Picking a qualified and electable running mate will be a snap for John McCain after the woes he has encountered trying to find a suitable campaign theme song. In his struggle to employ a stirring but appropriate ditty, McCain has been more apt to incite the artists associated with the songs he favors to consider chopping off their own fingers or poking their own eyes out with their accursed, misunderstood pens. Until now McCain has hardly been able to settle on a song that didn’t call forth a barrage of Cease and Desist orders.
Part of the problem is that these wily musicians and their intentionally ambiguous lyrics are designed to engender a mass following (e. g., Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”) while obliquely projecting their political slants. McCain wanted John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Little Pink Houses,” with its familiar “Ain’t that America” refrain, to stoke patriotic fervor and unify the electorate around simple homespun values–but someone in McCain’s camp eventually figured out that this particular jam actually decries the empty lie that is the “American dream.” Plus, Mellencamp is all about the farmers, that tragic, oft-neglected group that might well unseat the oil dynasty if we would only let them grow the corn to fuel our cars, buses, jet liners and semis.
McCain also tried ABBA and, well, they are fricking foreigners, you daft geezer. Naturally all of their lyrics are flimsily coded anti-American messages. ABBA was able to re-unite on at least this issue; they had a collective hissy fit. Bush encountered similar resistance in 2004 when he tried to use the Orleans hit, “You’re Still the One.” Ah, but songwriter John Hall was an anti-nuke activist. So now McCain, figuring Chuck Berry has been fucked over in much worse ways and might indifferently abide this dubious but relatively innocuous misappropriation, has jacked “Johnny B. Goode.” Berry is a self-proclaimed Barack Obama man, but McCain says he will continue to use the song, penned over a half-century ago by the pedophilic pee fetishist, because the 81-year-old legend has been, “the only [artist who] hasn’t complained.”
Obama is currently going with U2 and “Beautiful Day,” playing to the optimistic hipster set with his whole rainbows and jellybeans appeal. You would like to believe he could have found one song by an American band that would bolster his image and rally the faithful. But then again, Bono is some kind of Christian, and even with their half-billion dollars and staff of thousands Obama & Co. wouldn’t have been able to find a Christian-American band that doesn’t induce spontaneous wide-spread vomiting.
This theme song business is some serious shit, though. Kosovo, the newest country in the world, has just chosen a national anthem. I caught a few bars of the grim ecclesiastical arrangement on the radio today and was quite underwhelmed. Things are so touchy in the tumultuous Balkan state that the song has no lyrics. A spokesman said that because of the broad array of ethnicities, historical volatility and the clashing factional interests, there likely exists no sequence of words that would not be a potential igniter of conflagration in the region that has for centuries been the embattled border land between the Muslim and Christian hemispheres.
It is possible that the outcome of this historic U.S. election will be determined by whichever candidate picks the catchier tune, and clearly McCain is at a distinct disadvantage in this realm, judging from the apparent rage inspired in popular musicians by anyone associated with the Bush administration or even the Republican Party. It would be commercial suicide for any contemporary mainstream rocker to align themselves with, or even to allow any of their “art” to be used for the advancement of the conservative agenda, especially if they were a closet neo-con. So, taking for granted the fact that leftist posturing might for some musicians be simply the pragmatic option, let’s not lose sight of the more compelling issue at hand here: this presidential election is our first one out of fifty-six, dating back to 1789, in which we are free to choose a presidential candidate by basing our votes on the singular criterion of the candidate’s race. Now if that ain’t democracy then Chuck Berry ain’t a freak.