SHOULD we be afraid of Americans, as Bowie sang in the 1990s, or expect anarchy in the USA, to paraphrase the Sex Pistols? Donald Trump is back for a second term, and it could become a presidency of dissonance, a kind of vaudeville requiem for a lot of us.
In the next four years he and his donor and Department of Government Efficiency head, Elon Musk, could after all end up disrupting everything from the American economy and democracy, to climate change, Canada, Panama and Greenland, Britain and Germany, the football club Liverpool FC, and the music business.
Donald Trump certainly likes a good tune. His 2024 election campaign was steeped in music with more or less positive messages – from gay anthem YMCA to Beyonce’s Freedom, even though many of these musicians have been less than enthusiastic about Trump using their songs, including David Bowie’s son. Trump has used Bowie’s Heroes, Rebel Rebel and Starman.
The south London born-and-bred singer had dreamt of America as a young man, and ended up living in the US for many years. Bowie died in 2016, before Trump took office for his first presidency, but he had lived in New York, not far from Trump Tower. ”By the time I got to New York/ I was living like a king,” Bowie sang on his swansong, Lazarus.
Trump called Bowie “a great talent” and “a great guy” after the British singer died, and Bowie specifically refers to America in several of his songs. “It's on America’s tortured brow/ that Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow/ .../ Oh, man, look at those cavemen go/ It’s the freakiest show”, he sings in Life On Mars, allegedly a parody of Sinatra’s “My Way.”
“Blossom fails to bloom this season/ promise not to stare too long/ this is not America/ for this is not the miracle,” he sings in This Is Not America from the mid-1980s.
And when Bowie critiques contemporary America, where “God is American,” “Johnny” wants an absurd American dream of a brain, coke and a woman, combs his hair, “wants pussy in cars,” and the protagonist is “afraid of Americans” in the mid-1990s song I’m Afraid Of Americans, it sounds like something someone could have written about Trump and his MAGA-crowd in the press.
In the Tin Machine song, Under The God from 1989, Bowie sings of “Washington heads in the toilet bowl,” who don’t have the foresight to “see supremacist hate” and “right-wing dicks in their boiler suits/ Picking out who to annihilate.” Is this not a prediction of both American extremism becoming mainstream, and seemingly indifferent mainstream politicians?
Bowie also seems to predict the Muskian social media world we now live in, when he spoke to the BBC in 1999. “I think the potential for what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we are actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying... It’s an alien life form. Is there life on Mars? Yes, it’s just landed here,” he told Jeremy Paxman.
He goes on to describe how the traditional media will be disrupted, “where the interplay of user and provider will be so in sympatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.”
Trump used Space Oddity as a walk-in song for Elon Musk despite the fact that Bowie revisited Space Oddity’s space hero Major Tom in Ashes To Ashes, where Tom is now a junkie trapped in space, singing: “My mother said, to get things done/ You'd better not mess with Major Tom.”
Both Elon Musk and Donald Trump have become cult figures in our brave new world, and have both been referenced in a number of songs.
Johnny Ryall by Beastie Boys (“Donald Trump and Donald Tramp living in the men’s shelter”) and Sick Of You by Lou Reed (“And I’m sick of it, I’m sick of You, they ordained the Trumps, and then he got the mumps”) in the ’80s, and by the godfather of punk, Iggy Pop, who sang about how “Grandfather’s dead/ Got Trump instead/ Oh what a crime/ I’m losin’ my mind” in his 2020 song, Dirty Little Virus.
And Musk in songs by artists such as Tyler the Creator and Magzim, who sings about getting paid like Elon Musk, in a song named after the billionaire. Musk has even released an electronic dance track to rather mixed reviews.
Not exactly the type of rock music that — at best — could define and speak of and to youth, rebellion as well as a sense of togetherness. But (mainstream) rock is on a downward trajectory at present and many young Americans (especially young men) voted for Trump, as former Sex Pistols singer, John Lydon (aka punk legend Johnny Rotten, who wrote “Anarchy in the UK”), says he has also done.
Lydon wrote in his biography that present-day bands have “No bollocks. No guts. They’re all young, bored, and fed up with their lives. But they don’t sing about it. They don’t do anything to change it.”
Perhaps we need a new Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Johnny Rotten or Joe Strummer to remind us and help us digest what a time of upheaval and crisis sounds like musically.
Strummer, who died 22 years ago, condemned aspects of US politics and society such as the Vietnam War, dictator patronage and political corruption, singing about how he was “So bored with the USA/ But what can I do?” during the British punk years of the 1970s.
In 2004, German band Rammstein satirised global Americanisation by singing about a “wunderbar” “Amerika” — a global policeman leading by way of music “aus dem Weissen Haus” (from the White House) that we are all bound to dance to.
It is time we stopped singing and dancing along.