At Trump’s Rally, the Contradictions Are in the Music

WASHINGTON — A onetime foulmouthed white rapper remade as an icon of right-wing country rebellion. An iconic disco-pop outfit with a crossover hit often understood to be about gay cruising that has become a global sports-and-bar-mitzvah anthem.

These are the sorts of contradictory figures who have long animated and energized American pop music, the art form where competing interest groups and creative urges are in the closest quarters, and most likely to collide in unanticipatedly productive ways. The stew of American pop is messy, the result of centuries of creative crossover, willing and forced and sometimes unpredictable.

So maybe it’s not a surprise, then, that even onstage at President-elect Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again Victory Rally on Sunday afternoon at the Capital One Arena — seemingly a place inhospitable to these narratives of collaborative difference — these tugs-of-war persisted.

In the speeches — from Trump and many of his surrogates — there was nativism and isolationism and promises of record deportations.

And yet for a party and movement built in part on exclusion and a campaign marked at times by race-baiting, there were conspicuous overtures to diversity and inclusion, and sly acknowledgments of the power of the multiracial stew of American pop.

There was Kid Rock, his voice pockmarked and powerful, singing “All Summer Long,” his winning invocation of “Sweet Home Alabama,” before putting on a red Make America Great Again ball cap and taking a turn scratching on his DJ’s turntable. In a video message during the performance, Trump promised to Make America Rock Again, interspersed with footage of Run-DMC songs.

Billy Ray Cyrus, who was billed as one of the performers at the rally but who wasn’t heard apart from sound checking, would have deepened this curious narrative as a former country pretty boy rescued in late career by working with a queer hip-hop newcomer, Lil Nas X, on “Old Town Road.”

And, of course, there were Village People, who performed “Y.M.C.A.” at the rally’s conclusion with Trump behind them, shimmying and occasionally singing along.

Did the song’s origin story matter? It did not. (Victor Willis, the group’s frontman and sole remaining original member, made headlines last month when he posted on social media that the song is “not really a gay anthem.”)

But, of course, this is how Trump views music: as theme songs, fight songs, soundtracks for memories more than works of art. He leans toward anthems rinsed clean of meaning, so long as they’re memorably durable. He walked onstage to Lee Greenwood serenading him with “God Bless the U.S.A.,” as if accepting homecoming king coronation at the prom.

The prerally soundtrack — apart from the occasional contemporary intruder (Bruno Mars’ “Versace on the Floor,” The Weeknd’s “Starboy”) — skewed four to five decades old. It was largely the sound of Studio 54 and its offshoots, wrung through layers of history and irony and posthistory until nothing is left but the beat.

Most of the speakers were introduced with flickers of hard-rock guitar, as if to reassure (and energize) the majority white crowd. But the messages they delivered were in places more nuanced. Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, reminded the crowd of Trump’s success with nonwhite voters, as did Trump in his speech, keen to paint MAGA as a multiracial movement.

But the contradictions were never far from the surface. Puerto Rican superstar Anuel AA embraced Trump, saying he was onstage to speak “on behalf of all the Spanish community” and describing the backlash he received for supporting Trump. Just minutes later, Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser, decried President Joe Biden’s border policy, and Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News anchor, touted Facebook’s and McDonald’s doing away with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

It was the ultimate in having it both ways — slyly embracing the spoils of American diversity while forcefully arguing against DEI. Using the optics and sonics of integration as a soft weapon against their own furthering. The purpose of the rally was intended to be clear, but the music suggested a far messier — and still unresolved — truth underneath.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.