By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
As the 2024 election cycle drunkenly careens toward November, the Trump campaign has pissed off another musician by co-opting a song for his rallies. We can now add Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr to a list of musicians who have demanded that Trump cease and desist in using their music. The current list includes: Adele, Aerosmith, The Beatles, Springsteen, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Eddy Grant, Sir Elton John, Everlast, Guns N’Roses, Isaac Hayes (Chef!), Leonard Cohen, Linkin Park, Pavarotti, Neil Young, Nickelback, Nico Vega, Ozzy, Panic! At the Disco, Pharrell Williams, Phil Collins, Prince, Queen, R.E.M. Rihanna, The Stones, Tom Petty, The Village People, and The White Stripes. The breadth and talent of that lineup may only be surpassed by Live Aid in London and Philly in 1985.
Using a Smiths’ song is peculiar on a number of levels because the Smiths were only a band for five years (1982-1987), their uniquely morose lyrics largely appealed to a certain white, middle class populace who found it a balm to teenage angst while driving around suburbia in Subarus, and there is no way in hell that Donald Trump’s chauffeur ever popped “Meat is Murder” into the limo’s six-disc changer and said: “Boss, I think this Morrissey guy speaks to your general aesthetic.”
Marr immediately offered a condemnation of Trump playing “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” and released a statement that read: “I never in a million years would’ve thought this could come to pass. Consider this sh*t shut right down right now.”
Like Marr, I never thought any song I once heard on radio station WHFS would be part of a Trump campaign rally, but I also once thought Reagan was better suited for Bonzo movies than head of the free world. My initial thought was that it was a clever joke being played by a disgruntled member of the Trump campaign, but I’m pretty certain that, at least at Mary Washington College, one of the questions on the entrance exam to the Young Republicans club was do you have any posters on your walls of Morrissey with or without his shirt on? My point being that someone within the campaign, aged 48 to 58 white, male, and without a liberal arts degree, is deep under cover if that song was a plant to amuse woke Gen-Xers.
The use of “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” has obvious context for the megalomaniac that is Donald Trump, but the Smiths’ catalog of songs has so many other appropriate options that the campaign could have considered:
- “Big Mouth Strikes Again” (1986)—This one is so obvious and so spot on that my editor is likely to argue that I’m not really writing and more or less just listing songs. To that end, I would retort that I also opened this column by more or less just listing musicians and bands too.
- “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” (1984)—Once upon a time, Donald Trump and Howard Stern were amicable toward one another and Trump appeared on Stern’s radio show often. It was a more innocent time when Trump was simply calling his daughter “a piece of ass” and had been indicted zero times. Stern thought Trump running for President was a publicity stunt, but when he won Stern speculated on how miserable Trump was going to be in the White House. Four indictments and 91 felonies later, heaven knows.
- “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me” (1987)—Trump has dreamt about a lot of things–largest inauguration crowd in the history of the United States and about a parade with lots of tanks and with lots of troops saluting him. He also seems to conflate love with bedding Playmates and porn stars, so I’m certain when he hugged the American flag he dreamed it hugged him back.
- “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before” (1987)—Have you heard this joke before: A man walks into a bar and grabs a woman by her… which is simply engaging in locker room talk. I am comfortable with saying that the only locker room that Trump may have visited that I’ve also visited is the locker room at the Atlantic City Country Club. We (my soon-to-be married buddy Greg and his friends, not Trump) were in AC for a bachelor party and were playing a round of golf, but I assure you that our locker room talk was “Wow, Ron Jaworski has his own locker. This must be a fancy course.” And my friend Drew, being very excited that he got to play with a forecaddie for the first time in his life, thinking it would improve his golf game dramatically. It didn’t.
- “Still Ill” (1984)—It’s like Morrissey predicted the Orange Prince of Darkness 40 years ago when he sings, “I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving…But ask me why and I’ll spit in your eye.” It appears to be how Trump handles the bills from his legal counsel and contractors. Morrissey later asks if he’s still ill? Well, if the measure of illness is being able to identify horseys and piggies in a competency test then he most certainly is not still ill.
- “You’re the One for Me, Fatty” (1992, Morrissey solo album)—So I’m cheating here a little bit by straying into the Morrissey solo catalog, but I did not want to neglect a song from the perspective of former first lady Melania.
There are certainly a number of other Smith songs that would work at Trump rallies, but I had to use up a substantial amount of column space on the musicians he has pissed off. A list that is destined to grow in the coming months.
