Why Play "Y.M.C.A." at Trump Rallies?
The cultural politics of part of Donald's incredible playlist
You can read my review of Bob Woodward’s new book War in The Washington Post.
You’ve probably heard that Donald Trump ended a rally early the other day in an awkward fashion. In essence, he switched up the event’s format, scorning a planned series of questions from the audience for instead playing a long, and apparently awkward, series of some of his favorite songs.
Let’s give credit where it’s due: The switch to a musical interlude was the result of a pair of rally attendees fainting, likely because it was too hot indoors. In part, the change in format came was Trump doing the right thing— allowing people to be treated for medical emergencies!—but it also surely presented some awkward visuals. It looks weird, way weirder than the video makes it seem for attendees.
You can watch the whole thing, or you can (like me) kind of skip around. I don’t think this was a senior moment or sundowning or anything; I think it was just a crappy rally— “low energy”, one might say — that lends itself to some aggressive representations and furnishes critics with an opportunity to depict Trump as “too old”.
Don’t take away my anti-Trump card because I’m not going to bandwagon on this one instance; I just think there’s enough wrong with DJT that you don’t need to imply he had a mental episode or whatever at this rally. He’s lucid, enough, throughout the whole thing; we don’t need to pretend that he’s literally stroking out at every moment, and I do think a little less of people when they characterize events so incorrectly.
(We should also think deeply about the causes of this, like the fact that he’s doing indoor events because people keep taking shots at him outdoors, and also the fact that his—and Vance’s—advance teams seem … subpar.)
Regardless of whether Trump’s mentally unfit for office, he’s morally and politically unfit, and he was even before he led an attempted coup on January 6, 2021. I want to talk about the playlist.
What’s gotten passing attention in this bizarre episode is how Trump filled the dead air: with music. The musical selections were … unique!
You’ve probably heard about parts of the playlist, but I’ve reconstructed the whole thing out of some bizarre ADHD hyperfixation. “Pinball Wizard” is there. So is “I’m Still Standing”, the Elton John anthem, and “Hallelujah” (the Rufus Wainwright version from Shrek) and, infuriatingly, “Nothing Compares 2 U”, the Prince song everyone thinks is by Sinead O’Connor. And I’m stunned that news reports didn’t center on the fact that he included “An American Trilogy” by Elvis, which is mostly Elvis singing “Dixie” (although, in primo both-sidesing, also “Battle Hymn of the Republic”).
He requested “Ave Maria”, and then requested a different version because he wanted one with the words. At some point, they found a rare cover of “It’s a Man’s World” by James Brown and Pavarotti. The advance team for the rally might have let it get so hot that attendees started dropping like flies, but the audio team was on point.
Here’s the full playlist, which I made by going through the AP video of the event and finding each song. (It takes little time to do this if you skip ahead a lot.) Other highlights include “Rich Men North of Richmond” (yeah, sure, okay), “Party in the U.S.A.” (he has some taste), two Kid Rock songs (but not much taste), and “Time To Say Goodbye” by Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli.
My guess is that all the slow songs are ones he, specifically, likes, because you sure wouldn’t put these things on a rally playlist. And it seems fitting that the gilded MAGA guy would be really, really into showtunes and opera. A lot of the selections, to be honest, reflects the musical taste of … a guy who grew up in Queens in the 1950s and 1960s. He probably really likes Sinatra. “Memory” from Cats! This guy likes showtunes! (Please remember this point in the second half of this essay, which is about complicated gender politics.) The rest is more or less a mix of conservative stuff and 80s hits, which makes sense for a guy who, himself, is as much an 80s icon as Mr. T or Lee Iacooca.
But I don’t want to focus on Trump’s tastes.
Rather, I want to talk about one particular entry: the 1978 hit by the Village People, “Y.M.C.A.”, and why in the heck it’s on the playlist.
First, I want to note that the weirdest thing about the rally is not the fact that they went to a playlist to fill time but rather that alleged human Donald Trump can hear the song “Y.M.C.A.” and not do the dance.
Dog killer and occasional governor Kristi Noem attempted the dance, half-heartedly, but in a way that reminds us that normal people all do the dance, and so do dog killers.
If you grew up in the United States, or at this point I assume in its broader cultural orbit, and you’re under the age of about 55, you have grown up with this song. I don’t recall the first time I heard it, but I do know that it must have involved learning the dance—probably because I was still learning about the concept of letters at the time. The “Y.M.C.A.” dance makes the song accessible to large groups of people of varying dance skills, making it perfect for summer camps, preschools, and gatherings of Republicans, in much the same way that the “Macaraena” can be adapted to many gatherings:
Songs come with all sorts of baggage. It would be wrong to reduce the cultural phenomenon of the “Macarena” to its literal meaning. That is, it would be wrong to suggest that DNC delegates dancing to the song implied they endorsed the song’s celebration of a young woman’s taking the occasion of her boyfriend’s induction into the army to have a threesome with two other men. My recollection of that song’s triumphant summer is that vast swathes of the American public did not really quite get that part of the message.
And then there’s “Y.M.C.A.” Which has different baggage.
Here’s the thing. Sometimes you come across something that seems inexplicable in history, like people in the Seventies not immediately scanning Elton John as being something other than exclusively heterosexual, and you think, “Really? You didn’t know?”
The post-Seventies life of “Y.M.C.A.” is something like that. If you grow up with something as part of your cultural patrimony (and “Y.M.C.A.” is considered so neutral that you can play it for and with kindergartners!), how much time do you invest thinking about it? And even if you know that the name of the band is “The Village People”, your kindergarten teacher isn’t going to stop the class and explain the cultural semiotics of Greenwich Village during the 1960s and 1970s, like how it was largely synonymous with homosexuality. Maybe the first-graders can get the lecture about the Stonewall riots. (And then in second grade you can discuss how the HIV/AIDS epidemic devastated that neighborhood.)
Oh, and also you can explain at some point why the album on which the song appears is called Cruisin’.
All of this is by way of explaining why there are still people, today, who are still discovering that “Y.M.C.A.” is, well, kinda gay. Even though, well…
Lead singer / cop cosplayer Victor Willis has claimed that he intended no homosexual content to the song, which he co-wrote. Perhaps! In that case, he’s the only person involved who wasn’t in on it.
The irony is that this is not a meaning that was slowly discovered over time as people became more accepting of homosexuality. Oh no. America thought this was a song about homosexuality within about, oh, minutes of its release.
To be sure, at times it’s hard to detect whether everyone understood that. The Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle for December 5, 1978, for instance, described the Village People’s members as each adopting a “macho” identity: “hard hat, soldier, cowboy, Indian, motorcycle cop, and leather man.” Is this clueless heterosexual ignorance? Is it evidence of a tongue planted firmly in cheek? It’s hard to say.
The Seventies were a time of much greater liberation and enthusiasms in almost every area of personal expression. At midcentury, the Lavender Scare and a general mainstream moral panic over homosexuality had caused enormous repression and social violence (although I’m conservative in how I use that word, I think the term here is apt even to describe non-kinetic forms of social disciplining). But in the Seventies camp went mainstream, and there was greater room for expression, even if there wasn’t what we’d recognize today as tolerance. Playing with gay archetypes seems to have been a big part of that process. As a blog post at the Library of Congress explains:
The songs targeted a niche record buying audience: gay discotheques and their patrons. The titles were self-explanatory: “Fire Island” (the East Coast’s gay summer retreat); “San Francisco (You’ve Got Me)” (the West coast’s premier gay destination); “Village People” (a look at the inhabitants of New York City’s largely gay Greenwich Village) … The gay messaging in their songs, the gay fantasy stripper-costumes, the gay dancing and faux macho posturing seemed to go over the heads of the audience–or they just didn’t care.
We should pause here to think about how the directions of social change really, really aren’t linear or constant. The 1980s and 1990s were big, big retrograde steps compared to this degree of performativity.
There was an element, or more than an element, of calculation to all of this sexual ambiguity, as David Hodo (construction worker) admitted in an article reprinted in the Arizona Republic on September 17, 1978:
“This is the kind of show gays dig,” he said. “It’s a total male thing. It’s a very sexual show. Gays like us because they love disco. They’ve helped keep disco alive.” Hodo admitted the group includes both gays and straights. However, it avoids being labeled one or the other. “If you say you’re straight, you risk losing the gays,” he pointed out. “If you say you’re gay you can lose the straights. So we don’t advertise our preferences. Why cut out part of your audience?”
These commercial calculations, however, show that in the Seventies you could conceivably make money by passing as homosexual, which … was quite a change from 15 or 20 years earlier (or, again, from five or ten years later).
Not everyone was so welcoming. The Seattle Gay News (December 8, 1978) noted that the Tulsa YMCA director said “the hairs on the back of my neck went up” because of “what seemed to me to be obvious gay connotations”. The Seattle Y director, by contrast, was anxious to justify his institution as welcoming to heterosexuals and homosexuals alike, despite some foot-in-mouth comments about solicitation.
Ironically, “Y.M.C.A.” was a sufficiently big hit that it may have straightwashed the Village People, rather as how “We Are The Champions” made Queen a band for straight dude sports fans.1
Alex Midgley writes in The Australasian Journal of American Studies that the band’s relationship with the gay community (and I keep using that particular term because, first, it really doesn’t seem like they were bridge-building with the lesbian community, and second because the term LGBT would be anachronistic) changed after the song crossed over.
[“Y.M.C.A.”] quickly became “the quintessential mainstream disco experience,” recalls the journalist Peter Shapiro; “hearing ‘Y.M.C.A.’ six times in one night at the Rainbow Room of [a] Holiday Inn [in Middle America, while doing line dances with a bunch of travelling salesmen” suddenly seem[ed] depressingly normal.
Incidentally, the “Y.M.C.A.” dance was not invented by the band. The music video shows their original, non-lettered choreography. The arm movements spelling out the dance were accidentally invented for an appearance on American Bandstand, that indicator of mainstream taste, by choreographers who misunderstood the instructions and thereby paved the way for the song to go really, really mainstream.
The Village People were, like the Spice Girls and other later bands, created by their producers, two French immigrants, Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo, to catch a trend. The group’s macho depiction of homosexuality entailed a rejection of mincing, prim gay stereotypes—there are cultural politics within cultural politics—and emerged just before the Reagan and AIDS era, during a period of gay liberation that embraced a very different strategy than earlier homosexual rights movements. (Until 1973, homosexuality was still a mental illness as defined by the American Psychiatric Association!)
This was a weird time. One of the other hit Village People singles was called “In The Navy”, which was so catchy that the Navy gave the group the use of a destroyer for a music video.
Maybe the straights were clueless! Aside from the “seamen” pun, there’s also the lyrics directly playing on moral panic themes.
They want you, they want you
They want you as a new recruit
They want you, they want you
They want you as a new recruit
Midgley hints that maybe the stereotypes of homosexual men as effeminate had so blinded mainstream society to what a gay man could be, so that an effusively masculine image couldn’t possibly be gay. But this sits poorly with the fact that, well, it seems like everyone knew what was going on. Either it was stealth or it was coy, but it really doesn’t seem like it can be both.
Midgley argues that the welcoming playfulness of the Village People neutered camp. Instead of camp being used “to transgress boundaries and norms in order to show their insubstantiality, the Village People were merely showing that these boundaries existed, depicting their limits as ideals to be celebrated.”
Maybe, although I think this is too pessimistic. Is resistance the only possible purpose of representation? Doesn’t it mean something that a band like the Village People would have been if not unthinkable then certainly way less likely in 1968 or 1988?
(That criticism of the Village People eventually picks apart every aspect of their persona, including—to be fair, the very problematic—costumes that actual audiences, gay and straight, loved at the time also has me wondering, as I sometimes do, whether radical critics believe fun is possible or is merely something that can exist only as an unattainable ideal while we quietly sip culturally appropriate hot drinks and listen only to unimpeachably highbrow music approved by a team of credentialed authorities.)
Then again, the fact that Donald Trump can use the song without irony to rally folks who are, let’s say, less than enthusiastic about gay rights suggests that the strategy of courting a mainstream audience may have sapped the song of any sort of playful subversion. Yes, as Philip Gentry observes, we should always make sure to understand that there’s no “right” meaning to a song.2 Yet it does seem to matter that “Y.M.C.A.” is so mainstream that mentioning its subtext and context feels, well, a little subversive. Meanings are what we make of them, and draining subversion of any potency, even in entertainment, makes a very different kind of meaning.
Midgley, Alex. "'MACHO TYPES WANTED': The Village People, Homophobia, and Representation in 1970s." Australasian Journal of American Studies (2014): 104-119.
Gentry, Philip. "Music for Counting Votes." Journal of Popular Music Studies 34.1 (2022): 4-9.