Play that funky music, Mr President
What was so cool about Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on TV?
On June 3, 1992, Bill Clinton went on The Arsenio Hall Show. This was exactly five months before that year’s presidential election, and only one day after Clinton won enough primary votes to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.1 Clinton sat down for a light, humorous interview with the show’s host, but that wasn’t really what mattered. The most memorable part of the show came before the candidate even said a word, and if, like me, you missed watching this live on account of not even being born yet, you can watch the first two minutes of Clinton’s Arsenio Hall appearance below, in glorious ripped-from-VHS definition.
If you can’t watch the video, Clinton played “Heartbreak Hotel” — originally a hit for Elvis Presley in 1956 — on the saxophone. These days, it would not be particularly groundbreaking or interesting for a candidate to do a musical performance on a popular late night show, and I know that for a fact because when vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine played the harmonica on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in 2016, nobody was impressed and probably very few people even remember that it happened. Maybe the harmonica is a less cool instrument than the saxophone, and maybe the candidate for vice president is less important and memorable than the candidate actually running for president, but I simply cannot imagine any politician impressing anyone with this kind of performance in 2016 or in 2024.
Back in 1992, however, Bill Clinton’s televised saxophone jam was a real game-changer. Obviously, Clinton won the 1992 election and served as President of the United States from 1993 to 2001, but it wasn’t because he played the saxophone on TV, was it? Yes, actually! Obviously that was far from the only factor behind Clinton’s win, but the Arsenio performance actually had a really big impact on the race. A campaign retrospective published in The Washington Monthly after Clinton’s election victory notes that when he went on The Arsenio Hall Show, “he still lagged badly behind President Bush and Ross Perot2 in the polls” — but not for long.
Clinton’s performance on Arsenio — and the wide coverage it earned — helped trigger the June rebound that would catapult him past Bush into a lead he’d never relinquish. Many other factors were important, of course: strengthening the bi-racial coalition Democrats had sought for a generation; wooing Reagan Democrats; hammering away at Bush’s inaction on the economy; peppering audiences with one plan after another for jobs and health care and education. But the approach of using pop culture media — and other non-traditional methods of getting out the message had become institutionalized in the campaign.
Today, the biggest risk in attempting to use pop culture to appeal to the elecotrate is that the young people you’re trying to impress will find it cringe, like when Hillary Clinton told people to Pokémon go to the polls in 2016. But in 1992, naysayers criticised Bill Clinton’s saxophone stunt for being inappropriate and beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate. A 1992 Baltimore Sun article sums up and rebuts critics’ complaints:
It wasn’t dignified. It demeaned presidential politics. It “coarsened” the discourse of democracy, to use the language that syndicated columnist George Will seems to use to describe anything that isn’t white, male and borrowed from ancient Rome or Greece. Clinton was dubbed the “Elvis candidate,” in part because he was playing (or rather gamely trying to play) Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.”
But such media mockery only reinforced the overwhelmingly positive messages emanating to the larger audience of voters.
Clinton as Sax Man. Clinton as Baby Boomer. Clinton with a sense of humor about himself. Clinton participating in a Southern-black-and-white-folks’ strain of music. And, if you want to really get down, a case can even be made that it was Bill Clinton with his Excalibur.
But the main message was of Clinton reaching out to parts of the population that seemed to make some of his opponents uncomfortable. He was playing the saxophone on a show whose host was a young, black man who had a big audience of twentysomething men and women from just about every ethnic group.
Whether one was impressed or horrified by Bill Clinton’s sax performance, it was undeniably a break from tradition to court the youth vote by engaging with popular culture like that. And the craziest thing is that it wasn’t exactly youth culture that Clinton was referencing — he wasn’t playing Guns N’ Roses or MC Hammer or something actually current, he was playing the biggest hit song of 1956. On one hand, it makes sense that Clinton would choose a song that came out when he was ten years old over a modern pop hit — trying to reference something that he wasn’t actually familiar with would go down about as well as his wife’s Pokémon Go reference. But it’s also hard to imagine today how a candidate referencing the popular culture of their own youth could be cool or interesting to young people. The gap between 1956 and 1992 is 36 years — would anyone be impressed today if a politician knew or liked or performed the biggest hit of 36 years ago?3 I don’t think so!
Of course, Clinton’s choice of song wasn’t necessarily the key element of his Arsenio Hall Show appearance. The point was not to show his familiarity with Elvis Presley’s first major hit, it was to demonstrate his youth4 and charisma and help differentiate him from the other candidates, and he probably would have succeeded at that even if he picked a different song or just improvised an original riff. But the fact that one of the defining moments of the first boomer president’s campaign involved the biggest hit song of rock and roll’s breakthrough year5 is a perfect illustration of this particular generational divide.
Now, Bill Clinton was not the first American President to engage with popular culture, including popular music, at all. Warren Harding was endorsed by popular singer Al Jolson in the 1920 election,6 John F. Kennedy was pals with Frank Sinatra, Richard Nixon was famously photographed shaking hands with Elvis, and Jimmy Carter, dubbed the “first rock and roll president”,7 was connected to a number of popular musicians in the ’70s. But all of those examples involve the artist in question stepping into the president’s world, not the president stepping into the world of popular culture.8
Perhaps the most significant prior example of a president leaving his comfort zone to use pop culture to appeal to younger voters was when Nixon went on sketch comedy show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, which was like the 1968 equivalent of Saturday Night Live, and said the show’s catchphrase, “sock it to me”. But that was only a five-second cameo, and it apparently “took six takes for Nixon to make it through the phrase without sounding angry or offended”. Maybe I’m just out of touch with 1968 humour, but the take they actually used doesn’t seem that great either!
From this angle, the impact of Bill Clinton on Arsenio starts to make sense — by going all-in on the pop culture outreach, Clinton was breaking with tradition and positioning himself as a new kind of candidate. Before the ’90s, politicians mostly wanted to be seen in a serious light — they might make a little joke for levity in a speech or debate, but that was about as far as it went. But little by little, the standards for what one could do while still being taken seriously began to relax. Probably a lot of young people would have been fine with a candidate wearing sunglasses and playing a rock and roll song on TV much earlier than 1992, but those people didn’t make up a large enough slice of the electorate to make up for alienating the rest. Jimmy Carter got away with some unconvential behaviour when he first ran for president in 1976, but if he’d gone far enough into the “first rock and roll president” thing for it to really define his image, it would have cost him too many older, more conservative supporters to be worth it. But by 1992, even middle-aged voters were young enough that they didn’t view rock music or television comedy or, uh, sunglasses as inherently undignified and unpresidential. Those were all just normal things that had been popular for pretty much their entire lives.
The standard for presidential candidates naturally changed a lot slower than the standard for other people — a candidate running for office had to appeal to voters much older and younger than themselves, whereas someone like a popular musician really only had to care about fans and listeners their own age and younger. Since I like to bring everything back to music, I’m going to use a music video to better illustrate my point here. In Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take it” video, you’ve got a teenage boy who likes heavy rock music and wants to play his guitar, and a middle-aged dad who does not like his son’s music at all. The video obviously sides with the son, and the dad is played for laughs as a huge asshole, but it depicts a real generational divide between kids and parents in 1984.
Eight years later in 1992, both of those characters could vote. How do you appeal to both of them from a pop culture standpoint? You can’t go all in on current (or even last decade’s) youth culture, because the dad probably still hates heavy metal, and you don’t want to alienate him, especially because old people vote at a much higher rate than young people. It would be another 20 years before Twisted Sister was palatable enough to the median voter for candidates to try to use “We’re Not Gonna Take It” as a campaign song. But if you can show that you’re willing to take young people seriously by not taking yourself too seriously, that could help win over the son. Bill Clinton did a good job of threading that needle.
It helps that the generation gap between baby boomers and their parents was especially stark, and anything that fell on the boomer side of the divide has remained far more relevant to younger generations than anything on the older side. Obviously I’m far more familiar with the evolution of music than any other form of media or culture, but in the world of music, boomer favourites from the ’60s onward remain popular to this day, and while the first generation of rockstars from the ’50s have mostly faded from relevance — even Elvis isn’t as big as he used to be — that shift happened far more recently and was not yet underway in the ’90s, only a few years removed from the ’50s nostalgia of the ’80s. Meanwhile, pre-boomer pop culture had a much quicker fade — with the sole exception of Frank Sinatra, pretty much every other pre-rock-and-roll musical icon had experienced a significant fall from relevance by 1970 at the very latest. Thus a baby boomer like Bill Clinton could still position himself as the youth candidate in 1992, even though he was closer in age to Bush Sr than he was to an eighteen-year-old first-time voter, because he fell on the right side of that era’s biggest generational divide. That doesn’t mean there was no cultural difference between older boomers and Gen X young adults,9 but the gap was perhaps smaller than between previous generations, at least at that particular point in time.
Of course, a successful pop culture campaign depends a lot on the candidate. A young, charismatic politician like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama will obviously have a much easier time engaging with popular culture than an older or just plain uncool candidate would, and every outreach method has a use-by date. For example, Obama was the first president to really engage with rap and hip hop, and in 2008, that was actually pretty groundbreaking. It was not groundbreaking or effective when Marco Rubio tried it just two election cycles later, partly because as a Republican, he had far less appeal to liberal-leaning young voters anyway, but also, it had been done before. Even Obama’s pop culture moments eventually lost their magic — young people today are probably not that excited to learn he listens to cool indie artists like Mitski and Big Thief, and instead see his yearly culture roundups as more of a branding exercise and a way to promote his own media company’s movies.
The idea that a candidate’s cultural outreach is actually just a marketing tactic is not new at all. People picked up on this way back in 1992, with the Baltimore Sun article I referenced earlier saying that “since the Arsenio Hall Show and MTV appearances were calculated by Clinton and his advisers to send a message of reaching out, it’s fair to ask whether we should celebrate such manipulation.” That view has become far more common in the social media era, where cynical attitudes are increasingly pervasive, especially in the realm of politics. This makes engaging with pop culture a more difficult line to walk today. Not only do candidates still risk alienating out-of-touch older voters — an increasingly salient concern given how many seemingly viral trends aren’t well-known outside of niche social media bubbles — they also risk seeming overly calculated and insincere. A meticulously planned TV moment is far less likely to resonate today, but an off-the-cuff tweet by a pop singer with a small but dedicated online following can spark a surprisingly popular meme.
Bill Clinton’s saxophone performance definitely could not have had the effect that it did at any other point in history. Earlier on, it would have been seen as inappropriate and alienating by too many older voters for its youth appeal to be worth it. More recently, a stunt like that would be seen as too calculated and inauthentic to really hit with younger voters. But in 1992, the timing was just right, and Bill Clinton’s “Heartbreak Hotel” cover likely helped him win the election. And it didn’t even enter the Hot 100! Maybe the charts don’t measure a song’s impact that accurately after all.
Clinton became the party’s presumptive nominee on June 2 after winning enough primary delegates to cinch the nomination, but would not officially be nominated until the party’s convention in July.
An independent whose 1992 campaign was unusually successful for a candidate outside of the two major parties, although “unusually successful” still means “did not win a single electoral vote”.
That’s “Faith” by George Michael, for those of you who haven’t memorised Billboard’s Year-End Hot 100 statistics.
Clinton was 46, while Bush and Perot were 68 and 62, respectively.
Rock and roll existed many years before Elvis got to it, and music historians point to songs like Roy Brown’s “Good Rocking Tonight” (1947), Fats Domino’s “The Fat Man” (1949), and Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88” (1951) as candidates for the first rock and roll song. The first big rock and roll hit was Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” in 1955, which was the second-biggest hit of that year, but it was the only rock song on the 1955 Year-End singles chart. In 1956, many rock and roll songs by a number of artists, including Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Bill Haley, Little Richard, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, were among the year’s biggest hits, so it seems reasonable to call that rock and roll’s breakthrough moment.
Some sources cite Jolson’s endorsement of Harding as the very first celebrity endorsement of a president, but that overlooks the fact that Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of The Scarlet Letter, not only endorsed but also wrote an official campaign biography of Franklin Pierce in 1852. If you’re wondering why, it was because Pierce and Hawthorne were actually close friends who first met in college, and they remained lifelong friends until Hawthorne’s death in 1864, while he was on a trip with Pierce. However, a pop singer is a very different type of celebrity to a popular novelist, so in a way Jolson’s endorsement was still the first of its kind.
He was also dubbed “the wimp” by a Boston Globe article that was mistakenly printed with the headline Mush from the Wimp, which is where I got my blog title from. Thanks, Jimmy!
We also can’t forget that Ronald Reagan was an actual movie star before he went into politics, but the films he made in the ’40s and ’50s are mostly of interest because they star a future president, otherwise they weren’t really a relevant part of popular culture by the time he was elected in 1980.
You can’t watch Al Gore grilling Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider about explicit lyrics during a 1985 Senate hearing on music censorship without coming to the conclusion that some boomers entered their old person era at a very young age.