Mellencamp to McCain: Stop Playing My Music

Posted by Steven Reynolds, The All Spin Zone at 4:35 AM on February 5, 2008.

McCain is using two John Mellencamp songs at his rallies, "Our Country" and "Pink Houses." Mellencamp has asked McCain to stop, having never given permission. In other words, they violated Mellencamp's intellectual property. More stupid, the songs are critical and ironic concerning Republican ideals. Shades of Reagan and Springsteen, eh?

Ronald Reagan is realtively infamous for having to be called by a rock star to cease and desist. Reagan's people (supposedly spurred on by a clueless George Will) used Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" as a campaign theme song in 1984 until Springsteen's people asked them to stop. I'm not sure any of Reagan's people understood the ironies of the use of that song, which is about the sourness the Vietnam adventure left in the soul of the working man of America. Yeah, it talks about how working stiffs got screwed by folks like Reagan, who supported that role.

Heck, even John McCain is featuring Reagan's support of the war in Vietnam in his ads. He's also using theme music, and he's also had the artist who recorded the music call and ask him to stop. McCain is using John Mellencamp's "Our Country" and "Pink Houses," also without permission. As it is noted in the Rolling Stone, if only they'd listened to the lyrics, they'd not have made this mistake.

Come on, the Radical Religious Right-wing Christian Clerics are not going to go for lyrics focused on keeping science in the classroom and helping out the poor! From Cowboylyrics.com:

There's room enough here

For science to live

And there's room enough here

For religion to forgive

And try to understand

All the people of this land

This is our country

From the east coast

To the west coast

Down the Dixie Highway

Back home

This is our country

That poverty could be

Just another ugly thing

And bigotry would be

Seen only as obscene

And the ones that run this land

Help the poor and common man

This is our country

Of course, that assumes the McCain people and those radical religious right leaders can understand the printed and sung word. I'm thinking they'd have a harder time figuring out the ironic stance Mellencamp takes towards the American Dream in "Pink Houses." Lyrics again provided by cowboylyrics.com:

Well, there's people and more people

What do they know, know, know

Go to work in some high rise

And vacation down at the Gulf of Mexico

Ooh, yeah

And there's winners and there's losers

But they ain't no big deal

'Cause the simple man, baby

Pays for thrills

The bills the pills that kill

OK, maybe they just need to go to Rush Limbaugh to figure out some of those ironies.

McCain is running on a Reaganesque platform. He's claiming he learned his conservatism and was inspired by Reagan while he was a prisoner in Vietnam. In this case, sure he's following the tradition of Reagan whose people were so incompetent they didn't even listen to the Springsteen lyrics before foisting them off on the American people. To those of us who were progressives at the time, this sealed the notion that Reagan and his people were barely above the level of snake oil salesmen. McCain and his people so incompetent they can't ghet the message of Mellencamp's songs? Incompetence shouldn't surprise us at all given the last seven years of Republican incompetence.

By the way, whatever happened to the "ownership society" the Republicans so often tout? I know that housing bubble they mismanaged is putting the lie to the "ownership society" ideals, but shouldn't they be respecting Mellencamp's ownersip of these songs?

Tagged as: music, mccain, reagan, springsteen, mellancamp

Steven Reynolds is a regular blogger for the All Spin Zone