Opinions - How Trump can push Alt-Right musical taste (that he doesn’t even really like) at his inauguration today

Opinions - How Trump can push Alt-Right musical taste (that he doesn’t even really like) at his inauguration today

Great minds with time on their hands have been trying to understand why America’s overwhelmingly liberal A-listers have refused to perform at Donald Trump’s gala inauguration ceremony tonight. The answer most of them have got is that this litany of liberals would rather listen to The Eagles’ album Hell Freezes Over for eternity than pay obeisance to the Horned One entering a Klan-White House.

Which, if you notice, isn’t much of an answer, since the real question is: Why do most of these creative types like welcoming immigrants, are pro-choice, anti-war, anti-anti-gay, and like strange liberal things such as book-reading and tree-hugging?

But hang on a bit. Is Trump’s inauguration line-up really as ‘empty’ as one is making it out to be? Jackie Evancho, the classical-turned-pop singer is a perfect example of a white middle-class girl being feted for her ‘classical singing talent’ after coming out of the very legitimate arts and culture conservatoire of our times: the reality show.

Times have changed in the music industry and most Americans celebrate talent from shows like America’s Got Talent (a format that Trump himself is a product of). So Evancho may not be Adele or Elton John, but apart from Lutyens’ America, no one cares.

3 Doors Down, another act to perform tonight, is a top-shelf rock band with southern (Mississippi) credentials. They are part of a lineage shared by other southern acts like Kid Rock and Slipknot who make their being ‘less sophisticated’ part of their USP – even as one shouldn’t assume that all of them have Republican leanings.

Toby Keith, another top bill tonight, has all his ‘Trump people’ boxes ticked. A hugely popular country singer, he was once a busker in country music mecca Nashville. He makes country music that has its own ‘white blues’ values and tags scorned by ‘cosmopolitan America’. He’s ‘white trash’ and proud of it, his 2006 album titled White Trash With Money.

Trumped America can give these performers – singing about the American Way of Life, ‘our boys fighting for freedom’, the joys of getting drunk in a (non-Islamic) whisky bar – front-stage for a change. The media machine can do the needful cultural repositioning.

Recall the ‘fight’ in the hoary 1970s between the ‘liberal’ Neil Young and the southern band Lynyrd Skynyrd. Young had broadbrushed the ‘Confederate South’ as ‘redneck’ in his songs ‘Southern Man’ and ‘Alabama Song’. Skynyrd reacted with the glorious ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ – with its pushback lines to answer the condescending, liberal musician: Well, I heard Mr Young sing about her [Alabama]/ Well, I heard old Neil put her down/ Well, I hope Neil Young will remember/ A southern man don’t need him around anyhow.

There are enough acts available today for Trump to build a Skynyrd-type riposte against Young-type liberal, anti-Trump angst. Which, at the same time, will make it easier to put out the ‘we are misunderstood as rednecks’ message.

The last time America was so politico-culturally divided was during Lyndon B Johnson’s tenure. The anti-Vietnam War chorus of ‘Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?’ will surely find a reprise in some form or another during Trump’s term from the usual stages and studios. But there is enough of ‘other music’ that America already listens to for a counter-counter-culture to gain more mainstream visibility over the years.

America’s liberal media’s musical taste isn’t reflected in Middle America, or in those performing at tonight’s gala. Popular music audiences are far more fragmented in today’s post-album-buying world. Which is why the US liberal media – which we consume sitting here – being chuffed at the ‘boycotts’ is Gen X being as nostalgic about their heroes as baby boomers were a few presidential inaugurations ago.

The pity (for Trump, that is) is that Trump’s publicly stated taste in music – essentially classic rock – doesn’t match his clientele’s, but Hillary Clinton’s. For the first time there will be a president who will ‘host’ a gala catering to the taste of his ‘guests’ and not to his own.

The irony is that everything that liberal America hates about Trump boils down to a deep distaste of his voters’ (musical) taste. They won’t even realise the new president’s false foot-tapping tonight.