How Grace Slick tricked capitalism to triumph LGBTQ rights
In 2012, it emerged that Chick-fil-A’s CEO, Dan T. Cathy, had made a series of comments publicly opposing gay marriage, and reports started surfacing that Chick-fil-A’s charitable arm, the WinShape Foundation, had donated millions to organisations that were directly hostile to the LGBT community. Horrified activists called for boycotts, but the company never really felt the financial sting of them, and while a cultural war broke out between homophobic chicken sandwich lovers and gay rights protestors, Grace Slick sat waiting in the wings to put things right.
When Starship’s 1986 hit ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’ rang out over Chick-fil-A adverts in the 2017 Grammys broadcast, many viewers were confused. In their time, Starship had been a pivotal band in the acid-fuelled music scene of San Francisco, not exactly famous for its conservative values. Joining forces with a right-leaning fast food chain seemed just about the opposite of what they should be doing. It was like Mary Whitehouse endorsing the Sex Pistols.
After various accusations of selling out were made, Slick put everyone straight in a Forbes op-ed. By the time they’d read the line: “Chick-fil-A pisses me off,” it was clear this was done with the calculated precision of someone who was once able to work out the perfect number of Quaaludes to take avoid a hangover the next day.
As Slick pointed out, it wasn’t the first time she’d licensed her music for an advert. “In 1967, Jefferson Airplane wrote a psychedelic jingle about white rabbits jeans that’s a damn classic,” she wrote. But the Chick-fil-A opportunity was far more thorny than the Levi’s one, but she admitted she didn’t “immediately” tell them to go fuck themselves, sensing her own involvement actually stood more chance of helping the LGBTQ community than not.
“So that was my voice you heard on the Chick-fil-A commercial during the Grammy Awards telecast,” she admitted. “I am donating every dime that I make from that ad to Lambda Legal, the largest national legal organization working to advance the civil rights of LGBTQ people, and everyone living with HIV.”
While her quiet defiance was genius, she admitted it wouldn’t make the millions that WinShape had given to organisations that insisted marriage was reserved for heterosexual couples. “But,” she added, “Instead of them replacing my song with someone else’s and losing this opportunity to strike back at anti-LGBTQ forces, I decided to spend the cash in direct opposition to ‘Check’-fil-A’s causes – and to make a public example of them, too. We’re going to take some of their money, and pay it back.”
In yet another example of the genius of Grace Slick, she turned a pro-LGBT protest into a message about artist integrity. “See, I come from a time when artists didn’t just sell their soul to the highest bidder,” she wrote. “When musicians took a stand, when the message of songs was ‘feed your head‘, not ‘feed your wallet’. We need that kind of artistic integrity today, more than ever.”
