Longtime friend-of-TAS and Alarming News proprietor Karol Markowicz has a typically feisty column up over at the WYNC website arguing Republican candidates should stop licensing songs by the “already-successful rock stars” who hate them and instead look to the “entrepreneurs of the music world” — struggling independent musicians — for muscial accompaniment.
She also makes a good point about the true nature of the now de rigueur self-righteous denunciation of X Republican politician using Y’s anthem at political rallies:
I don’t stop listening to musicians because of their outspoken opinions, though I’ve been known to roll my eyes and mock them, but it is annoying. When a musician asks a politician to stop using their music, despite the politician having purchased all the necessary licenses and rights to that music, it becomes a statement that those who don’t think the same as the musician are not welcome. It’s just mean and spiteful.
Since I don’t often get an opportunity to cite Night Ranger on this blog, I have to ask: Can you still rock in America? Or, as Triumph put it back in ’81, “You’re thinking it over, but you just can’t sort it out/Do you want someone to tell you what they think it’s all about?”
