Ronald Reagan in music

Pre-presidency

Ronald Reagan became a subject in song during the era of protests against the Vietnam War while he served as governor of California (1967–1975). Folk singer Phil Ochs mentions Reagan on his 1966 album Phil Ochs in Concert during the introduction to the song "Ringing of Revolution" when he speculates a future where the last of the bourgeoisie are besieged in a mansion atop a hill. Ochs imagines a movie based on his own song:

Ochs' satire highlights the permeable line between actors and politicians by poking fun at Reagan for following in George Murphy footsteps: Murphy, like Reagan, had been a movie actor and became president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), then went on to be a Republican U.S. Senator for the state of California. Reagan had succeeded Murphy as SAG president where he worked as an informant for the FBI during the Hollywood blacklist period. Two decades later, Reagan ran for office and became California's governor.

Tom Lehrer made a similar comparison in his song "George Murphy," which opens, "Hollywood's often tried to mix show-business with politics, from Helen Gahagan to Ronald Reagan." In his live version on the album That Was the Year That Was (1965), Lehrer raises inflection on Reagan's name, as if he cannot believe Reagan's entry into the political realm, the future governor's prior political participation having been limited to political committees and speeches such as those given in support of Barry Goldwater.

Jefferson Starship referred to Reagan's policies and attitudes as governor in the song "Mau Mau (Amerikon)" on their 1970 debut album Blows Against the Empire, in which Paul Kantner recants, "the dogs of a grade-B movie star governor's war." Jefferson Starship's song recalled the previous year's actions taken against students at the University of California, Berkeley to create a People's Park as part of the political counterculture of the 1960s. Reagan's Chief of Staff, Edwin Meese III, ordered the Alameda County Sheriff to fire upon the crowds with buckshot, resulting in the death of one student and the hospitalization of 128 others. These directives had come from Reagan himself, who had been publicly critical of UC Berkeley administrators for tolerating student demonstrations. In his 1966 gubernatorial campaign he had promised to crack down on what he called "a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants" on the Berkeley campus. Jefferson Starship counters Reagan's prudishness with the line, "We'll ball in your parks."

Popular and folk music

After Reagan's election as U.S. president in 1980, many pop music artists responded in their song lyrics.

1981's "(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang" by British synthpoppers Heaven 17 slammed UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher along with Reagan, denouncing the leaders' policies as tending toward racism and fascism. The song was banned by the BBC over concerns of libel.

That same year Prince released the album Controversy, including the song "Ronnie, Talk to Russia," a "hastily blurted plea to Reagan to seek disarmament" in which Prince pleads with the president not to blow up the world. On the same record, the song "Annie Christian" envisions an angel of death responsible for the recent violent events, including John Hinckley's attempt on Reagan's life, the murder of John Lennon, and the deaths of several children in Atlanta, Georgia.

In 1984 John Fogerty alluded to Reagan for his single "The Old Man Down the Road." That same year the group Frankie Goes to Hollywood traced Reagan's career to an imagined future when Jesus Christ would return only after a nuclear apocalypse in their song "Two Tribes". Chris Barrie, who voiced Reagan on the TV show Spitting Image, played the president on the track, quoting the song "American Pie" and parts of an Adolf Hitler speech as Reagan.

In 1984 Eagles drummer Don Henley released the single "All She Wants to Do Is Dance" in protest against the U.S. involvement with the Contras in Nicaragua (well before Henley's sang the line "this tired old man that we elected king" as a parting shot at Reagan as he was leaving office in 1989's "The End of the Innocence"). Henley chastised Americans for wanting to dance while sales of guns and drugs were going on at the behest of the CIA. Among the year's other songs protesting America's role in the Iran-Contra affair were "Nicaragua" by Bruce Cockburn, "Lives in the Balance" by Jackson Browne. "Please Forgive Us" by 10,000 Maniacs, and "Untitled Song for Latin America" by Minutemen.

When Britain's ITV network launched the satirical puppet show Spitting Image in 1984, the first record released in relation to the show was a rework of the Crystals' "Da Doo Ron Ron". The Spitting Image version, "Da Do Run Ron," was a spoof election campaign song for Ronald Reagan, featuring Nancy Reagan listing reasons why he should be re-elected. The cover featured the puppet versions of the Reagans that appeared on the show and later starred in the 1986 video for "Land of Confusion" by British band Genesis.

In 1985 former Police frontman Sting released "Russians", with lyrics leveled at Reagan, the Soviets, and both countries' pro-nuclear rhetoric, all set to Sergei Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije Suite. Milwaukee folk-rockers The Violent Femmes imagined the president as "Old Mother Reagan," a dangerously senile grandmother who tries in vain to enter heaven in one of the group's most fiercely political songs. The same year jam band Phish made their own overt case against the president, sung as a letter to the first lady. Originally titled "Memo to Ronnie Reagan", the song "Dear Mrs. Reagan" mimics Bob Dylan's protest music of the 1960s but rails against Mrs. Reagan's Just Say No anti-drug campaign. The band continued to perform it until Reagan left office in January 1989.

1985 also saw the release of Dog Eat Dog, Joni Mitchell's synth-driven album co-produced by Thomas Dolby. The album's songs capture the headlines of the 1980s, including South Africa's apartheid and Ethiopia's famine, while critiquing the rise of mass consumerism and televangelists. Mitchell saw the rise of the religious right as a dangerous and manipulative force on American politics and likened Reagan to a puppet being manipulated by powerful religious leaders. Mitchel told The Guardian:

Reagan feels that Armageddon is inevitable and it's dangerous when you have a President who thinks that way since he's the one who can call for the pushing of the button. He sees himself in his personal drama, I think, increasingly as a religious leader and he has public lunches with some of these very powerful evangelists, Pat Robertson and The 700 Club for instance. In other words, you have the church stroking Reagan and saying "Yes, yes, aren't they saying nasty things about you, they must be communists. Therefore they threaten both you and me. Don't you think we should silence these communists from speaking?"

In 1987 INXS highlighted Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative in their similarly named song "Guns in the Sky", and R.E.M. likened Reagan to former senator Joe McCarthy.

Frank Zappa was an outspoken critic of the Reagan presidency and what he saw as a pandering to the religious right wing. During a televised debate on CNN's Crossfire, Zappa said, "The biggest threat to America today is not communism, it's moving America toward a fascist theocracy. And everything that's happened during the Reagan administration is steering us right down that pipe." Several songs on Zappa's 1988 album Broadway the Hard Way ridicule Reagan, notably "Promiscuous," which jabs at the Reagans' attempts to remove sex education from public schools and replace it with abstinence-only propaganda as well as his slow response to the AIDS pandemic.

On his 1989 album, Big Daddy, John Mellencamp's song "Country Gentleman" is "a scathing indictment on Ronald Reagan." Written and recorded during Reagan's final year in office, the song's last line thanks God that "he went back to California." Other pop artists to take potshots at president Reagan included Midnight Oil, Supertramp, and Def Leppard.

Punk rock

In the 1970s, punk rock emerged as an antithesis to establishment, authority, and the status quo, and by 1980, president-elect Reagan became a prime pariah for punks to rally against in both the United States and abroad. The widespread appearance of Reagan as a vilified icon in punk music particularly can be linked to the do-it-yourself model of bands releasing their own records and not being subject to the censorship of major labels, commercial radio stations, or MTV. Reagan's rise to power also coincided with the arrival of new subgenre: hardcore punk, many hardcore bands put Reagan's face on flyers, T-shirts, and album covers, plus peppered lyrics, song names, and album titles with the president's various monikers, including "Reagan," "Ronnie," "Bonzo," and "The Gipper." Some groups even named themselves after the president or events related to him, the first being the anarcho-punk band Reagan Youth who formed in Queens, New York in 1980 as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Hitler Youth. The band's theme song was sung in satire as if by a cadre of neo-fascist youth, shouting, "Reagan Youth—Sieg Heil!"

In 1981 San Francisco-based record label Alternative Tentacles featured Reagan on the cover of the compilation album, Let Them Eat Jellybeans!, whose title refers to Reagan's favorite candy. The label was run by Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra whose band made a career out of mentioning Reagan in songs like "Moral Majority," "We've Got a Bigger Problem Now," "Bleed for Me," and "Dear Abby."

In April 1981, 19 days after the attempted assassination of Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr., a skate punk group from Phoenix, Arizona named themselves JFA, short for "Jodie Foster's Army." Hinckley had been obsessed with Foster since her portrayal of a teen sex worker in the 1976 Martin Scorsese film Taxi Driver, and had attempted to kill the president as a means to impress the actress. The band's moniker, and a song that shared its name, was a half-joking tribute in solidarity with Hinckley because Reagan was such a hated figure in the 1980s punk rock scene.

JFA's label-mates, the Sun City Girls, released an entire Reagan-themed album in 1987 whose title, Horse Cock Phepner, was an alleged nickname for Ronald Reagan. The album was the band's most lyrical; an obsenity-laden "documentation of the American nightmare in all its incestuous beauty." The album's refraining spoken word track "Voice of America" makes mention of the president, and the album's song "Nancy" depicts then-First Lady Nancy Reagan as a sexual fetishist. Other songs deride members of the Reagan administration, including Attorney General Edwin Meese, and the band recorded an updated cover version of The Fugs song "CIA Man" to be about atrocities committed by the Central Intelligence Agency during Reagan's reign. In a 1999 interview, the Sun City Girls' guitarist Rick Bishop said:

Other bands during that part of the '80's, both major and not-so-major acts, were really getting on the political bandwagon for one stupid reason or another. They were all so fucking serious, trying to be a voice for a generation or some shit like that, but worst of all they remained within the parameters of social acceptability. There was also a big censorship flap going on at the time. We looked at it as a chance to catch up with our obscenity quota.

Other notable punk bands that sang about Reagan included Black Flag, The Ramones, The Clash, The Damned, The Exploited, NOFX, Suicidal Tendencies, Wasted Youth, T.S.O.L., Government Issue, Dayglo Abortions, D.O.A., The Fartz, The Minutemen, Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, MDC, Spermbirds, and The Crucifucks. Many of these groups, along with the Dead Kennedys, organized a series of "Rock Against Reagan" concerts and tours to infuse awareness of then-current politics into the punk subculture.

Some hardcore punk bands made a conscious decision to avoid putting Reagan in their lyrics. In wanting his music to outlast the administration, Washington, D.C. musician Ian MacKaye, who was in the bands Minor Threat, Embrace, Pailhead, and Fugazi during the Reagan years, has said, "I remember clearly resisting the urge to put the word 'Reagan' in any of the songs." In the late 1980s American skinheads spearheaded a patriotic right-wing faction within the New York hardcore scene, and although bands like Agnostic Front and Cro Mags did not reference the president directly in their lyrics, their support of Reagan fell within their interpretation of quasi-fascist backlash that reimagined hardcore without the antiestablishment ethos of punk rock. When the drunk-rock group Murphy's Law praised Reagan and his films in their 1986 song "California Pipeline," fans could take it as either actual pro-Republican patriotism, or a tongue-in-cheek take on anti-Reagan irony that had grown so commonplace in American hardcore that the joke was no longer on the president, but on a punk scene where bands were practically obliged to put a Reagan song on their setlist or album.

Hip-hop and sampling

As hip-hop came of age during the 1980s, many rappers inserted Reagan into their lyrics. Proto-rapper Gil Scott-Heron made Reagan the subject of his 1981 song "B-movie" as well as his 1984 single "Re-Ron" focusing on Reagan's re-election campaign.

Sound collage group Negativland first sampled Reagan on their 1981 album Points on the instrumental track "The Answer Is", where the music interrupted by the president stuttering, "The problem isn't being poor, the problem is, uh ... the answer is ..." The art rock band 3 Teens Kill 4 sampled Reagan and anecdotes about him in their 1984 song "Tell Me Something Good". In 1985 P-Funk bassist Bootsy Collins and Jerry Harrison from Talking Heads teamed up as Bonzo Goes to Washington (named for Reagan's film Bedtime for Bonzo), and released a single that heavily sampled the president saying, "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that outlaws Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes," during a microphone test.

Afrikaa Bambataa and John Lydon used the same sample in their 1984 video for "World Destruction" performing under the name Time Zone. The single's B-side also sampled Walter Mondale talking about Reagan.

An entire musical revue was penned by cartoonist Garry Trudeau and Elizabeth Swados, featuring the song "Rap Master Ronnie", accredited to Reathel Bean & The Doonesbury Break Crew. Hollywood actor Reathel Bean was the main performer in the revue and in 1984 the group released a 12" single featuring three versions of the song. There was also an accompanying video where Reagan and his posse of Secret Service agents go to a black DC neighborhood to rap for minority votes.

Other 80s rap songs mentioning or referencing Reagan include Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" (1982), Project Future's one-off "Ray-Gun-Omics" (1983), Ice-T's "Squeeze the Trigger" (1987), Biz Markie's "Nobody Beats the Biz" (1988), Boogie Down Productions' "Stop the Violence" (1988), and Public Enemy's "Rebel Without A Pause" (1988).

Reggae and African music

The Kansas City's Grammy-nominated Blue Riddim Band, recorded the satirical track "Nancy Reagan" in 1982 about the President and his wife's misguided priorities. The song was later versioned by Ranking Roger in 1985 and by Big Youth in 2011. Fela Kuti featured demonic caricatures of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and other world leaders on the cover of his 1989 album Beasts of No Nation and mentioned them in the lyrics.

Music videos

In 1984 Randall Jahnson directed a video for the Minutemen song "This Ain't No Picnic". Shot for $450, the video intersperses shots of the Minutemen playing the song on a barren landscape with World War II propaganda footage of Reagan in an American Spitfire fighter plane, allegedly strafing the band. The video was one of the first by an indie band to be played on MTV and was in the running on the network's first Video Music Awards in 1985.

That same year Frank Zappa created a music video for his racially charged song "You Are What You Is." Though a somewhat conventionally produced video by Zappa standards, MTV blacklisted it because it depicted an actor made up to look like Ronald Reagan playing the harmonica and applying hair cream while sitting in an electric chair.

In 1986 Genesis collaborated with the producers of British sketch comedy show Spitting Image on the music video for their song "Land of Confusion." The video opens with a puppet caricatures of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in bed with a chimpanzee parodying Reagan's film Bedtime for Bonzo, and spirals into the president's fever dream featuring Benito Mussolini, Ayatollah Khomeini, Mikhail Gorbachev, Muammar Gaddafi, Richard Nixon, celebrities from American television, and the members of Genesis themselves. Reagan awakens drowning in his own sweat, fumbles for a bedside button labelled "Nurse", but instead presses the one titled "Nuke", setting off a nuclear explosion. The video won Best Concept Music Video at the 30th Annual Grammy Awards and was nominated for by MTV for video of the year. Village Voice critic Robert Christgau ranked the video number one on his year-end "Dean's List," and it made number three on the equivalent list in the paper's annual Pazz & Jop survey of music critics.

Post-presidency

Many artists from different genres have continued to make note of Reagan's legacy in their lyrics, including Neil Young, Glen Frey, Van Dyke Parks, Camper Van Beethoven, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Killer Mike, and Kanye West. Billy Joel was among the first songwriters to mention Reagan as a former president on his 1989 single, "We Didn't Start the Fire.

Rage Against the Machine's 2001 album Evil Empire takes its title from name Reagan repeatedly used to describe the Soviet Union. Frontman Zack de la Rocha explained:

The title Evil Empire is taken from what Rage Against The Machine see as Ronald Reagan's slander of the Soviet Union in the eighties, which the band feels could just as easily apply to the United States.

In 2010, television actor Fred Armisen and ex-Scream/Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl paid tribute to their own punk rock roots in the Saturday Night Live sketch, "Crisis of Conformity", a send-up of an 80s hardcore band reuniting to play a wedding 25 years past their heyday. Chicago indie label Drag City later released a Crisis of Conformity single featuring the song.

In 2012 thrash metal band Municipal Waste formed the spinoff group, Iron Reagan. The band's name pays double tribute to the 1980s with a nod to the group Iron Maiden who enjoyed heavy airplay on MTV during Reagan's presidency.

Record sleeves

Reagan appeared as an actor and spokesperson on spoken word recordings as early as 1958, and was first pictured on album covers in in the early 1960s. One notable recording was Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine a 1961 Cold War propaganda piece sponsored by the American Medical Association. In his speech, Reagan purports that Social Security is a socialist attempt to supplant private savings, and eventually concludes that, "Pretty soon your son won't decide when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him." The first musical album that Reagan appeared on was Ronald Reagan Recommends Award Winning Music from Hollywood, a promotional item produced by General Electric during Reagan's tenure as their spokesperson from 1953 to 1962. The LP features the General Electric Transcription Orchestra rendering such hits as "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah," "White Christmas," and "Que Sera, Sera."

During the 1980s, Reagan's likeness appeared on jackets of records by musicians making political statements almost exclusively against the president. These include:

Ronald Reagan's campaign music

Both in his two terms as governor and during his 1980 run for the presidency, Reagan was introduced with the pop americana standard, "California Here I Come.

During his second run for president, Reagan's campaign advisor, George Will, tried to co-opt Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" for the campaign. Will wrote that if "labor and management, who make steel or cars or shoes or textiles, made their products with as much energy and confidence as Springsteen and his merry band make music, there would be no need for Congress to be thinking about protectionism." A week after Will's writing appeared in a column, Reagan praised Springsteen in a stump speech given in Hammonton, New Jersey. Soon after Reagan's speech, Springsteen expressed discontent with the president and his policies, and "Born in the USA" was dropped from the campaign. Reagan's team then reached out to John Cougar Mellancamp to use his song "Pink Houses" and were turned down. The campaign then adopted "God Bless the USA" by Lee Greenwood with the country singer's permission.

Bob Dole and then Pat Buchanan also used "Born in the USA" in their respective 1996 and 2000 campaigns, until Springsteen objected.