Today’s blog is going to be the playlist of songs to be played at my presidential campaign rallies. I haven’t registered as a candidate, I have made no formal announcement of running, have no staff, and no funds, but I figured that the music was a good place to start planning my campaign. Everything else should follow easily from that.
This was inspired by an article in the New York Times, What Do Rally Playlists Say About the Candidates? There are some interesting tidbits in this and you can listen to the music. The one thing I found quite revealing is the percentage of music by women the candidates played.
Gillibrand is the only candidate that plays more music by women than men. My guess is that most of that is because of prejudice upstream of the candidates, most music that gets exposure is by men. It’s true of festivals, it’s true of radio stations. The charts consistently have more male than female artists. Grading on that curve there are four outliers, the aforementioned Gillibrand and the three candidates at the bottom of the list, Sanders, Trump, and O’Rourke. Trump is not unexpected. If you look at the word frequency list in the article, Trump’s top two are “Man” and “Macho.” He has a history of misogyny. But what of Sanders and O’Rourke? The most generous explanation is that they are remarkably tone deaf, irony intended. Sexism is so far from their thoughts that they didn’t think twice about it. They felt no need to check for unconscious bias, or perhaps just a small sample accident. They either didn’t care how this looks or didn’t notice. Either is telling.
This is music, so of course I think I can do better. This is not a carefully curated list. I made it over the course of a last night. If I were doing this for real I’d have staffers helping me out. I’m woefully short on hip hop, Spanish language, and mainstream country music, genres important to many people that aren’t found in my music library. There’s less folk than you might expect. At a rally people don’t listen closely so this is light on lyric heavy songs. Some of the songs are there to represent important parts of my musical landscape including two jazz instrumentals, but most reflect my thinking on issues. I am not going to analyze song by song; the songs should speak for themselves. Some common threads will be my passions for social and economic justice, the environment, and the fellowship of all people. Listen, enjoy, and learn about me.
Sadly I can’t embed the playlist here with a free account so I’ll have to just give you the link, Presidential Campaign Songs.
Wise Madness 