When you think about songs associated with the LGBTQrights movement, the same dozen cliches come up again and again: Gloria Gaynors I Will Survive, Madonnas Vogue, Lady Gagas Born This Way. Theyre defiant assertions of identity or anthems about resilience in the face of adversity. Same goes for pretty much all of Chers hits, too.
Then theres Y.M.C.A. by the Village People, which is very different: several verses and a punchy chorus's worth of encouragement from an experienced, mildly predatory man eyeing up a new arrival in town and giving him some pointers for where he can meet the boys.
Lyrically, its a vision of a pre-AIDS, pre-internet sexual innocence, both in terms of the young mans naivete as well as the wider societys ignorance that gay sex was taking place in a gym thats ostensibly for devout followers of Christ.
And yet Y.M.C.A. is also a staple of Donald Trumps campaign rallies. He gyrates to it seemingly everywhere he goes, on elevated platforms or in front of Air Force One, for fans who cant get enough of the only single from the 1978 Village People record "Cruisin'."
On Monday, in one of its final pre-Election Day pushes, the Trump campaign released a video of the presidents metronome-like torso oscillating to it for a full two minutes. Few among us have the attention span for a two-minute commercial for anything, let alone a supercut with no narrative arc or variation that isnt edited tightly enough to keep Trumps fists-and-knees dance moves on the beat, but it went viral. Mystified, the U.K. LGBTQ outlet PinkNews tartly referred to it as a song thats definitely, definitely not about gay sex.
Except actually, its not that simple. Victor Willis, the Village People frontman hes also the nightstick-wielding cop as well as the one who wrote the song is an out-and-out heterosexual, and he said as recently as September of this year that hell sue anyone who suggests that "Y.M.C.A." is about sweaty man-on-man lovin at the gym.
So the line You can do whatever you feel is meant to be taken at face value, and a man whose uniform consists of a MAGA hat and an ill-fitting suit would be at ease dancing next to a cowboy and a construction worker, all of them totally straight.
If Willis is uncomfortable with his songs universally understood message of giving someone directions to a good shower to have sex in, hes also uncomfortable with the Trump campaigns use of it. Like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty and countless other liberal-leaning musicians who see their work used by politicians and causes they dont agree with, he asked them to stop. But as Pitchfork notes, most licensing deals go through publishers like ASCAP, not with the artists themselves. In October, "SNLs" "Weekend Update" spoofed this entire episode, too shrewd not to capitalize on any opportunity to have five members of the cast play the Village People.
Irresistible though it is, Y.M.C.A. also sucks as a disco track, which is why most gay people groan when they hear it. Musically, its closer to the Chicken Dance than the binary-annihilating hedonism of Sylvester. (And, like the Chicken Dance, its played at bad weddings and comes with its own built-in moves, a cheering-squad spelling-out of its letters that Trump never seems to do.)
It also feels utterly out of sync with all the other hyperaggressive tropes of Trump fandom, from drunken boat parades and crude chanting to lock people up but then again, the masculinity that Donald Trump projects has always been a bizarre pastiche of the hypermanly and the unmanly, bragging and self-pity, fast food and bronzer.
Well, a lot of gay men also embody those very contradictions. Still, its a puzzle why Trumps fans, whose musical tastes otherwise run to Lee Greenwood and Kid Rock, would thrill to a heavyset septuagenarian grooving arhythmically along with the Village People. Y.M.C.A is, in fact, the exact type of record that would have been burned in effigy at Chicagos infamous Disco Demolition Night, that 1979 White Sox game that functioned like a proto-Trump rally and supposedly spurred the genres death. (Chics Nile Rodgers once compared it to a Nazi book-burning.)And if baseball games are our barometer, well, Queens medley We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions has had a long history blasting out of stadium loudspeakers, Freddie Mercurys outrageous queerness be damned.
So maybe Y.M.C.A. is just too catchy and too ridiculous for its smoldering homoerotic gaze to do anything but disappear in the sludge of Boomer nostalgia, just as Sweet Home Alabama has become a symbol of generic Southern pride and no longer a specific eff-you to Neil Young for Southern Man.
Does Trump just remember Y.M.C.A. fondly? It was released when he was 32 and newly married to Ivana, with Don Jr. barely an infant. Already rich by then, Trump was a local nuisance, the Manhattan real-estate equivalent of an obnoxious bro from Queens trying to cut the line at Studio 54. The decades that followed brought him billions of dollars, TV shows, branded steaks and the U.S. presidency, largely on the strength of sheer bluster and swagger.
It should be noted that Trump also really likes Macho Man.
Peter Lawrence Kane is communications manager for SF Pride and a former editor of SF Weekly.
Continue reading here:
Why Trump is so obsessed with 'Y.M.C.A.' - SFGate
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