The 2024 election has intertwined music and politics more than ever. Will this affect how we vote?

The etymology of charm, Sonnewend tells me, is the Latin “carmen,” which means “song” or “spell.” Thanks to his charm, Obama was able to rally enough people to put him in the White House not once, but twice. Not every candidate is so lucky and so charming. Hillary Clinton, for example, has battled accusations of inauthenticity (whether fair or not) throughout her career.

In the summer of 2015, Clinton took a page out of Obama’s playbook and released a campaign playlist. It consisted of top 100 radio hits, mostly from 2010 onwards, and no one believed she was actually listening. The three songs that formed the basis of her campaign: Katy Perry’s “Roar”, Sara Bareilles’ “Brave” and, most infamously, Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song”, are still spoken of with shudders. . Sonnevend, who was inspired by New School undergraduate students to include a paragraph about the concept of “cringe” in her book, says there’s a fine line between delivering a successful speech and a flood of content that triggers Gen Z’s greatest sin. Repetition may be a key factor in that. the performance becomes obnoxious, and the cheesiness of Clinton’s millennial, girly pop tracks has driven many people over the edge (see: “Fight Song” is pathetic trash and unsuitable for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign).

“Music can also cause harm if voters perceive you as insincere,” confirms Kajikawa. Some voters who already thought Clinton was a hypocrite were further dismayed by her oddly juvenile choice of campaign songs, and even a number of her supporters may have formed a negative association with the campaign after hearing that refrain for the thousandth time. While Clinton’s out-of-touch musical choices didn’t cause Donald Trump to win the 2016 election, they did ultimately draw more attention to the harsh public perceptions she sought to redefine. In his book, Sonnewend also discusses the concept of unmasking, where a politician strips away—either intentionally or unintentionally—layers of media preparation and campaign money and, for a moment, becomes simply “normal.” By choosing power pop, Clinton took off one mask, revealing another.

While music can work for or against a candidate, it can also take on a life of its own. One of the biggest changes we have faced as a country since the 2008 election has been the rise of social media. TikTok, which just got its start in 2020, has changed the way we listen to and interact with music and has played a major role in the 2024 elections. “Anyone can create a video, upload it and make it go viral,” Kajikawa notes, “and then campaigns have to decide whether they want to react to it or embrace it.”