As someone who has covered way too many presidential campaign rallies, I can attest that popular music at political gatherings is a powerful mood enhancer.
I will never forget one of then-President Obama’s last campaign rallies of 2012, in a crowded University of Cincinnati gym on election eve. The already pumped-up crowd erupted when they realized that “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)” wasn’t being piped in; it was being sung live by Stevie Wonder himself. The song was something of a premature victory lap: Obama appeared to be in a tight race against Mitt Romney, though he ended up beating the former Massachusetts governor decisively.
Ever since our first baby boomer president, Bill Clinton, adopted Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” as his campaign theme song in 1992 — even inspiring the band to regroup for his inauguration — candidates have increasingly used popular music to send a message.
Some songs are less subtle than others. During her 2016 bid to make history as the first female president, Hillary Clinton adopted Katy Perry’s “Roar” and Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song.”
Former President Trump, whose performative patriotism can be boiled down to a single four-letter acronym, MAGA, chose Lee Greenwood’s signature song, “God Bless the U.S.A.,” as his jingle.
And Vice President Kamala Harris has famously made Beyoncé’s “Freedom” her campaign anthem.
While the music playing at political rallies has never struck me as signifying the artist’s endorsement of a particular candidate, musicians can be furious when their music is used without permission. Either they don’t want their work associated with politics at all, or they loathe the candidate who is playing it.
Which brings us back to Trump.
The list of artists who have demanded that he stop using their songs is long, ranging from ABBA and Adele to the Village People and the White Stripes.
I counted at least 41 artists who have tried to forbid him from using their tunes, including the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Queen, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, the Foo Fighters, and Bruce Springsteen, who endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 after calling on Trump to stop playing “Born in the U.S.A.”
Celine Dion condemned Trump’s campaign for playing her mega-hit “My Heart Will Go On” last month during a rally with his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. It was a peculiar choice of music because, as everyone knows, the song was the theme for a movie about a giant passenger liner that famously hit an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic.
“In no way is this use authorized,” said a post on Dion’s official X feed. “… And really, THAT song?”
Also last month, the family of the late R&B singer, songwriter and producer Isaac Hayes filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against Trump, his campaign and the Republican National Committee for using the 1966 Sam & Dave hit “Hold On, I’m Coming” at rallies all over the country. Hayes co-wrote the song with David Porter.
On Tuesday, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction forbidding Trump from using the song.
Trump’s attorneys claim the Hayes family no longer owns the rights to the song and that, in any case, something called a “political campaign license agreement” allows the music rights management organization BMI, which has more than 22 million songs in its catalog, to use music for political events.
There is a clause in the agreement, however, that allows BMI to exclude certain music if a songwriter or publisher asks the organization to withhold it. For example, the Rolling Stones were unhappy that Trump used “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” as his walk-off music in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. They sent cease-and-desist letters to no avail and then turned to BMI for help and explicitly threatened to sue. “If Donald Trump disregards the exclusion and persists,” the Stones said in a June 2020 statement, “then he would face a lawsuit for breaking the embargo and playing music that has not been licensed.”
Trump has not played the song since.
The current flap over “Hold On” is not the first. In 2008, the Obama campaign stopped using “Hold On” after Sam Moore of Sam & Dave objected. “No one called me, no one sent a telegraph, no one did anything,” Moore told the Associated Press. “They just did it, and I think that’s rather rude.”
Arizona Sen. John McCain, who ran for president against Obama in 2008, wryly turned a band’s potential rejection into a joke. Trying to woo conservative Republicans who disliked his moderate stances on some issues, he thought about using ABBA’s 1978 hit “Take a Chance on Me,” but worried about being unable to secure the Swedish band’s permission.
“If you’re not careful, you can alienate some Swedes,” McCain told reporters during one of the many off-the-cuff conversations he had with his traveling press corps. “If word gets out to Stockholm that we’re using ABBA music, then there’ll be a worsening in U.S.-Swedish relations.”
If only Trump were so considerate.