If you were to put these lyrics into a rock, hip-hop or folk song, the effect would perhaps be too familiar because that’s what protest music usually sounds like. That formulation might be a deliberate callback to Dear Mr President, Pink’s open letter of a song to George W Bush in 2006, which asked “What do you feel?” and “How do you sleep?” But it also reminds me, oddly, of Crass’s 1982 broadside against Margaret Thatcher, How Does It Feel (to Be the Mother of a Thousand Dead)? Both questions are moral condemnations but Crass’s song is all punk-rock venom, while Lovato’s is calmer. Lovato’s call for votes during her Billboard music awards performance. ‘The song expresses the emotional pain of the Trump era’. She gets to the fundamental incomprehensibility of Trump’s callousness: “Honestly, if I did the things you do, I couldn’t sleep, seriously.” The gospel-elevated bridge rises above the president’s toxic headspace and turns to the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests: “We’ll be in the streets while you’re bunkering down.” The final line of the chorus (“How does it feel to still be able to breathe?”) references both Covid-19, which has killed more than 215,000 Americans on Trump’s watch, and the BLM slogan “I can’t breathe”. The line, “Do you get off on pain?” reminds me of Adam Serwer’s classic 2018 Atlantic essay, The Cruelty Is the Point. Lovato the protest singer is an exasperated everywoman, interrogating Trump’s failings as a human being as much as a politician: his corruption, his vanity, his carelessness, his sadism. Lovato has said that she has often thought of writing Trump a letter, or sitting down with him to ask him why he behaves the way he does, but that a song opens these questions up to everybody: “I’m not the only one / That’s been affected and resented every story you’ve spun / And I’m a lucky one / ’Cause there are people worse off that have suffered enough.” In the arrestingly stark video, a diverse range of Americans lip-sync the song before Lovato takes over for the final minute.Ĭommander in Chief opens with a wholesome, relatable line about the values that we are supposedly taught (unless our father is Fred Trump) when we are young. While it’s not without lyrical flourishes (“Fighting fires with flyers and praying for rain”), it is largely plain-spoken and direct, conveying grief, resilience and disgust. In a sense that’s what it is, as it expresses the emotional pain of the Trump era, and 2020 in particular. Produced by Eren Cannata and Billie Eilish’s brother Finneas, the song sounds like a heartbreak ballad.
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