Songs for Dean

Matt Labash’s look at songs written for Howard Dean is so funny it almost brought tears to my eyes:

While I’m hardly the first to state that the Dean campaign is remarkably free of people of color, I am, after spending a day on songsfordean.com, the person who has suffered through the most painful reminders of it in rapid succession. From coffeehouse bluesmen who over-enunciate every whitebread word, to hot blasts of undiluted folk so earnest that it could make the Weavers cry uncle, the songs are by and for white people. Sort of. There are two versions of the “Howard Dean Rap” . . . They use dated rap terminology like “chill” and “wack.” One line goes, “Stop and stare, say hey, lookie there! / It’s a doctor! Where? And he knows health care!” “Lookie there?” If they were real rappers, they’d get their asses kicked even in East Hampton, where Dean hails from. By the time they recite Bush’s falling “P to the O to the double L” numbers, you just want to grab the first B-to-the-L-to-the-ACK person you can find, and tuck a reparations check into their breast pocket while apologizing profusely.

Labash also has some amusing thoughts on past presidential campaign songs:

[T]here’s John Quincy Adams’s “Little Know Ye Who’s Coming.” With the melody pinched from the Scottish “Highland Muster Roll,” it’s a sunny little ditty that reminds voters what’s coming if they fail to elect Adams. The list is not encouraging: “Fire’s comin’, swords are comin’, pistols, knives and guns are comin’.” Additionally coming were slavery, knavery, hatin’, and Satan, “if John Quincy not be comin’.”

Read the whole thing.