How politics and music intertwine on the campaign trail
Gov. Ned Lamont is often seen wearing a Grateful Dead-themed belt. It features one of the images most associated with the band, a line of multicolored dancing bears.
His reelection campaign doubled-down on that with a sticker that evokes the popular group. It’s commonly called the “steal your face” logo, but in Lamont’s case, instead of a stylized red and blue skull bisected by a lightning bolt, it’s the outline of the state of Connecticut.
The words “Ned Head” declare the sticker’s political leanings.
In linking himself to a well known and well liked band in the minds of voters, experts say Lamont is drawing on an age-old strategy intended to make candidates feel approachable, and perhaps encourage some potential voters to cast ballots.
Politics and popular music have gone hand-inhand for a long time, according to Scott McLean, a professor of politics at Quinnipiac University.
“I studied how Frank Sinatra would sing songs for John F. Kennedy’s campaign,” he said. “This has been around a long time.”
But the real question, he said, is whether a politician’s association with music can change a voter’s mind. McLean said probably not.
“I’m not sure it’s changing minds,” he said. “It’s more of a reinforcement thing. So, if I like Bruce Springsteen, and he likes Biden, maybe I’ll decide, ‘Oh, Joe Biden’s okay,’ where I might have had some doubts. Some of the doubts are being addressed by someone I admire.”
It’s the same as any endorsement, McLean said, including “newspaper endorsements or celebrity endorsements of candidates.”
“They don’t really change anyone’s mind so much as they reinforce what someone wants to already think,” he said.
McLean said a political campaign’s goal is “to build a kind of connection between one kind of product you like, which is the music and the artist, and the other kind of thing you like, which is the party or the candidate, and making them connect somehow psychologically for people.”
Sharing a candidate’s taste in music can also make them seem more relatable.
“It tells you something about him other than the person who’s giving a press conference or who is behind the governor’s podium, that this is a real person with interests,” McLean said, though it depends “on what the band is.”
“I think the Grateful Dead still has a kind of mystique about it, even today,” he said.
Lamont campaign spokeswoman Onotse Omoyeni said the governor is not “pretending” to like the band. His enjoyment, she said, is genuine.
“Gov. Lamont doesn’t pretend to be someone he’s not, so the dancing bears always come along for the ride,” she said. “The governor still has the original Grateful Dead vinyls he got as a kid, and his collection has grown to include new music he hears on the road. He jams out behind the scenes and isn’t scared to rock the mic on stage.”
An email to Bob Stefanowski’s campaign, who is running against Lamont on the Republican ticket, asking the candidate’s musical preferences, went unanswered.
Getting out the vote
McLean said the association between a musician and a politician is most powerful in convincing potential voters to actually register and head to the polls.
“That’s especially important in our system right now,” he said. “Because voter turnout is really the name of the game.”
It’s something Andy Bernstein, executive director of a group known as Headcount, knows something about.
Headcount is nonpartisan and is not associated with the Lamont campaign. The organization runs getout-the-vote events at live music venues.
The group got started 18 years ago touring along on the jam band circuit.
“When we started it was very much in the jam band scene. That’s where we came from,” Bernstein said. “We toured that summer with Phish and The Dead, who were touring that summer under the name of The Dead, and also Dave Matthews Band and a lot of other smaller jam bands.”
Since then, they’ve branched out. They’ve worked with modern musicians like Lizzo and Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish. Bernstein said that though they might have a good showing at a Dead show (they’re now called Dead and Co.) they do try and work at concerts aimed at younger voters.
“We’re trying to go where there are young people and we’re trying to work with artists that are most relevant among young people,” he said. “There’s a lot of opportunities out there. There’s always a new artist emerging.”
Bernstein said that music and politics are connected through identity and community: “Music is a great unifier and it’s also a real identity driver.” He said Ariana Grande is a good example.
Headcount works with Grande, and is often mentioned on her social media, which means “you know, that Ari cares about this stuff deeply,” Bernstein said. “I don’t know if it’s necessarily that an Ariana
Grande fan is more likely on day one to be politically aligned with Ariana Grande but it’s that if you are a big fan, you know that this is really important to Ari,” he said. “It’s part of the fan experience, and hopefully it gets you to become a more likely voter.”
Before pop
Music has been at the nexus of identity, politics and culture long before Ariana Grande, or even the Grateful Dead, and it’s not necessarily limited to pop music.
Elizabeth Sallinger is a visiting professor in music history at the University of Connecticut, specializing in the politics of musical theater.
She said very often the politics embedded in a musical are not very overt. Take “Porgy and Bess,” for example, which takes place in a Black neighborhood in 1920s Charleston, S.C.
When the opera was first performed in the United States, composed Ira Gershwin famously and controversially said that that only Black singers should play lead roles. “You’re looking at social structures in that musical, but you had something like ‘Of Thee I Sing,’ which is about politicians and kind of being a little ridiculous and examining how their political messages were conveyed,” she said.
Multiple Tony-award winning musical “Hamilton,” directly confronted issues of politics and identity, and when then-Vice President Pence came to see the show, cast members read what some considered a politically charged statement, drawing ire from conservatives.
Before “Hamilton” there was “Hair,” which Sallinger said directly challenged societal norms.
“It was just a very inyour-face show that was discussing how people felt and how people reacted to other things like drugs and being really open about sexuality, to the point where it caused the show to be banned in some places,” Sallinger said.
Before “Hair” there was “The Pirates of Penzance.” That show, now 143 years old, “made fun of behaviors and English society and loyalty to the Queen above all else,” Sallinger said.
Before Gilbert and Sullivan, Sallinger said there were other bits of societal and political commentary put to music, perhaps for as long as there have been musical performances.
“You can see that stretching pretty far back,” Sallinger said. “Other predecessors of modern musical theater had political messages to them, too. And I guess, if you wanted to look even farther back in time, pretty much as long as you had people writing songs, writing shows, writing other pieces of music, there’s often some sort of reactionary element to them.”