2008 Pop Conference Bios/Abstracts

Mike Barthel

Michael Barthel is a Master''s candidate in media studies at the Newhouse School of Communication. He is the proprietor of clapclap.org and a staff writer for Flagpole.Panel(s):
Vote Music
Saturday, April 12, 2008, 2:00 - 3:45Abstract:

"Yesterday''s Gone: The Use of Pop Songs in Presidential Campaigns"
Campaign songs are a familiar feature of presidential elections, but they''ve undergone a major historical shift. Where once they were newly commissioned compositions explicitly about the candidate, such as "I Like Ike" (Eisenhower ''52), almost all campaign songs are now pre-existing pop songs that express a campaign''s message or themes, like "Don''t Stop" (Clinton ''92). Such political playlisting is now endemic: Hillary Clinton held an online poll to determine her campaign song for 2008, and in 2004, perhaps in an effort to appeal to MP3 bloggers, George W. Bush picked a song that hadn''t even been released yet ("Only in America" by Brooks & Dunn).

This shift from custom-made campaign songs to appropriations of existing cultural objects is a significant one, and the paper examines what it means to use pop songs as tools of political communication. First, we examine how effectively campaign songs convey political messages by comparing a campaign''s themes to the lyrical and musical content of its theme song. We conduct an experiment in which listeners evaluate to what degree campaign songs express particular messages, testing if the words and music convey different meanings by giving one group lyric sheets and the other only instrumental versions. And to examine why politicians so clumsily use pop songs to convey affinity, we survey political professionals to discover their scope of musical knowledge, as well as asking future electioneers what they would use for their own campaign songs.

We conclude by applying this examination of pop music''s use in "politics as a vocation" to standard ideological analyses of art and politics. When ideology''s prime practitioners treat music''s impact so lightly as to relegate their selection of campaign song to an online poll, can we really say that art has any impact on politics at all?