to be a desirable trait. Like, maybe it would help if the party’s leaders ventured outside the fever swamps of right wing social media and learned that it’s not popular to condemn single “cat ladies” or to know that Kamala Harris actually didn’t just decide she was black when she ran for president.

And their lack of knowledge of current culture just reinforces the idea that they are clueless bubble-dwellers who know nothing about the country they seek to govern. They want to pass laws in an imaginary world free of drag queens, where people watch Murder, She Wrote with a warm glass of milk before bed every night, and where every song on the radio is about pickup trucks, front porches, and functional alcoholism.

(This is why libertarians are so cool - what is a libertarian other than a Republican who has listened to the Velvet Underground’s “White Light/White Heat?”)

Insulating themselves from the rest of American culture may be comforting to a lot of Republicans, but it just makes them seem out of touch and from a completely different time. Maybe it helps to pretend you have old-fashioned values when your beloved presidential candidate has done more to corrode public morality than every Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion song put together. But it just makes Republicans look as phony as JD Vance’s eyeliner.

GOD BLESS THE USAAAAAAAAA…….

ALSO

I am currently in the process of reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, when I came across this passage, about researchers trying new treatments to cure cancer:

Shih walked over to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and carried back a cancer cell line derived from a patient, Earl Jensen, a long-term smoker who had died of bladder cancer. DNA from these cells was sheared into fragments and transfected into the normal human cell line. Shih returned to his microscope, scouring plate after plate for foci.

It’s a normal story of researchers doing their jobs, but right in the middle, it names the dead patient whose cells are being used to help find a cure. It’s a little strange to actually identify the person whose cancerous cells are being utilized in trials. Like, would he name the cadaver that was used to transplant a tendon into LeBron James if such an operation was possible?

On one hand, it’s kind of awesome. Now Earl Jensen will live forever in the annals as the host of the cancerous cells that helped find a cure. And he never touched a Bunsen burner or microscope - all ol’ Earl had to do was choke down ten heaters a day and get bladder cancer. And yet now he is a pioneer in disease research.

The list of great names in health care is now, like, Louis Pasteur, Jonas Salk, and Earl Jensen. May he be remembered forever, maybe even longer than Lee Greenwood.

ALSO

This week, we released our podcast covering Season 28 of Saturday Night Live. If you’re not a subscriber to the Wasn’t That Special podcast, consider joining up - in a couple of months, you’ll be deluged by 50th Anniversary SNL materials, and listening to our complete history of the show will give you a jump on the discussion.

CHECK IT OUT HERE.

ALSO

From the New York Times:

Tens of Thousands of Men Dead, Women Adversely Affected

FINALLY

Speaking of SNL, I was recently reminded of this 1995 video by Weezer spinoff group The Rentals, which features a band touring member you might recognize. That is baby Maya Rudolph (daughter of famous singer Minnie Riperton) on keyboards, a few years before she made the SNL stage.

(And yes, I am aware I spent the first two-thirds of this post complaining about old music, then I recommend a 29-year-old song. I contain multitudes.)