The Top Ten Campaign Songs of the Presidential Race so Far!
America hasn’t been able to touch the remote following the presidential campaign since Mitt Romney said he was running back in 2002, but the bloggers here are not entirely sure how much you’ve been keeping up with what’s been happening on the tubes– the YouTubes, that is– and the wonderful acoustic productions that have been put up there since. Thanks the advent of technology, the hobos on your street corner that think they’re musicians now have an international platform on which to broadcast their “art!”
Has your Justin Timberlake collection fried your brain and exhausted your patience? Need a new playlist to replace the soundtrack to “El Cantante” that has been on repeat since February? Have no fear! Here we provide you with ten of the catchiest masterpieces of political pop to have come out of this national nightmare since the days when everyone thought Al Gore was going to come back from the (political) dead and force us all to plant trees.
In no particular order:
1. “Hillary ‘Pa Los Hispanos,” Johnny Canales. For the past decade or so, Democratic capture of the most ignorant factions of minority populations has been nothing short of a national joke, and America’s Latino population the punchline (needless to say that with the advents of naturalization and effective bilingual education, this is no longer a case). Since, of course, Hillary Clinton’s life is still existing in a small micro-climate circa 1992, she thought she had the Latino vote in the bag, and instead of presenting the minority- almost the nation’s largest- with a tangible platform on what her presidency will be like, she wrote this Mexicanized fantasy piece where Johnny Canales assures his paisanos that Bill Clinton’s experience somehow translates into Hillary’s, too! I guess the joke was on her and her astronomical campaign debt.
2. “Yes We Can”- Will.I.Am featuring random celebrities: Will.I.Am, a rapper/noisemaker who had previously done nothing of positive note with his obnoxious band, the Black-Eyed Peas, somehow found it in himself to raise the bar on supporter-generated campaign music by, rather than coming up with stupid lyrics and singing himself, just taking one of Barack Obama’s genial speeches and putting it to an acoustic guitar and some politically aware singers that are better than him. I have no idea what it is exactly that “yes, we can” do, but that doesn’t change the fact that by the end of the song I’m sobbing hysterically and yelling “God Bless America!”
3. “The Ron Paul Song,” Anonymous (?): Picking just one Ron Paul cult song was a heart-wrenching decision (the population of the Ron Paul seems to entirely consist of bad guitarists with a YouTube obsession). But this one has a catchy synthesizer and the drug-induced stupor that the girl in the beginning of the video is experiencing seems to epitomize the entire Paul campaign best.
4. “Lean on Fred,” Edward Daley: Like “It’s Raining McCain,” this isn’t an original song, so it shouldn’t be here, but it’s fairly creative and also the only song anyone ever bothered to put together about Fred Thompson, who, like Obama, didn’t really have a platform, except he didn’t have enthusiasm, youth or ethnicity to push him through. And he was older than John McCain, meaning he was visibly decomposing during the debates.
5. “I’ve Got a Crush on Obama (Remix),” Obama Girl featuring Mike Gravel. The same tune, the same annoying average-looking girl in bikinis, but this time ex-presidential candidate Mike gravel of Alaska makes the whole experience much more palatable. That and the Anderson Cooper cameo appearance.
