Without a Pandemic, How Would the Music World Have Organized Against Trump?
Remember when the presidential race felt like one endless music festival? It was eight months ago, or maybe a century. The Strokes lit up New Hampshire for Bernie Sanders on the eve of the primary there. John Legend aligned forces with Elizabeth Warren. Pete Buttigieg, short on musical endorsements, took matters into his own hands with a Spoon cover. At one point, Sanders rallies began to feel like indie showcases, with the septuagenarian senator enthusiastically enunciating names like Ratboys and Soccer Mommy as though bragging to friends about his grandkid’s band.
The 2020 election seemed poised to include a historic outpouring of energy and involvement from musicians committed to removing Donald Trump from office. Then came March, and the end of live music as we knew it. All that energy, abruptly deflated by dread and disaster.
It was “devastating,” says Caleb Wilson, who was the deputy director of surrogates and head of talent partnerships for Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. “For me, it was the culmination of five years coming to an abrupt [stop]. Like, we’re flying so high, and then overnight it’s just this one giant crash. It jolts the soul.”
It jolts the concert industry, too. A brutal irony of 2020 is that the Trump administration’s mishandling of the pandemic and subsequent crippling of live music (which likely won’t return in recognizable form for another year or more) has also sabotaged the music community’s ability to effectively mobilize voters to boot Trump out of the White House. Virtual fundraisers? Livestream concerts? Those are fine, and a present necessity, as major names like Foo Fighters, Pink, and Cher currently do what they can to fire up voters from afar. “If anything, I think this virtual environment has allowed us to bring in more performers and artists, because we’re able to use people in a more creative, virtual way,” says Adrienne Elrod, Joe Biden’s director of surrogate strategy and operations.
But for music fans, it’s not quite the same. “For me, you can never replace live events online,” says Wilson.
What if we didn’t have to? What does the music industry’s election mobilization look like in the alternate universe where the pandemic never happened? Would the music community be more intensely involved in the 2020 election than any election in U.S. history? Would Cardi B be running around with Biden on the campaign trail instead of on Zoom? Would bands like Sleater-Kinney or Green Day have been railing against Trumpism on their summer tours? Could Sanders have snagged the nomination with a little help from some boomer musician pals who aren’t afraid of socialism?
Honestly, who the hell knows? But it’s fun to imagine. So, inspired by Vulture’s “Year of Movies That Never Was,” here’s a glimpse into the alternate timeline where the pandemic never happened and pop stars could get involved without the glare of a Zoom screen standing in the way. Whichever timeline you live in, please do vote.
A newly radicalized Taylor Swift drags Trump during her Lover Fest tour
Instead of holing up and recording folklore (which doesn’t exist in this universe—it disappears into the ether like those family photos in Back to the Future), Taylor Swift would have spent the summer of 2020 filling up NFL stadiums and outdoor parks in support of last year’s Lover. It would have been one of the biggest summer tours of the concert year that never was, and it would have offered a large-scale testing ground for Swift’s newfound political voice. Even before the pandemic hit, she seemed to be preparing her fanbase for a newly political persona, belatedly addressing her liberal views (and regret for not coming out against Trump in 2016) in the Miss Americana documentary. Later, during the unrest following George Floyd’s murder, she blasted the president for stoking white supremacy.
All available evidence suggests that Swift’s eagerness to enter the political fray during an election year would have had some impact on the Lover Fest tour, but how? Would she have partnered with a GOTV organization to set up voter registration tables and register Gen Z en masse? Would she have digressed into well-rehearsed exhortations against the president’s racism in between bangers? Would she have welcomed a Timberlands-clad Kamala Harris to the stage for a duet of “Style”? Would she have rebranded “Dear John” as an anti-Trump screed called “Dear Don”? We’ll never know.
Bon Iver rallies Wisconsin voters with a series of home-state concerts
Although Bon Iver head-honcho Justin Vernon was all in for Bernie, forever ago, the band announced a series of shows in February that were set to take place this month in their home swing state of Wisconsin, to spur voter turnout regardless of the nominee. The concerts obviously didn’t happen—but what if they had? Likely, Bon Iver would have performed a mix of recent material, like new track “Things Behind Things Behind Things,” and old favorites. They would assuredly not have performed “exile,” Vernon’s duet with Taylor Swift, because—again—folklore doesn’t exist in this timeline.
Caleb Wilson, the ex-Sanders staffer, concurs that Wisconsin, which Hillary Clinton narrowly lost to Trump, would have been a key destination for musicians. “We would have probably seen a massive Wisconsin Biden-Harris event,” Wilson says. “You would have had Justin Vernon headlining that, and I think Carole King. She’s an incredibly supportive Democratic party artist—her and James Taylor. They’re literally writing emails for Biden-Harris right now. They would have absolutely lent their pedigree to these large-format experiential shows.”
The “46 for 46” initiative brings buzzy concerts to every other swing state, too
One of the largest drivers of live music activism would have been the “46 for 46” campaign, an ambitious initiative spearheaded last year by artist managers Kyle Frenette and Christopher Moon. The idea was fairly simple: 46 different concerts in 46 crucial states leading up to the election. As Billboard reported, “Primarily designed to target voters in the swing states that went for Trump in 2016, 46 for 46 entails recruiting artists who either hail from or live in those states—or who at least have some association with them.” That piece, written several thousand years ago in 2019, cites Bon Iver as a confirmed participant, as well as Sylvan Esso (who would have played North Carolina) and Dashboard Confessional (Florida). “46 for 46” in its current form is instead organizing a strong slate of private virtual concerts and hangouts. The crown-jewel prize is a trip to see Bon Iver live in Sydney in 2021, which is pretty much the “I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island” of indie-rock boasts.
There’s a boomer-friendly, Vote for Change-style tour winding its way through the country
Remember the Vote for Change tour? It united a mix of classic rockers and then-young bands like Death Cab for Cutie under a liberal, MoveOn.com-presented banner during the fraught lead-up to the 2004 election. The 2020 equivalent would also be an intergenerational affair, bringing together boomer artists beloved by millennials, like Vote for Change headliner Bruce Springsteen, alongside millennial artists embraced by boomers, like, say, Vampire Weekend or Lizzo, who is presently campaigning for Biden in Detroit. (And Gen X acts, too—perhaps the now-vindicated Chicks.) Like the 2004 tour, the contemporary version would be ostensibly non-partisan, but obviously motivated by anti-Trump sentiment on the part of both audience and performers. Chris Christie would attend one date to catch Springsteen’s set, but he’d wear a disguise and hang near the back so Trump doesn’t find out.
Bernie Sanders travels the summer festival circuit
By late February, the Vermont senator’s campaign for president was already starting to feel like a rolling music festival. So it’s no great shock to imagine Sanders would have made cameos at actual music festivals—whether campaigning for himself or for Biden—if music festivals were a thing that actually existed in 2020.
“Before the campaign conceded and the pandemic hit hard, I was talking with Desert Daze,” says Wilson. “They had sort of said, ‘Hey, we’d love for Bernie to come out to take the main stage at some point and give remarks.’ I was talking with folks that were involved with the Governors Ball Music Festival about Bernie coming out.” Several indie bands who had participated as cultural surrogates in the Sanders campaign, including Portugal. The Man, had even reached out and expressed interest in having the senator join their festival sets.
Bernie also gets his own music festival
Well, maybe if he had been the nominee (a different alternate universe entirely). Early in the primary season, Wilson sat down with Paul Tollett, the president and CEO of Coachella organizer Goldenvoice, to talk about organizing a major West Coast musical happening around the senator. “This vision that was laid out before us was: Could we do some sort of iconic, like, ‘Bernchella’-style event?” says Wilson. “Could it be something that we host in the Rose Bowl, just to give you an idea of scale. How can we really celebrate the grassroots and try and get hundreds of thousands of people together?”
There’s some actual hip-hop at the Democratic National Convention
Hip-hop was mostly absent from this year’s DNC lineup, save for a brief Common cameo slotted into a John Legend performance. That’s probably because the convention was, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it, overwhelmingly geared towards “white moderates who aren’t sure who they’re voting for.” Or because the DNC remains oriented in a white cultural space, where politicians call upon rappers once every four years when they need Black voters.
But there was also the format of the DNC. Rap is great live, but it doesn’t always translate well to the livestream age—the genre thrives on crowd interaction and energy, and that’s lost in the virtual sphere. Still, plenty of prominent rappers (at least those over 40) have been willing to pitch in and help Biden’s campaign: Ludacris and Jermaine Dupri have participated in ads focused on Black voters, and even hip-hop revolutionary Chuck D has expressed enthusiasm for Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris as veep candidate. (Never mind that Harris seems confused about which rappers are alive and which ones died in 1996.) Without a pandemic, it’s reasonable to imagine more rap at the DNC, and more hip-hop events in general surrounding the ticket—all the better to drown out the circus roar of Kanye West’s presidential run (or whatever it is that Lil Wayne is doing).
Eddie Vedder dons a Trump mask during Pearl Jam’s Gigaton world tour
Back in 2003, Eddie Vedder frequently wore a rubber George W. Bush mask while performing the anti-Dubya cut “Bu$hleaguer.” In an alternate universe, Pearl Jam would have spent much of this year touring behind Gigaton, their comeback album released at the dawn of quarantine. It almost certainly would have been the liberal band’s most politically charged tour since the Riot Act era. It’s easy to imagine Vedder delivering Trump-baiting zingers like “Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse they forged the north and west/Then you got Sitting Bullshit as our sitting president” to raucous cheers, or splicing in socially pertinent covers like the Clash’s “Know Your Rights,” or perhaps even donning a Trump mask if he’s feeling nostalgic. (Meanwhile, in the real world, the band recently supported the Biden ticket by hosting a virtual conversation with Biden and Harris’s respective spouses.)
Rage Against the Machine spends the summer raging against the white supremacist machine
If 2020 weren’t the worst possible year for Rage Against the Machine to roll out a reunion tour, it would have been the best possible year. The rap-rock outfit spent the Clinton ’90s—years of historic apathy and political disengagement—mounting a four-man attack on white supremacy and American imperialism one funk riff at a time. During 2020’s long summer of protest and police brutality, “Killing in the Name” and “Sleep Now in the Fire” would have assumed renewed urgency as Rage, accompanied by tourmates Run the Jewels, toured the U.S. and the festival circuit. Concert videos of the band covering MC5 or inserting George Floyd or Breonna Taylor’s names into song lyrics would have made blog headlines. It’s easy to imagine Rage supporting the ACLU and imploring fans to vote, but harder to imagine these leftists rallying whole-heartedly around the Biden-Harris ticket—Tom Morello has openly expressed ambivalence towards the nominee, and Zack de la Rocha’s lyrics implicitly critique decades of corporatist centrism.
Pro-Trump rockers go full MAGA at the Republican National Convention
In 2017, Trump’s team was so hard-pressed to find pro-Trump musical acts that they were forced to settle for washed-up Nickelback soundalikes 3 Doors Down to play at Trump’s inauguration weekend. Three years later, there are a few more openly pro-MAGA rockers willing to lend support. Imagine if the RNC had been allowed to fill up an indoor arena in Charlotte, N.C., as originally planned. Kid Rock, an occasional guest at Trump’s White House, would be high on the list of potential performers—perhaps alongside other Trump-friendly musicians, like Ted Nugent or Mike Love’s sad incarnation of the Beach Boys, which recently performed at a Trump fundraiser (much to Brian Wilson’s dismay). Throughout the convention, David Crosby would entertain his Twitter followers by calling Mike Love a “shithead” or a “prime flaming asshole.” Which, to be fair, is what he’s doing in real life, too.
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
