The appearance of Ronald Reagan in music includes mentions and depictions of the actor-turned-politician in songs, albums, music videos, and band names, particularly during his two terms as President of the United States. Reagan first appeared on a few album covers during his time as a Hollywood actor, well before his political career. During the 1960s, folk, rock, and satirical musicians criticized Reagan in his early years as Governor of California for his red-baiting and attacking of the Berkeley-based Free Speech Movement. In the 1980s, songs critiquing Reagan became more widespread and numerous once he ascended to national office and involved himself in the renewal of the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, social conservatism, right-wing evangelicalism, and his economic policies in relation to low-income people. While references to Reagan during his presidency appear in pop music, his presence in song lyrics and on album covers is often associated with the hardcore punk counter-culture of the 1980s.
The 1980s' surge in political songs about a current president marked a shift in the culture and helped define the soundscape of the decade, partly fueled by Reagan's attack on aspects of culture associated with rock and roll, namely sex, drugs, and left-leaning politics. While presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon had been the subject of protest songs and politically satirical music during both the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal, presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were mentioned only occasionally by songwriters in the 1970s. That changed with Reagan's presidency, which brought on echoes of his prior campaign against counter-cultural activists a generation earlier during his terms as governor of California. The arrival of music television added a visual component to many of these songs, as did numerous album covers that used the president's likeness in their artwork. Artists' access to digital technology and the rise of hip hop also made Reagan the first political figure whose voice was widely sampled in music.
With regards to musical taste, Reagan himself was a proponent of standards from Hollywood musicals and the Great American Songbook, running three campaigns to the tune of "California Here I Come". As a social conservative, he and his administration were sometimes at odds with the lifestyles and politics of popular musicians, and Reagan's time as president was marked by various miscommunications involving the Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen, and others. Reagan's longevity as a public figure, and the legacy of music written about him, has driven musicians to continue making comments on Reagan well after his political career.
While Ronald Reagan began involving himself in politics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, other cultural and political shifts in the United States coalesced to create a surge in protest music. [1] Waves of African-Americans moving from the Southern United States to urban centers in the North, Midwest, and West during and after World War II helped to electrify the blues and hastened the evolution of rock and roll. [2] A post-war baby boom meant that a large segment of the population was entering their teens at the start of the 1960s and became the de facto audience for this new music. Simultaneously the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War fueled folk singers like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs to write and record numerous topical songs that reached a large fanbase of primarily young people. [1] While President Lyndon Johnson's escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam was met with increased protests, Reagan began his campaign for Governor of California. [3] Phil Ochs mentioned both Johnson and Reagan on his 1966 album, Phil Ochs in Concert. In his introduction to "Ringing of Revolution", Ochs sets up the song by speculating on a future where the last of the bourgeoisie are besieged in a mansion atop a hill. Ochs imagines a film based on his own lyrics:
It stars Senator Carl Hayden as Ho Chi Minh,
Frank Sinatra plays Fidel Castro,
Ronald Reagan plays George Murphy
and John Wayne plays Lyndon Johnson.
And Lyndon Johnson plays God. [4]
Ochs interchanges actors and politicians [5] and pokes fun at Reagan for following in George Murphy's footsteps: [6] Murphy, like Reagan, had been a film actor and became president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), then went on to be a Republican U.S. Senator for the state of California. [7] Reagan had succeeded Murphy as SAG president where he worked as an informant for the FBI during the Hollywood blacklist period. Two decades later, Reagan also ran for office and became California's governor. [8]
Tom Lehrer made a similar comparison in his song "George Murphy", which opens:
Hollywood's often tried to mix
Show-business with politics,
From Helen Gahagan
To Ronald Reagan. [9]
Helen Gahagan was also an entertainer turned politician, progressing from Broadway to U.S. Congress until Richard Nixon unseated her after claims that Gahagan was "pink down to her underwear". [10] In Lehrer's song on his 1965 live album, he punctuates Reagan's name with a question mark, evoking a laugh from an audience who did not yet know that Reagan would sweep the gubernatorial election the following year. [11] In a similar vein to Lehrer was Borscht Belt entertainer Allan Sherman, who satirized Reagan's governorship on his 1967 song, "There's No Governor Like Our New Governor," set to the tune of "There's No Business Like Show Business." [12] [13]
In 1969, Creedence Clearwater Revival mentioned Reagan in their science fiction-inspired song "It Came Out of the Sky" in which a flying saucer landing in the U.S. Midwest spirals into a commercial and political fiasco. [14] In his lyrics, CCR frontman John Fogerty imagines how different sectors of the establishment would respond, with Hollywood turning the event into an epic film, The Vatican declaring it as Christ's return, then-Vice President Spiro Agnew proposing a tariff on all things Martian, and Governor Reagan suspecting a communist conspiracy. [15] Fogerty wrote about his inspiration for the song's spectacle and its Reagan reference in his 2015 memoir, saying, "Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid are in there, big newscasters at the time. And Ronald Reagan—I call him Ronnie the Popular." [14]
At Woodstock in 1969, Jeffrey Shurtleff dedicated his and Joan Baez's performance of "Drug Store Truck Driving Man" to "Ronald Reagunz".
In 1970, Jefferson Starship referred to Reagan's policies and attitudes as governor in the song "Mau Mau (Amerikon)" on their debut album Blows Against the Empire . In the song vocalist Paul Kantner sings, "the dogs of a grade-B movie star governor's war" [16] in reference to the previous year's actions taken against students at the University of California, Berkeley who were creating a People's Park as part of the political counterculture of the 1960s. [17] [18] [19] Governor Reagan's Chief of Staff, Edwin Meese, had ordered the Alameda County sheriff to fire upon the crowds with buckshot, resulting in the death of one student and the hospitalization of 128 others. [20] [21] These directives had come from Reagan himself, who had been publicly critical of UC Berkeley administrators for tolerating student demonstrations. [22] In his 1966 gubernatorial campaign he had promised to crack down on what he called "a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants" on the Berkeley campus. [23] [22] [24] In their song, Jefferson Starship countered Reagan's social conservatism with the line, "We'll ball in your parks". [25]
While Presidents Johnson and Nixon had come under lyrical fire from songwriters for the role they played in waging war both in Vietnam and against protesters in the U.S., songs about presidents Ford and Carter were scant in comparison. [26] Exceptions include James Brown's single "Funky President" (1974); [27] "Please, Mr. President" (1975), recorded by 10-year-old Paula Webb; [28] Devo's hit "Whip It" (1980); [29] and a handful of novelty records, first spoofing the Ford/Carter presidential debates and later the 1970s energy and Iran hostage crises during Carter's presidency.
On December 19, 1980, Stiff Records released "The Wit And Wisdom Of Ronald Reagan", a vinyl album containing the two tracks "The Wit of Ronald Reagan" and "The Wisdom of Ronald Reagan", one on each side and both entirely silent. [30]
In 1980, producer Dickie Goodman spoofed the Carter/Reagan debates on his "Election 80" single, which used Goodman's then-popular "break-in" or "flying saucer" technique that interspersed bits of dialogue, written and recorded by Goodman, with snippets of popular songs. Goodman would go on to satirize Reagan on his follow-ups, "Mr, President," "America 81," "Washington In-Side-Out," "Election '84" and "Safe Sex Report" throughout Reagan's presidency. [31]
While Goodman's novelty records dug more at current events and the political process than at the president himself, Reagan's return to major political office ushered in his renewed campaign against things often associated with the rock-and-roll lifestyle: promiscuous sex, illicit drugs, and left-wing politics. As had happened in the 1960s, these attitudes, along with Reagan's domestic and foreign policies, designated Reagan as a prime target for a new generation of protest music. [26]
After Reagan's election as U.S. president in 1980, many pop music artists responded in their song lyrics. In 1981, "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang" by British synth-poppers Heaven 17 slammed UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher along with Reagan, denouncing the leaders' policies as tending toward racism and fascism. [32] The song was banned by the BBC over concerns of libel, but became a minor UK hit despite its absence from the airwaves. [33] [34] Scottish group the Fire Engines defied the ban by performing a live version of "Fascist Groove Thang" on The John Peel Show. [35] Critic Stewart Mason later wrote of the song as an example of Heaven 17's "skewed perspective: on one level, the song is a straightforward condemnation of the right wing. On another...well, what exactly was a fascist groove thang? The lyrics put images of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan getting down P-Funk style into the listener's head." [36] The song has since become a staple for other bands to play, sometimes keeping the original anti-Reagan lyrics, sometimes inserting other right-wing leaders in relevance to current political situations. [37] [35]
After Reagan's inauguration, Prince released "Ronnie, Talk to Russia" for the album Controversy, a song that Rolling Stone called a "hastily blurted plea to Reagan to seek disarmament." [38] [26] On the same record, the song "Annie Christian" envisions an angel of death responsible for the recent violent events, including John Hinckley's attempt on Reagan's life, the slaying of John Lennon, and a wave of infanticide in Atlanta, Georgia. [39]
In 1982 Australian rock band Midnight Oil critiqued American military intervention in other nations' affairs on their single "US Forces." Singer Peter Garrett later said that "it's construed as an anti-American song but it was an anti-Reagan, anti-Republican song about what they were doing and the impact it was having on our country at the time." [40] Two years after the song's release, Garrett ran for an Australian Senate seat representing the newly formed Nuclear Disarmament Party. After winning more votes than his opponent, other parties joined forces to refuse Garrett and his party a seat in the Senate. [41] That same year artist Joseph Beuys released his single "Sonne statt Reagan", a play on a German phrase meaning "sun instead of rain" with the word for "rain" (Regen) spelled like the American president's surname. [42] Beuys' sun-not-Reagan protest song was backed by members of Neue Deutsche Welle groups BAP and Ina Deter and was added to the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. [43]
Blues musicians also sang about Reagan. Vietnam and Korean War veteran Louisiana Red recorded "Reagan Is For The Rich Man" backed by harmonica player Carey Bell in 1983. Red wrote the track after having been refused government benefits, and expresses preference for Reagan's western films over his politics. [44] That same year blues pianist Champion Jack Dupree recorded the song "President Reagan" in which the former boxing champ accuses Reagan of helping the rich, ignoring poor people and veterans, and undoing the policies put in place by John F. Kennedy two decades earlier. Dupree also sings about being "so glad he only got two more years, and the world will be happy...and we won't shed no more tears," without the knowledge that Reagan would be voted in for a second term. [45]
In 1984 former Creedence Clearwater Revival guitarist John Fogerty alluded to Reagan once again for his single "The Old Man Down the Road". [46] [47] That same year Eagles drummer Don Henley released the single "All She Wants to Do Is Dance" in protest against the US involvement with the Contras in Nicaragua. [48] In the song he chastised people for wanting to dance while sales of guns and drugs were going on at the behest of the CIA. [49] [50] Henley would later sing about Reagan as "this tired old man that we elected king" in a parting shot at the president as he was leaving office in 1989's "The End of the Innocence". [51] Among 1984's other songs protesting the Reagan administration's role in the Iran-Contra affair were "Nicaragua" by Bruce Cockburn, "Lives in the Balance" by Jackson Browne. "Please Forgive Us" by 10,000 Maniacs, and "Untitled Song for Latin America" by Minutemen. [50]
When Britain's ITV network launched the satirical puppet show Spitting Image in 1984, the first record released in relation to the show was a rework of the Crystals' "Da Doo Ron Ron". [52] The Spitting Image version, "Da Do Run Ron," was a spoof election campaign song for Ronald Reagan, featuring Nancy Reagan listing reasons why he should be re-elected. The cover featured the puppet versions of the Reagans that appeared on the show and later starred in the 1986 video for "Land of Confusion" by British band Genesis. [53] Chris Barrie, who voiced Reagan on Spitting Image, also did so on Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes". The song follows Reagan's career to an imagined future in which Jesus Christ can only return after a nuclear apocalypse, and Barrie, as Reagan, quotes Don McLean's "American Pie" and parts of an Adolf Hitler speech. [54]
On the heels of 1984's presidential campaign, the rock group Supertramp featured spoken voice-overs from both Reagan and Bush on the right audio channel and their Democratic opponents Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro on the left audio channel during the fade-out for their song "Better Days". [55] The song's video reviews the 20th century through a retrospective montage of its hardships and the leaders who promised a solution. Beginning with the Great Depression and the rise of the Third Reich, the video sequences clips of military parades and battles moving forward to atomic test and other advancements in weapons technology, to footage of President Nixon, and then Reagan as his voice can be heard saying, "Our nation is poised...for greatness." [56] In a similar vein, the last minute of Def Leppard's "Gods of War" is layered with soundbites of Reagan, Thatcher and the noises of missile launches and bombs exploding. [57] In a departure from Cold War rhetoric, the two leaders' quotes are lifted from their justifications for the 1986 United States bombing of Libya and Britain's participation in the affair. [57] Reagan can be heard on the track saying, "Message to terrorists everywhere: You can run...but you can't hide", and, "We're not going to tolerate these attacks from outlaw states...We will not cave in," ending with, "He counted on America to be passive...He counted wrong," in contrast to Def Leppard's anti-war lyrics. [56]
In 1985 former Police frontman Sting released "Russians", with lyrics leveled at Reagan, the Soviets, and both countries' pro-nuclear rhetoric, all set to Sergei Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije Suite . [58] Milwaukee folk-rockers The Violent Femmes imagined the president as "Old Mother Reagan", a dangerously senile grandmother who tries in vain to enter heaven in one of the group's most fiercely political songs. [59] The same year jam band Phish made their own overt case against the president, sung as a letter to the first lady. [26] Originally titled "Memo to Ronnie Reagan", the song "Dear Mrs. Reagan" mimics Bob Dylan's protest music of the 1960s but rails against Mrs. Reagan's Just Say No anti-drug campaign. The band continued to perform it until Reagan left office in January 1989. [60]
1985 also saw the release of Dog Eat Dog , Joni Mitchell's synth-driven album co-produced by Thomas Dolby. [61] The album's songs capture the headlines of the 1980s, including South Africa's apartheid and Ethiopia's famine, while critiquing the rise of mass consumerism and televangelists. Mitchell saw the rise of the religious right as a dangerous and manipulative force on US politics and likened Reagan to a puppet being manipulated by powerful religious leaders. Mitchell told The Guardian :
Reagan feels that Armageddon is inevitable and it's dangerous when you have a President who thinks that way since he's the one who can call for the pushing of the button. He sees himself in his personal drama, I think, increasingly as a religious leader and he has public lunches with some of these very powerful evangelists, Pat Robertson and The 700 Club for instance. In other words, you have the church stroking Reagan and saying "Yes, yes, aren't they saying nasty things about you, they must be communists. Therefore they threaten both you and me. Don't you think we should silence these communists from speaking?" [62]
In 1987, INXS highlighted Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative in their similarly named song "Guns in the Sky", and R.E.M. likened Reagan to former senator Joe McCarthy. [63] U2's "Bullet the Blue Sky" from The Joshua Tree was inspired after lead vocalist Bono visited El Salvador during the Salvadoran Civil War and witnessed how the conflict between rebels and the US-backed government affected local civilians. [64] During a spoken word passage of the song, he speaks of being approached by a man, "his face red like a rose on a thorn bush, like all the colors of a royal flush, and he's peeling off those dollar bills, slapping them down, 100, 200". Bono said the person he had in mind while writing these lyrics was Reagan, whose administration backed the military regimes in Central and South America that Bono encountered on his trip. [65]
Frank Zappa was an outspoken critic of the Reagan presidency and what he saw as a pandering to the religious right wing. During a televised debate on CNN's Crossfire , Zappa said, "The biggest threat to America today is not communism, it's moving America toward a fascist theocracy. And everything that's happened during the Reagan administration is steering us right down that pipe."[ citation needed ] Several songs on Zappa's 1988 album Broadway the Hard Way ridicule Reagan, [66] notably "Promiscuous," which jabs at the Reagans' attempts to reduce sex education in public schools and replace it with abstinence-only propaganda as well as his slow response to the AIDS pandemic. [67]
On his 1989 album, Big Daddy , John Mellencamp's song "Country Gentleman" is "a scathing indictment on Ronald Reagan". Written and recorded during Reagan's final year in office, the song's last line thanks God that "he went back to California." [68]
In the 1970s, punk rock emerged as an antithesis to the establishment, authority, and the status quo, and by 1980, like his British counterpart Thatcher, president-elect Reagan became a prime pariah for punks to rally against in both the United States and abroad. [69] The widespread appearance of Reagan as a vilified icon in punk music particularly can be linked to the do-it-yourself model of bands releasing their own records and not being subject to the censorship of major labels, commercial radio or television. [70] Reagan's rise to power also coincided with the arrival of a new subgenre: hardcore punk. [71] Many hardcore bands put Reagan's face on flyers, T-shirts, and album covers, plus peppered lyrics, song names, and album titles with the president's various monikers, including "Reagan," "Ronnie," "Bonzo," and "The Gipper." [72] Other bands would take Reagan's image into the sphere of stage theatrics, like San Antonio's Marching Plague, who donned Ronnie masks while performing their Black Sabbath-inspired tribute, "Reagan Man." [73]
A few punk bands went so far as to name themselves after the president or events related to him, the first being a self-proclaimed anarcho-punk group from Queens who, in 1980, named themselves Reagan Youth to liken Young Republican fervor for the president to that of the Hitler Youth during the Third Reich. [74] The band's tongue-in-cheek theme song was penned from the perspective of a neo-fascist youth gang shouting, "Reagan Youth— Sieg Heil! " [75] On the other side of the country, a skate punk band in Phoenix rebranded themselves as Jodie Foster's Army, or JFA, two weeks after the 1981 Reagan assassination attempt. [76] Actress Jodie Foster had been the target of an obsession that Reagan assailant John Hinckley Jr. had developed since seeing her portray a preteen sex worker in the film Taxi Driver . Hinckley eventually attempted to kill Reagan as a means to impress the actress. [77] Originally performing under the name The Breakers, one of JFA's first songs was about the assassination attempt, describing Hinckley's actions with the line, "Shoot the prez, shoot a cop, secretary too." When Breakers fans adopted that song's title—Jodie Foster's Army—as their own nickname and began showing up at Breakers gigs with "JFA" written on their clothes, the band decided to adopt it as their new name. [78]
San Francisco's Dead Kennedys made a career out of mentioning Reagan in songs like "Moral Majority", "We've Got a Bigger Problem Now," "Bleed for Me", and the track "Kinky Sex Makes the World Go Round", a spoken-word piece about World War III formatted as an erotic phone call between Margaret Thatcher and Reagan's fictitious Secretary of War. [50] [79] The band's 1986 studio album, Bedtime for Democracy , is a play on Reagan's film Bedtime for Bonzo and features a multitude of songs about Reagan. "Potshot Heard Round the World" is about US military actions in the Middle East, "with Reagans and Gaddafis cast as cartoon villains and heroes." Reagan plays the title role in the song, "Rambozo the Clown", a portmanteau of Sylvester Stallone's Rambo franchise and Bozo the Clown from children's daytime TV. [50] The Dead Kennedys were done in by a lawsuit against their inclusion of H. R. Giger's Penis Landscape painting as an insert for the album Frankenchrist . Singer Jello Biafra was attracted to Giger's work as soon as he saw it, saying, "This picture is like Reagan America on parade." [80]
JFA's label-mates, the Sun City Girls, released an entire Reagan-themed album in 1987 whose title, Horse Cock Phepner , was an alleged nickname for Ronald Reagan. [81] The album was the band's most lyrical; an obscenity-laden "documentation of the American nightmare in all its incestuous beauty." [82] The album's refraining spoken word track "Voice of America" makes mention of the president, and the album's song "Nancy" depicts then-First Lady Nancy Reagan as a sexual fetishist. The San Francisco based Angst also has a song named "Nancy" with similar subject matter. [83] Other songs deride members of the Reagan administration, including Attorney General Edwin Meese, and the band recorded an updated cover version of The Fugs song "CIA Man" to be about atrocities committed by the CIA during Reagan's presidential terms. [81] In a 1999 interview, the Sun City Girls' guitarist Rick Bishop said:
Other bands during that part of the '80's, both major and not-so-major acts, were really getting on the political bandwagon for one stupid reason or another. They were all so fucking serious, trying to be a voice for a generation or some shit like that, but worst of all they remained within the parameters of social acceptability. There was also a big censorship flap going on at the time. We looked at it as a chance to catch up with our obscenity quota. [82]
Other notable punk acts that sang about Reagan included The Ramones, The Clash, The Damned, The Exploited, NOFX, Suicidal Tendencies, [84] Wasted Youth, T.S.O.L., Government Issue, [85] Dayglo Abortions, D.O.A., [84] The Fartz, The Minutemen, Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, [75] MDC, Rosemary's Babies, Spermbirds, [86] and The Crucifucks. Many of these groups, along with the Dead Kennedys, organized a series of "Rock Against Reagan" concerts and tours to infuse awareness of then-current politics into the punk subculture. [87] [88]
Some hardcore punk songwriters made a conscious decision to avoid putting Reagan in their lyrics. In wanting his music to outlast the administration, Washington, DC musician Ian MacKaye, who was in the bands Minor Threat, Embrace, Pailhead, and Fugazi during the Reagan years, has said, "I remember clearly resisting the urge to put the word 'Reagan' in any of the songs". [72] Meanwhile, other members of the US hardcore scene took a different political stance altogether: In the late 1980s US skinheads spearheaded a patriotic right-wing faction of New York hardcore, [89] and although bands like Agnostic Front and Cro Mags did not reference the president directly in their lyrics, their support of Reagan fell within their interpretation of patriotic backlash that reimagined hardcore without the anti-establishment ethos of punk rock. [84] Some groups' stances on the president were a bit more ambiguous. When drunk-punk group Murphy's Law praised Reagan and his films in their 1986 song "California Pipeline," fans could take it as either actual pro-Republican patriotism or a tongue-in-cheek take on anti-Reagan irony.
As hip-hop came of age during the 1980s, Ronald Reagan became the first president to make mention of its music and culture, and Reagan in turn became the first major political figure to recur as a subject in the genre. [90] Proto-rapper Gil Scott-Heron made Reagan the subject of his 1981 song "B-movie" [91] as well as his 1984 single "Re-Ron" focusing on Reagan's re-election campaign. [92]
The 1980s also saw the widespread use of sampling sounds for use in music, and as sampling equipment became more affordable, both experimental and hip hop artists utilized with greater frequency. [93] Sound collage group Negativland first sampled Reagan on their 1981 album Points on the instrumental track "The Answer Is", where the music interrupted by the president stuttering, "The problem isn't being poor, the problem is, um, the answer is ..." [94] The art rock band 3 Teens Kill 4 sampled Reagan and anecdotes about him in their 1984 song "Tell Me Something Good". In 1985 P-Funk bassist Bootsy Collins and Jerry Harrison from Talking Heads teamed up as the supergroup Bonzo Goes to Washington [95] (named for Reagan's early 1950s films Bedtime for Bonzo and Bonzo Goes to College ) [96] to release a single that heavily sampled the president saying, "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes," during a microphone test. [97] German Techno act Moskwa TV sampled the same phrase in the "bombing mix" of their 1985 dance track, "Tekno Talk". [56]
A snippet of Reagan saying "out of control" was looped by DJ Jazzy Jeff, Was (Not Was) and EPMD. [98] The president had originally used the expression in reference to the national debt and was appropriated by dance artists to entice their audiences. [98] Industrial dance group Skinny Puppy also used Reagan's voice in their music. [99] Their song "Far Too Frail" puts a spin on the president's prudishness as he is heard saying, "For years some people have argued that this type of pornography is a matter of artistic creativity." [56] [99] and in "State Aid" Reagan's voice is clipped to create a stammering effect that reflected his reluctance to address the AIDS crisis. [100]
Afrika Bambaataa and John Lydon used the same sample in their 1984 video for "World Destruction" performing under the name Time Zone. The single's B-side also sampled Walter Mondale talking about Reagan. [101]
Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau co-wrote an entire musical revue with Elizabeth Swados, featuring the song "Rap Master Ronnie." Hollywood actor Reathel Bean was the revue's star performer and in 1984 released a three versions of the song on a 12" single attributed to Reathel Bean & The Doonesbury Break Crew. [102] There was also an accompanying video where Reagan and his posse of Secret Service agents go to a black DC neighborhood to rap for minority votes. [103]
Other '80s rap songs mentioning or referencing Reagan include Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" (1982), [26] Project Future's one-off "Ray-Gun-Omics" (1983), Ice-T's "Squeeze the Trigger" (1987), [104] Biz Markie's "Nobody Beats the Biz" (1988), [104] Boogie Down Productions' "Stop the Violence" (1988), [104] Public Enemy's "Rebel Without a Pause" (1988), [105] and rapper Too Short's 1988 track "Cusswords." [90]
The Kansas City's Grammy-nominated Blue Riddim Band, recorded the satirical track "Nancy Reagan" in 1982 about what the band considered to be misguided priorities on the part of the President and his wife. The song was later versioned by Ranking Roger in 1985 and by Big Youth in 2011. [106] Fela Kuti featured demonic caricatures of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and other world leaders on the cover of his 1989 album Beasts of No Nation and mentioned them in the lyrics. [107]
The rise of the importance of music videos coincided with Reagan's presidency with the launch of MTV midway into his first year in office. [108] Within a few years, references to the president in song lyrics were mirrored by his likeness appearing in songs' videos. One of the first to feature Reagan, and one of the first by an indie band to appear on MTV, was Randall Jahnson's video for the Minutemen song "This Ain't No Picnic." [109] Shot for $450, the video intersperses shots of the Minutemen playing the song on a barren landscape with World War II propaganda footage of Reagan in a US Air Force Spitfire fighter plane, edited to appear as though Reagan was strafing the band with the aircraft's machine guns. [110] The music video was in the running on the network's first Video Music Awards in 1985. [111]
That same year Frank Zappa created a music video for his racially charged song "You Are What You Is." Though a somewhat conventionally produced video by Zappa standards, MTV blacklisted it because in it an actor made up to look like Reagan was depicted sitting in an electric chair. [112] [113]
Also in 1984, Frankie Goes to Hollywood released a video for their anti-war song "Two Tribes" featuring actors playing Ronald Reagan and then-Russian leader Konstantin Chernenko who were fighting as though they were professional wrestlers. The video was televised several times during the 1984 Democratic National Convention. [114]
In 1986 Genesis collaborated with the producers of British sketch comedy show Spitting Image on the music video for their song "Land of Confusion." [115] The video opens with a puppet caricatures of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in bed with a chimpanzee parodying Reagan's film Bedtime for Bonzo , and spirals into the president's fever dream featuring Benito Mussolini, Ayatollah Khomeini, Mikhail Gorbachev, Muammar Gaddafi, Richard Nixon, television celebrities, and the members of Genesis themselves. [116] Reagan awakens drowning in his own sweat, fumbles for a bedside button labelled "Nurse", but instead presses the one titled "Nuke", setting off a nuclear explosion. [117] The video won Best Concept Music Video at the 30th Annual Grammy Awards [118] and was nominated for by MTV for video of the year. Village Voice critic Robert Christgau ranked the video number one on his year-end "Dean's List," and it made number three on the equivalent list in the paper's annual Pazz & Jop survey of music critics. [119] [120]
Reagan appeared as an actor and spokesperson on spoken word recordings as early as 1958 and was first pictured on album covers in the early 1960s. One notable recording was Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine , a 1961 Cold War propaganda piece sponsored by the American Medical Association. In his speech, Reagan purports that Social Security is a socialist attempt to supplant private savings, and eventually concludes that, "Pretty soon your son won't decide when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him." [121]
The first musical album which featured Reagan on the cover was Ronald Reagan Recommends Award Winning Music from Hollywood, a promotional item produced by General Electric during Reagan's tenure as their spokesperson from 1953 to 1962. [122] The LP features the General Electric Transcription Orchestra rendering such hits as "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah," "White Christmas," and "Que Sera, Sera." [123]
During the 1980s, Reagan's likeness appeared on jackets of records by musicians making political statements almost exclusively against the president. [72] These include:
Both in his two terms as governor and during his 1980 run for the presidency, Reagan was introduced with the pop americana standard, "California Here I Come". [148] The song was reworked into a jingle for the candidate opening with, "California, here we come, back where Reagan started from. [149] In 1998 folksinger Oscar Brand recorded this version, along with other presidential campaign songs, for a collection released by Smithsonian Folkways. [150]
During his second run for president, Reagan held a public speech in Hammonton, NJ The campaign advisor, George Will, tried to co-opt Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." for the campaign. [151] Will wrote that if "labor and management, who make steel or cars or shoes or textiles, made their products with as much energy and confidence as Springsteen and his merry band make music, there would be no need for Congress to be thinking about protectionism". [152] A week after Will's writing appeared in a column, Reagan praised Springsteen in a stump speech given in Hammonton, New Jersey on September 19, 1984, [153] saying: "America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire – New Jersey's own, Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about." [154] [155]
Soon after Reagan's speech, Springsteen expressed discontent with the president and his policies, and "Born in the U.S.A." was dropped from the campaign. Reagan's team then reached out to John Cougar Mellencamp to use his song "Pink Houses" and were turned down. [151] [156] The campaign then adopted "God Bless the U.S.A." by country singer Lee Greenwood. [148] [157] Greenwood played the song for the Second inauguration of Ronald Reagan and at the inaugurations of the next three Republican presidents. [158]
Bob Dole and then Pat Buchanan also used "Born in the U.S.A." in their respective 1996 and 2000 campaigns, until Springsteen objected. [151]
In 1983 Reagan's Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt cancelled The Beach Boys annual Independence Day performance in Washington, DC, opting instead for crooner Wayne Newton and a U.S. Army band. The Beach Boys had played a free concert on the National Mall every July 4 since 1980 until Watt declared that rock music attracted "the wrong element" and that the administration was "not going to encourage drug abuse and alcoholism as was done in past years." [159] Watt's social conservatism made him the target of public outcry and denouncements from both the President and the First Lady who declared themselves Beach Boys fans. [160] Days after Watt's announcement, Reagan presented the Secretary with a plaster boot with a hole in it to indicate that Watt had "shot himself in the foot." [161] Watt soon reversed his order and invited the Beach Boys back, but the band had quickly booked another Fourth of July concert in Atlantic City. [162] The Beach Boys returned to a crowd of 750,000 on the National Mall in 1984 and performed at Reagan's second inaugural ball the following year. [160]
In 1984, Reagan awarded Michael Jackson with the Presidential Public Safety Communication Award after the pop star licensed "Beat It" for TV spots against drinking and driving. Reagan's speech made several references to Jackson's songs. From the opening remark, "Well, isn't this a thriller," Reagan went on to drop allusions to the songs "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)" and "I Want You Back," as well as the album Off the Wall . Jackson himself said a total of 13 words at the ceremony. [163]
A 1985 summit between Reagan and Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney known as the Shamrock Summit was capped by a televised gala in which Reagan, Mulroney, and their wives sang "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling." Meant to celebrate both leaders' Irish heritage, the incident became contentious in Canada with critics calling it a "cloying performance" that symbolized the Mulroney government's excessive closeness to the Reagan administration. [164]
Many artists from different genres have continued to make note of Reagan's legacy in their lyrics, such as Neil Young, Glenn Frey, [26] Van Dyke Parks, GWAR, Camper Van Beethoven, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Killer Mike, Kanye West, [165] and the Dead Milkmen. [166] Billy Joel was one of the first songwriters to mention Reagan post-presidentially amidst his litany of American cultural and political events in his high-profile 1989 single, "We Didn't Start the Fire." [26] ex-Beatle George Harrison threw both Reagan and Bush into a 1991 performance of "Taxman" released on his Live in Japan concert album. [167] And New York City hardcore band Sick of It All revived that music sub-genre's prime pariah in their 1992 song "We Want the Truth". [168]
Rage Against the Machine's 1996 album Evil Empire takes its title from name Reagan repeatedly used to describe the USSR. In an interview with MTV, Rage's frontman Zack de la Rocha explained, "The title Evil Empire is taken from what Rage Against The Machine see as Ronald Reagan's slander of the Soviet Union in the eighties, which the band feels could just as easily apply to the United States." [169] That same year California punk band NOFX launched a parodic lament for the demise of songs that railed Reagan in their song "Reagan Sucks," which name checked 1980s hardcore bands Dead Kennedys, D.I., D.R.I., and M.D.C. [170]
In 2006 folk-satire duo The Prince Myshkins released a song about Reagan named "I Don't Remember" for testimonials the president had given during the Iran-Contra Hearings. [171] [172] Reagan was also mentioned in the 2009 Aqua song "Back to the 80s".[ citation needed ]
In 2010 television actor Fred Armisen and ex-Scream/Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl paid tribute to their own punk rock roots in the Saturday Night Live sketch, "Crisis of Conformity", a send-up of an '80s hardcore band reuniting to play a wedding 25 years past their heyday. [173] Chicago indie label Drag City later released a Crisis of Conformity single featuring the song "Fist Fight in the Parking Lot" whose opening lines "When Ronald Reagan comes around / He brings the fascists to your town" and subsequent mention of Alexander Haig are a sendup of similar lyrics by the Dead Kennedys and other 80s hardcore acts. [174] [175]
In 2012, musical project Lemon Demon, created by Neil Cicierega, released an early version of their song "Reaganomics", showing a duet between Ronald Reagan and a hypothetical alternate universe version of himself who advocates for communist socio-economic policies, one advocating for a solution of deregulation as per Ronald Reagan's economic policy the song is named for, while the alternate universe Ronald Reagan advocates for heavier state control. The song samples Ronald Reagan's first inaugural address, in particular his quote "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.". The song serves as a satire and critique of Reagan and his wave of American conservatism and capitalism as a whole, with the song portraying tongue-in-cheek romanticization from the perspective of Ronald Reagan himself. In 2016, the song was officially released and remastered as a part of the album Spirit Phone .
In 2012, thrash metal band Municipal Waste formed the spinoff group, Iron Reagan. The band's name pays double tribute to the 1980s with a nod to the group Iron Maiden who enjoyed heavy airplay on MTV during Reagan's presidency. [176]
Musical references to Reagan continued to persist in the late 2010s. Bright Eyes founder Conor Oberst's 2016 song "A Little Uncanny" comments on Reaganomics and alleges to explore a supposed irony that Reagan's charisma distracted from the 'darker' side of his policies. [177] After numerous artists refused to perform during inaugural events for Donald Trump in January 2017, a 1980s cover band called The Reagan Years agreed to play at the All American Inaugural Ball at the Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill hotel amidst criticism for supporting a "bigot, womanizer, horrible man." [178]
Hardcore punk is a punk rock subgenre and subculture that originated in the late 1970s. It is generally faster, harder, and more aggressive than other forms of punk rock. Its roots can be traced to earlier punk scenes in San Francisco and Southern California which arose as a reaction against the still predominant hippie cultural climate of the time. It was also inspired by Washington, D.C., and New York punk rock and early proto-punk. Hardcore punk generally disavows commercialism, the established music industry and "anything similar to the characteristics of mainstream rock" and often addresses social and political topics with "confrontational, politically charged lyrics".
Anarcho-punk is an ideological subgenre of punk rock that promotes anarchism. Some use the term broadly to refer to any punk music with anarchist lyrical content, which may figure in crust punk, hardcore punk, folk punk, and other styles.
"California Über Alles" is the debut single by American punk rock band Dead Kennedys. It was the group's first recording and was released in June 1979 on the Optional Music label, with "The Man with the Dogs" appearing as its B-side. The title track was re-recorded in 1980 for the band's first album, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, and the original recording as well as the B-side were later included on the 1987 compilation Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death.
Skate punk is a skater subculture and punk rock subgenre that developed in the 1980s. Originally a form of hardcore punk that had been closely associated with skate culture, skate punk evolved into a more melodic genre of punk rock in the 1990s similar to pop punk. Since then, it has predominately featured fast tempos, lead guitar playing, fast drumming, and singing. Occasionally, skate punk also combines the fast tempos of hardcore punk and melodic hardcore with the catchy hooks of pop-punk.
Reagan Youth is an American anarcho-punk band formed by singer Dave Rubinstein and guitarist Paul Bakija in Queens, New York City in early 1980.
Bedtime for Democracy is the fourth and final studio album by American punk rock band Dead Kennedys. Released in 1986, songs on this album cover common punk subjects often found in punk rock lyrics of the era such as conformity, Reaganomics, the U.S. military, and critique of the hardcore punk movement. The album's title refers to the 1951 comedy film, Bedtime for Bonzo starring Ronald Reagan and also reflects the band's weary bitterness from the trial they were undergoing at the time over the controversial art included with their previous album. By the time recording of Bedtime for Democracy had begun, the Dead Kennedys had already played what would be their last concert with Jello Biafra and announced their breakup immediately after the release of the record, whose opening track is a cover of David Allan Coe's "Take This Job and Shove It."
MDC is an American punk rock band formed in 1979 in Austin, Texas, subsequently based in San Francisco, and currently Portland, Oregon. Among the first wave of bands to define the sound and style of American hardcore punk, MDC originally formed as The Stains; they have periodically changed the meaning of "MDC", the most frequent being Millions of Dead Cops. The band's lyrical content expresses radical left political views and has proven influential within the punk subculture.
In God We Trust, Inc. is an EP by hardcore punk band Dead Kennedys and the first of the group's releases with drummer D. H. Peligro. The record is a screed against things ranging from organized religion and Neo-Nazis, to the pesticide Kepone and government indifference that worsened the effects of Minamata disease catastrophes. In God We Trust, Inc. is also the first Dead Kennedys album released after the presidential election of Ronald Reagan and features the band's first references to Reagan, for which they—and hardcore punk as a genre—would become notorious.
Crust punk is a subgenre of punk rock influenced by the English punk scene as well as extreme metal. The style, which evolved in the early 1980s in England, often has songs with dark and pessimistic lyrics that linger on political and social ills. The term "crust" was coined by Hellbastard on their 1986 Ripper Crust demo.
Siren Song of the Counter Culture is the third studio album by American punk rock band Rise Against. Released on August 10, 2004, it was Rise Against's first album on a major record label, after the band signed with DreamWorks Records in September 2003. The recording sessions for the album with producer Garth Richardson were mostly split between two studios in British Columbia. These sessions were marred by numerous distractions and inconveniences, such as the absorption of DreamWorks into Geffen Records, the arrival of a new guitarist, accusations of the band selling out, and the birth of lead vocalist Tim McIlrath's child.
Punk ideologies are a group of varied social and political beliefs associated with the punk subculture and punk rock. It is primarily concerned with concepts such as mutual aid, against selling out, hierarchy, white supremacy, authoritarianism, eugenics, class and classism, while supporting anti-consumerism, anti-corporatism, anti-war, anti-imperialism, leftism, anti-globalization, anti-gentrification, anti-racism, anti-sexism, gender equality, anti-homophobia, racial equality, animal rights, free-thought and non-conformity. One of its main tenets is a rejection of mainstream, corporate mass culture and its values. It continues to evolve its ideology as the movement spreads throughout North America from its origins in England and New York and embraces a range of anti-racist and anti-sexist belief systems. Punk does not necessarily lend itself to any particular political ideology as it is primarily anti-establishment although leftist punk is more common due to the prevalence of liberal and conservative ideologies in the status-quo.
Dave Dictor is an American musician, singer of the punk rock band MDC, and founder of the band's label, R Radical Records. Dictor is known for his political lyrics, involvement in the Rock Against Reagan campaign in the 1980s and being vegan.
"Bonzo Goes to Bitburg" is a protest song by American punk rock band the Ramones. It was issued as a single in the UK by Beggars Banquet Records in mid-1985. The song is an emotionally charged commentary on the Bitburg controversy from earlier that year, in which U.S. president Ronald Reagan had paid a state visit to a German World War II cemetery and gave a speech where numerous Waffen-SS soldiers were buried. Lyrically, the song was a departure from the usual Ramones topics. While not commercially successful, it was critically well received.
Folk punk is a fusion of folk music and punk rock. It was popularized in the early 1980s by The Pogues in England, and by Violent Femmes in the United States. Folk punk achieved some mainstream success in that decade. In more recent years, its subgenres Celtic punk and Gypsy punk have experienced some commercial success.
Double Nickels on the Dime is the third album by American punk trio Minutemen, released on the California independent record label SST Records in 1984. A double album containing 45 songs, Double Nickels on the Dime combines elements of punk rock, funk, country, spoken word and jazz, and references a variety of themes, from the Vietnam War and racism in America, to working-class experience and linguistics.
Animal Boy is the ninth studio album by the American punk rock band Ramones, released through Sire Records on May 19, 1986. Due to conflicts within the group, the album features less of lead singer Joey Ramone, both in performing and writing, and less performing from guitarist Johnny Ramone. Bassist Dee Dee Ramone wrote and sang more on this album than on previous albums, and Richie Ramone became the first drummer to write songs for the band since Tommy Ramone, the band's original drummer. Richie also wrote for Too Tough To Die (1984). The album spawned four singles, all of which charted on the UK Singles Chart, as well as other charts. In addition to singles, the band promoted their album using a music video for "Something to Believe In", which parodied the contemporary benefit concerts Live Aid and Hands Across America.
David Rubinstein, also known as Dave Insurgent, was an American singer and co-founder of the New York–based hardcore punk band Reagan Youth. Rubenstein founded the band with guitarist Paul Bakija when both were in Forest Hills High School in Forest Hills, Queens. The band played the punk clubs of Manhattan while the members were still in high school.
The Proletariat are a punk rock band from Southeastern Massachusetts, whose heyday was during the 1980s, when they were active in the early Boston hardcore scene, sharing the bill with many of the best punk and hardcore punk acts of the time, despite their recorded output having a decidedly non-hardcore aesthetic; the Proletariat show more strongly the musical influences of early British post-punk bands such as Wire and the Gang of Four in their fractured guitar sound and Marxist-themed lyrics.
Nintendocore is a broadly defined style of music that most commonly fuses chiptune with various hardcore punk and/or heavy metal subgenres, most often metalcore and post-hardcore. The genre is sometimes considered a direct subgenre of post-hardcore and a fusion genre between metalcore and chiptune. The genre originated in the early 2000s and peaked around the late 2000s with bands like Horse the Band, Karate High School and Sky Eats Airplane pioneering the genre.
"(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang" is a song by British synth-pop band Heaven 17. It was their debut single, released on 6 March 1981, and the lead single from their debut studio album, Penthouse and Pavement (1981). It was a minor hit in the UK in 1981, despite being banned by the BBC. It was also a minor dance hit in the US. It developed from an instrumental, "Groove Thang", that Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh created earlier that year for Music for Stowaways, an album they released as British Electric Foundation.
'Ringing of Revolution' describes typical upper-class ignorance of the plight of the poor and, in the spoken intro, likened Lyndon Johnson to the actor John Wayne.
In his patter before 'Ringing of Revolution' (Ochs's patter was itself one of his genres, a famous form of political commentary), he acidly casts a movie about Vietnam ('and Ronald Reagan plays George Murphy').
"It Came Out Of The Sky" was inspired by two things. As a youngster I read every science fiction book in the El Cerrito library, and I loved all the movies—Invaders from Mars, Them!, It Came from Outer Space.
Radio 1 remained wary in the political arena and in 1981 its legal department advised Heaven 17 that their hit 'We Don't Need This Fascist Groove Thing' libelled American President Ronald Reagan by calling him a 'fascist'. So the BBC dropped it ...
In 1984, he ran for the Australian Senate as a candidate for the fledgling Nuclear Disarmament Party. Although Garrett won more popular votes than his rival, the major parties colluded to deny him his seat, which was okay with the tall, bald rock singer.
The tune paints a picture of Americans focusing on their own selfish needs amid the Iran-Contra weapons-selling scandal of the Ronald Reagan administration, and it features allusions to gun running and the corrupting influence of money and drugs.
In 1989 I released a record called Big Daddy. That record sold 4 million copies in the first year. On that record is a song called 'Country Gentleman,' a scathing indictment on Ronald Reagan. The last verse is something like" – here Mellencamp breaks into song, a private-concert moment that is both thrilling and a bit unnerving – " 'Country gentleman, there's a bird who flew / High above this nation and preyed upon its weakness / Picked our bones and threw it in a stew / Thank God he went back to California.' You know how much [stuff] I caught for that song? None.'
Growing up in the 80s in New York City, it was a different place, and there were people who wanted to speak out against discrimination of any kind. Everybody was against Reagan, but there were some [of us] who didn't care for the anti-Americanism and wanted to make the country better and some people twisted that into nationalism on like the extreme, far right side.
Bonzo Goes To Washington, the most obscure supergroup ever assembled (a trio with Bootsy Collins and...Daniel Lazerus, whoever that is). The track is called 'Five Minutes,' and it's basically a sample of Ronald Reagan's 'We begin bombing in five minutes' joke speech, with some rudimentary beats and, well, Bootsy Collins.
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: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)Eons ago, when Ronald Reagan was in the first months of his presidency ... there was no such thing as a 24-hour music channel.
The video for "Two Tribes" had a few different versions. However, while "Relax" was completely reshot because of the sexual content, "Two Tribes" was merely re-edited for MTV to remove violence, like the scene where Reagan bites Chernenko's ear. The video — which remains scarily relevant today — was a critical success. "Two Tribes" even hit the height all music videos dream of: It was played several times at the 1984 Democratic National Convention.
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: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link). About.com.I made it clear from day one that he just had to forget it, Mellencamp said at the time. I couldn't bear gettin' involved that way with any politician, least of all Reagan, and corrupt what is essentially a basic, humble dream of contentment he can't even understand.
Both leaders made much of their mutual Irish heritage, and Brian and Mila Mulroney sang "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" with Ronald and Nancy Reagan, a cloying performance that instantly made the phrase "Shamrock Summit" emblematic in Canadian political discourse for the overly close nature of the Canadian-American relationship during the Conservative era.