By Donald Trump always gives the impression that he's being attacked from all sides and that the world is desperately unfair for a man who became a millionaire at the age of eight. He's right in one way though. Musicians absolutely hate him using their music at his rallies, and Axl Rose and Rihanna are the latest to tell him to knock his use of 'Sweet Child O' Mine' and 'Don't Stop The Music' on the head.
"The Trump campaign is using loopholes in the various venues’ blanket performance licenses which were not intended for such craven political purposes, without the songwriters’ consent," Rose explained on Twitter. "Can u say shitbags?"
Yes u can, but u probably won't get Trump to stop. Trump has largely paid very little attention at all to whether musicians are happy with him using their music, but that's not stopped them pleading with him to stop. These are the biggest tiffs.
Neil Young
The environmentalist and anti-war and gun control activist was the first to take Trump on, and is perhaps the last you'd put in a political kinship with the President. Trump used 'Rockin' in the Free World' to launch his presidential tilt at Trump Tower - with paid permission, for once - but dropped it after Young got the hump and spoke out for Bernie Sanders instead. "Mr. Trump is a big fan and likes Neil very much," campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said. "We will respect his wish." That's not a pattern which would hold for very long.
Pharrell Williams
Pharrell took issue with Trump playing 'Happy' at a rally for the Future Farmers of America in the hours after the recent shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue which left 11 people dead, and his lawyer, Howard King, went in hard. "On the day of the mass murder of 11 human beings at the hands of a deranged 'nationalist', you played [Pharrell's] song 'Happy' to a crowd at a political event in Indiana," King wrote. "There was nothing 'happy' about the tragedy inflicted upon our country on Saturday and no permission was granted for your use of this song for this purpose. Pharrell has not, and will not, grant you permission to publicly perform or otherwise broadcast or disseminate any of his music."
Bruce Springsteen
After Trump pinched 'Born in the USA' for his rallies, Springsteen put together an anti-Trump anthem called 'That's What Makes Us Great' with Houserockers' Joe Grushecky. It's not very good, but it's got better optics as a response than hanging out with the Obamas on a yacht in Tahiti, as he did in April 2017.
Steven Tyler from Aerosmith
Tyler's people served Trump with two notices to stop using his 'Dream On' at rallies in 2015, and Trump eventually caved: "Even though I have the legal right to use Steven Tyler’s song, he asked me not to. Have better one to take its place!" Then, just a couple of weeks ago, Trump started using Aerosmith's 'Livin' On The Edge' and everyone had to go through the whole thing all over again.
REM
After a very restrained please-stop-it statement from the band and their record label over Trump's use of 'It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)', frontman Michael Stipe went for a slightly more fulsome explanation of his position on Twitter: "Go fuck yourselves, the lot of you — you sad, attention grabbing, power-hungry little men. Do not use our music or my voice for your moronic charade of a campaign."
Twisted Sister
Dee Snider and Trump were mates from The Celebrity Apprentice and initially gave the thumbs up to Trump using 'We're Not Gonna Take It', but later revised that opinion when he realised that Trump wasn't just about "shaking things up", as he'd thought. "It’s very upsetting to me, ’cause I strongly don’t agree with his extremist positions," Snider said at the time. "I have to call Donald. I have to speak to him, as a friend. He was respectful enough to call me and say, 'How do you feel about me using this?' And I’ve gotta be — as a friend — respectful enough to call him and say, 'Listen, man, this has gotten wildly out of control, and I really have a problem with it.' It’s really gotten ugly."
Adele
Unhappy that the Trump campaign used a medley of her hits, including, for some reason, 'Skyfall' (who knew Trump knew his way around a CDJ deck?), Adele backed Hillary Clinton "100 percent" at a concert. Didn't do much good in the end, as you might recall.
Elton John
"I have broken more Elton John records, he seems to have a lot of records," Trump boasted in July - incorrectly, would you believe - of the attendances at his rallies. "And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ." Trump is an admirer of Elton's organ, utilising the unique parp it gave to 'Tiny Dancer' and 'Rocket Man' to get his rally crowds pumped. Elton denounced it, and flatly turned down the chance to sing at Trump's inauguration.
The Rolling Stones
Trump liked using 'Start Me Up' and, oddly, 'You Can't Always Get What You Want' to hype up his rallies; Mick and the lads disagreed. "The Rolling Stones do not endorse Donald Trump," they tweeted. "'You Can’t Always Get What You Want' was used without the band’s permission." Unfortunately they actually couldn't get what they wanted, and the Trump campaign kept using the songs.
George Harrison
Having been dead since 2001, Harrison didn't have much of a hand in rejecting the use of 'Here Comes the Sun' at the Republican National Convention, but his official Twitter account decried it as "offensive and against the wishes of the George Harrison estate", which added that "if it had been ‘Beware of Darkness’, then we may have approved it".
Queen
The use of 'We Are the Champions' riled Brian May, Roger Taylor and The Space Where John Deacon Used To Stand, with May stating that it "has always been against our policy to allow Queen music to be used as a political campaigning tool". (The band also used that pretext to play Sun City in Bophutswana, South Africa, during the UN's apartheid-inspired cultural boycott of the country in 1984.) Trump continued anyway, leaving the band "frustrated" that their request had "obviously been ignored by Mr. Trump and his campaign".
Prince
'Purple Rain', a grovelling apology and plea for togetherness which, in Prince's view "pertains to the end of the world", is one of the stranger choices of rally tunes, but there we are. Prince's estate took a very dim view, with Omarr Baker, Prince's half-brother, writing: "The Prince Estate has never given permission to President Trump or The White House to use Prince’s songs and have requested that they cease all use immediately."
