Yesterday, I was talking about really poorly chosen campaign songs. These are the ones that apparently, the candidates have selected without fully listening to all the lyrics For example, George W. Bush occasionally used “Still the One” by Orleans while on the campaign trail. Guess he missed the line that said, “Sometimes I never want to see you again.” Good grief, it was the second line of the song! How could you miss that?
So far, I’ve been picking on Republicans. But, let’s take a look at the Democrats. How about Barack Obama? One of Obama’s choices was the U2 song “City of Blinding Lights.” The opening lines are “The more you see the less you know, the less you find out as you go, I knew much more then than I do now.” Hum, I don’t follow politics that closely, but I do know that many criticize Obama for not really understanding what he stands for and these lyrics just seem like a bad choice.
Now, on to Hillary Clinton. One of her songs was Tom Petty’s “American Girl.” Hillary is a bit smarter than most politicians are in that she only used snippets of a song to stand for what she wanted it to convey. Hillary also used Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Takin’ Care of Business.” I love that song – I will try to keep in mind that Hillary does really intend to take care of business and not the “It’s the work that we avoid, and we’re all self-employed, we love to work at nothing all day” part of the song.
But, perhaps Hillary’s greatest blunder is one that many people would not catch. Priding myself on having spent many thousands of hours glued to MTV in its 80’s heyday however, I noticed. Hillary chose the catchy if not a bit risqué song “When the Lady Smiles” by Golden Earring. I absolutely adore this song. Some of the lines read “When the lady smiles, she holds me in her hand, as a matter of fact, she could always let me down, but when the lady smiles, I can’t resist her call, as a matter of fact, I don’t resist at all.” Visit Oldie Lyrics to see all the lyrics.
To me, it is still an okay song choice with one major, major mistake. Golden Earring seemed to have a proclivity of using sexy scenes in their videos. The “When the Lady Smiles” video featured a man who is obsessed with a woman. Every women he sees turns into his ladylove. The problem occurs on the bus, when he is in such a crazed love frenzy that he sees his ladylove’s face on a nun and attacks (some use the word “rapes”) her. Golden Earring, being from the Netherlands, might not have realized that the video for the song would cause such a stir in America. That one scene meant the video was quickly yanked off MTV and the song didn’t far well on the charts, not to mention that Golden Earring would never appear on U.S. charts again.
The band itself was a bit confused by Hillary’s use of the song, having only found out about it when a U.S. fan contacted them. Their manager said, “’There’s been no contact between Clinton’s team and us. But no doubt we’ll receive royalties.” Spoken like true businessmen! Reports say that Bill used the band’s hit “Radar Love” in his 1992 campaign, but I cannot imagine how that would fit!