Notes on Deconstructing the Populism: Music on the Campaign Trail, 2012 and 2016

Music in the Middle: A Culture-Cognition-Mediator Model of Musical Functionality

“…The use of music in political campaigns has been framed as a deliberate attempt to interface with constituents' cultural identities and self-concepts with an aim to alter their interpretation of or attitude toward the candidate (Patch, 2016). Sometimes, this linkage has different effects depending on preexisting cultural understandings of particular songs; for instance, the dissociations between Donald Trump's politics and his use of songs such as The Village People's "Y.M.C.A."…”

“…The use of music in political campaigns has been framed as a deliberate attempt to interface with constituents’ cultural identities and self-concepts with an aim to alter their interpretation of or attitude toward the candidate (Patch, 2016). Sometimes, this linkage has different effects depending on preexisting cultural understandings of particular songs; for instance, the dissociations between Donald Trump’s politics and his use of songs such as The Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” have been frequent sources of material for late-night comics, whereas music critics have referred to his adoption of The Beatles’s “Revolution” and Neal Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” as examples of those songs as an empty signifier, 1 or a concept with a subjectively determined meaning (Richards, 2016); incidentally, this explicitly follows on from Zizek’s (2007) assertion that Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” has been used to celebrate such a baffling range of causes as to have lost intrinsic meaning.…”

The people vs. the power bloc? Popular music and populism

“…Given music's ability to constitute and perform popular identities, and to challenge or reaffirm hegemony, politicians, political movements and parties have employed music for its affective capacity (Street 2012). Political actors frequently draw on popular music as a means of aligning themselves with popular identifications, expressing particular solidarities or presenting themselves as ‘ordinary people’ (Jordan 2013; Patch 2016). To these ends, they might associate themselves with popular artists, publicly share personal playlists, organise music events or play music at election rallies.…”

“…Existing scholarship on the nexus between popular music and populism demonstrates the breadth of populist parties and movements' musical activity, which ranges from the symbolic endorsement of specific genres, styles, tastes, artists and aesthetics, through the composition of campaign songs to political actors performing as musicians themselves. In recent years, scholars have discussed cases including populism in presidential campaign songs and Barack Obama's mixtapes (Jordan 2013;Patch 2016Patch , 2019; musical references in the discourses of the Podemos party in Spain (Caruso 2020); popular music playlists at demonstrations of the German far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Dunkel 2021); the affinity between Hungary's extreme-right Jobbik party and the Nemzeti sub-genre of rock music; and the embracing of Disco Polo by Poland's Law and Justice Party (Łuczaj 2020;Szele 2016). These examples, musically and politically different, reveal that populism has increasingly blurred the boundaries between the political extremes and the mainstream.…”

From ‘we shall prevail’ to ‘weapon of struggle’: Populism, Chile's Unidad Popular government and Nueva Canción

“…First, it engages with emerging conversations about populism and popular music (e.g. Garratt 2019; Patch 2016), extending this discourse to an important context in Latin America. Second, it aims to expand the scope of existing CNS studies by examining an important moment in the development of PU arts policy (Ayo Schmiedecke 2022; Canto Novoa 2012; Fairley 1984; Peters 2020) that has not been the subject of a detailed conceptual and music-focused examination: the Chilean Communist Party's 1971 Assembly on the Chilean Revolution and the Problems of Culture (henceforth ‘the Assembly’).…”