From Kate Bush to Morrissey: the 10 best songs inspired by politicians
Politics and music have opposing roles in culture, with a portion of those who make up the latter often needing the former to exist. They share a unique relationship, and the two realms should never get too close because the role of political artists is to speak truth to power, rather than to cosying up too close.
Bar the occasional exception, the entries listed below were crafted to show an artist’s dissatisfaction with a political figure rather than bow down to them. While there are one or two anomalies to the rule, few great songs about politicians are endorsements, and instead, music should be a tool to highlight their flaws.
Billy Bragg once told High Profiles about the art of being a political singer-songwriter and said: “I try and write songs that bring a different perspective to any issue. Whether it’s politics or relationships, I’m trying to cover an angle no one else has covered – and the best ones to me are the ones where politics and love overlap. If I can do that in a song, I’m really pleased about that.”
While many of the songs in this article are about a specific politician, there’s also another meaning to be mined by the listener. This element gives the creations wider, universal importance, as Bragg highlighted in his aforementioned comment.
See the list below.
The 10 best songs inspired by politicians:
‘Exhuming McCarthy’ – R.E.M.
When R.E.M. delved into the political sphere with ‘Exhuming McCarthy’, they made a statement about the current state of play by visiting the tale of Joe McCarthy, a prominent Republican senator during the Cold War. He single-handedly made politics a mud-slinging contest, and his presence can sadly still be felt today. McCarthy was a figure who loved to divide opinon, and in that sense, he was ahead of his time.
At the height of ‘Reaganomics’ in 1987, R.E.M. thought it fitting to revisit his story and explore how he was a precursor to modern politics. “Look who bought the myth, by jingo, buy America,” Michael Stipe sings on the track. “Michael is really concerned — we all are — about this neo-conservative wave in America,” Mike Mills told the Globe and Mail in 1987 of the track. “With all the repression of personal freedoms, the knee-jerk reactionism, it’s the sort of atmosphere old Joe [McCarthy] would fit well into. Hence, the song.”
‘John Sinclair’ – John Lennon
John Sinclair isn’t a standard politician. During his younger days, he was an enemy of the state due to his association with the anti-racist political organisation, The White Panther Party. Sinclair entered John Lennon’s radar after being ridiculously sentenced to ten years in prison after passing two marijuana joints to undercover female police offers.
After his sentencing in 1969, there was uproar nationwide, and news of his story reached Lennon, who wrote ‘John Sinclair’ as a tribute to the prisoner. The former Beatle performed the track at a rally for Sinclair in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which made the story of his imprisonment even bigger. Only two days after the rally, Sinclair was released on December 13th, 1971. Fittingly, he was one of the first people who legally bought marijuana in Michigan upon legalisation in 2019.
‘Heartland’ – The The
For most people, Britain in the 1980s was a dismal period as Margaret Thatcher attempted to restructure the nation’s fabric and tear apart industry at an alarming rate. While some benefitted from her decisions, it was at the expense of the ordinary Brit. Matt Johnson from The The was livid by her actions and felt compelled to write ‘Heartland’ in 1986’s Infected about Mrs Thatcher.
On the track, Johnson angrily sings: “But the stains on the heartland, can never be removed, From this country that’s sick, sad, and confused”. He also calls the UK “the 51st state of the USA” and later said of the song on The The’s website: “I suppose in a way that song was ahead of its time because the Americanization of Britain seems to have accelerated rapidly since then. You see and read about it commented on more and more, just about how much our little island is really losing or has lost.”
‘Margaret On The Guillotine’ – Morrissey
Once upon a time, Morrissey’s politics were yet to become despicable, and similarly to The The’s Matt Johnson, he hated Margaret Thatcher. In typical Morrissey fashion, he expressed his opinion by releasing a track titled, ‘Margaret On The Guillotine’, in 1988. In the wake of the song’s release, the singer claims he was brought in for questioning by the Special Branch, who feared he’d genuinely kill Thatcher.
When she died in 2013, Morrissey said: “In truth, of course, no British politician has ever been more despised by the British people than Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher’s funeral on Wednesday will be heavily policed for fear that the British tax-payer will want to finally express their view of Thatcher. They are certain to be tear-gassed out of sight by the police. United Kingdom? Syria? China? What’s the difference?”
‘Heads We’re Dancing’ – Kate Bush
While Kate Bush’s ‘Heads We’re Dancing’ is a piece of fiction about Adolf Hitler, it’s also partly inspired by a true story she was told by a friend. Bush explained to Q in 1989 how a friend of hers had attended a dinner party and grown close to a stranger, who she later discovered was J. Robert Oppenheimer, who invented the atomic bomb.
This tale got Bush’s mind racing, as she explained to the same publication: “I thought, Who’s the worst person you could possibly meet in those circumstances? Hitler! And the story developed. A woman at a dance before the war and this guy comes up to her tossing a coin with this cocky chat-up line. Heads we’re dancing. She doesn’t recognise him until she sees his face in the paper later on and then she’s devastated. She thinks that if she’d known she might have been able to get him and change the course of history. But he was a person who fooled a tremendous number of people and I don’t think they can be blamed. It worries me a bit that this song could be received wrongly, though.”
‘The Warmth Of The Sun’ – The Beach Boys
When The Beach Boys wrote ‘The Warmth Of The Sun’, it had nothing to do with the world of politics. However, by the time they recorded it, the world had changed following the assassination of President Kennedy, which sent shockwaves across America. Following the devastating news, the band couldn’t think of anything else during the session, and the mood completely shifted the song’s tone.
Mike Love told SongFacts: “Brian (Wilson) and I wrote that together in November of 1963. And the reason I remember it was that we woke up in the morning to the news that President Kennedy had been shot and was on his way to Parkland Memorial Hospital. We all know the result of that incident. But it was such a haunting, melancholy, sad musical composition, the music was. And the only thing I could relate to in terms of lyrics was the loss of someone you love.”
‘Let’s Impeach The President’ – Neil Young
Neil Young has never hidden his feelings towards President George W. Bush, who represented everything he hated. ‘Let’s Impeach The President’ was the most explicit track on his 2006 album, Living with War, which demonstrated Young’s feelings on Bush, and his improper conduct in Iraq. He sings on the effort, “Let’s impeach the president for lyin’, Misleading our country into war, Abusing all the power that we gave him.”
Meanwhile, during a discussion with Rolling Stone about the song, Young said: “A political song about something that’s so wrong that the only way to point out how wrong it is is by doing a song that’s wrong – smashing and pounding away at it. A lot of people criticised it as a crappy song, that it was such a terrible melody. You want a melody that pisses people off, that’s so stupid and repetitive that it aggravates people.”
‘Bushleaguer’ – Pearl Jam
Remaining on the theme of President George W. Bush, Pearl Jam also shared their discontent towards the controversial politician on ‘Bushleaguer’. The track was released in 2002 and appeared on their album Riot Act. During one performance of the song at a show in Denver, Eddie Vedder wore a mask of Bush and mimicked him before taking it off to sing. As this act was at the start of the Iraq War, Vedder was criticised by the Bush supporters in their audience, who booed his actions and felt it was unpatriotic.
Vedder once told Relix of Bush ahead of the election in 2004: “What’s important right now is to dispel this myth that somehow Bush, Jr. is a man of the people. I really don’t understand it, because he is fairly inept at communicating, and somehow that brings him down to an average working-class level? I don’t believe that. I think his inability to communicate on the issues has to do with the fact that he doesn’t know much about them. He hasn’t had the same kind of struggles that most people have had.”
‘Corporation’ – Jack White
Jack White isn’t a particularly political songwriter, but the presidency of Donald Trump turned him into one. For White, it was heartbreaking to see the face of corporate America represent his country on the global stage and have the keys to the Oval Office. After Trump was elected, White responded with a scathing critique of Trump’s America on ‘Corporation’, which appeared on 2018’s Boarding House Reach.
“I just walked out there and started singing whatever came in to my head and, shockingly, the first think I thought of was Donald Trump,” he told The Sun (via SongFacts). “He symbolises everything that’s bad right now, especially in America. ‘Corporation’ may be a household word in the house he grew up in, whereas in the houses most Americans grew up, that’s a pipe dream. You can’t just start a corporation.”
White added: “I thought it would be funny for someone on the street to be walking and talking to his friends and saying, ‘Hey, let’s start a corporation.’ It’s hard enough for someone in America just to open a corner store or a liquor store.”
‘Ivanka (Things You Can’t Have)’ – Gang Of Four
Post-punk heroes Gang Of Four took a different route to White when they decided to comment about President Trump. Rather than discuss the fake-tanned former host of The Apprentice, they turned their attention to his daughter, Ivanka. On the track, the late Andy Gill uses cutting humour to poke fun at the Trump dynasty and sings: “I saw how hard daddy worked for his money, Daddy loves women and he believes in family.”
In a press statement, Gill said: “It would’ve been easy to be extremely damning about Donald Trump and of course, like everyone else, I could have called him all kinds of names. What drew me to this subject at all was the running commentary from Ivanka in the earlier stages of this administration.It was fascinating to get a kind of explanation or justification from the daughter who had already been given an official position within the White House. And frankly, a lot of it was pretty funny. But although the characters in the Trump family are interesting, it’s more the ideologies and politics which they represent and enable which need describing.”
