Maren Morris sings at the DNC Wednesday night (YouTube screenshot).
The devil is in the details. During this week’s Democratic National Convention, he was also in an elevator headed down to the infernal basement far below Chicago’s United Center, his hair flaming orange.
Performing the exorcism was the stalwart party songster and piano man John Legend clad in black-and-white vestments with a plunging neckline. He was joined by vocalizing percussionist Sheila E. in “Let’s Go Crazy,” the chart-topping rock-and-roll burner from the late Minnesotan musical genius, Prince.
“Are we gonna let de-elevator bring us down?” the pop stars queried to the searing beat. The brimstone was hurled back at the question with an exuberant “Oh no!” Instead, the Democrats were following Prince’s advice and punching the button for a “higher floor.” Their elevator was going to bust through the glass ceiling and follow a trajectory not directly up to the Pearly Gates, but instead trace an arc just inside the black-lacquered iron fence guarding 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
“Let’s Get Crazy” sounds like an ode to sex, but it is eschatological funk about getting through this life as quickly as possible and to the “afterworld.” Legend happily reminded us that “we’re all gonna die,” that the Grim Reaper would soon be “knocking at the door.”
For reasons of time, the profligate overspending of which had cost James Taylor his spot on the convention’s opening night, Legend skipped Prince’s Intro which begins “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today …”
That slow, churchy invocation was scrapped for the dance-till-you-drop Christian debauchery that was meant both to embody and to stoke the surging energy of the Democratic faithful.
Prince’s music was deployed often over these past nights to boost the Minnesota brand of vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz. During the state-based playlist heard during the roll call, an instrumental version of Prince’s “Kiss” erupted when Minnesota’s turn came. Prince’s lyrics were prudently put on mute, since they open with: “You don’t have to be beautiful to turn me on / I just need your body, baby, from dusk ’til dawn.”
“Let’s Go Crazy” is just as libidinous, as is abundantly clear from Prince’s official video, even if the song lusts for long-term salvation more than for immediate sexual gratification. The track opens Prince’s album Purple Rain of 1984 and was featured in the movie of the same name and year. “Let’s Go Crazy” shot to no. 1 on the charts just as a previous Minnesota politician, former vice president Walter Mondale, was making a tepid run to unseat incumbent Ronald Reagan. Those old-guard Democrats would never have imagined that a Holy Rocker of such polymorphous erotic power could possibly be drafted into campaign service for the party’s good.
Indeed, that same election year of 1984, True Blue Democrat Tipper Gore, who would become Second Lady almost a decade later, discovered her teenage daughter listening to another track from Purple Rain, “Darlin’ Nikki,” a song that depicts the eponymous “sex fiend … masturbating to a magazine.” This revelation of adolescent musical tastes sent Tipper into paroxysms of censorial rage. She co-founded the Parents Music Resource Center the next year. Tipper was doubtless dumfounded by this week’s Democratic canonization of the Prince of Paisley of Park.
Thanks to Prince and many of his non-posthumous musical colleagues, God was as ubiquitous as football across the conventions four nights, including Beyoncé’s official campaign song, “Freedom,” recently wrested back from a MAGA snatch-and-grab job: “Lord forgive me, I’ve been runnin’ / Runnin’ blind in truth.”
Still, those who endured the slog asked themselves on what day God had created the DNC and couldn’t He have rested on that day too.
Unconcerned by such theological ruminations, the opening musical act, Jason Isbell’s “Something More than Free” praised Him for supplying a job, any job:
I’m just lucky to have the work
Sunday morning, I’m too tired to go to church
But I thank God for the work
I thank God for the work.
Originally, the Lord was adamantly uninvolved in job creation. But then there was that episode, well-known to JD Vance, about a childless, presumably cat-loving woman, a snake and an organic apple. That was the end of the Edenic Welfare State. Fast-forward a few millennia and a housing crisis of Biblical proportions spread across, then Covid: both hammered on in the endless succession of speeches. It was time for stimulus from above, duly hymned by Isbell.
Bruce Springsteen, whose “Born in the USA” made an audio cameo late on Thursday night, is no longer sufficient to rally the working class with his 40-grit voice and unsustainably sourced power chords. New Jersey is not a Swing State, even if Count Basie was born there. Real, or apparently real, Middle American voices are required. Isbell is an Alabaman, but his rural twang and throaty prayers did the job of tugging at the Heartland strings as he stood alone with his guitar in front of the projection of an old wooden barn with a flag painted on it. The nostalgic backdrop was probably drummed up by AI.
Isbell’s bland sonic hors d’oeuvre got the political palate ready for the hot stuff to come from the likes of Stevie Wonder through to the convention’s concluding act—the surrealistic, onanistic beatings of the Chicago Bulls’ Drumline.
Amongst the soul food was more white-bread ballast from the Heartland—Maren Morris’s “Better Than We Found It.” Morris claimed recently to be leaving Country Music because of this branch of the industry’s failure to confront its racist, misogynist past. She was the musical variant of the ex-Trumpers who gave testimony against their former idol during the DNC.
It was through Morris that that the devil insinuated himself most cleverly, if also most clearly, into the Democratic details, revealing to those listening carefully the manipulations and moral triangulations so useful to campaign strategists.
“Better Than We found It” was conceived by Morris in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. Backed by a sincerely strummed acoustic guitar, Morris sang plaintively of the need to take a moral stand when brute reality demands it.
She arrived at the critical third verse, which, in the original version, runs:
Over and under and above the law
My neighbor’s in danger, who does he call?
When the wolf’s at the door all covered in blue
Shouldn’t we try something new?
We’re over a barrel and at the end of one too.
That “wolf in blue” had to be skinned by the DNC censors. So, Morris disarmed her own metaphor: “When the wolf’s at the door, what would you do?” she sang on Wednesday night.
Stevie Wonder does not redact. But kindred lines in Wednesday’s night’s “Higher Ground,” however critical, were already less specific in their imagery:
Powers keep on lyin’, yeah
While your people keep on dyin’.
These words were deemed sufficiently unthreatening by those same powers.
Already funereal in mood, Morris’s song became its own dirge for righteous outrage and reform.
Details like these don’t lie.
