Saying ‘Bye Bye’ to Trump’s Least Favourite Phrases

Final 12 months, numerous indie-music followers—together with myself—received another person’s packing record caught of their head. I’d stroll round muttering “Milk thistle, calcium, high-rise, boot minimize / Advil, black denims, blue denims”—lyrics hissed out by the art-punk legend Kim Gordon on a track referred to as “Bye Bye.” The monitor led off her album The Collective, one of many most acclaimed releases of 2024. Over exhausting hip-hop beats and snarling guitar distortion, Gordon stammered about each day banalities, reframing fashionable life as a psychological warfare zone.

Now the 72-year-old co-founder of Sonic Youth has launched a brand new model of the track, referred to as “Bye Bye 25.” The music is essentially the identical, however the lyrics are new, they usually begin like this:

These are among the many phrases that the Trump administration has tried to attenuate from public life. PEN America has assembled a listing of no less than 350 phrases that federal authorities have, this 12 months, scrubbed from authorities web sites and supplies (together with faculty curricula), flagged as necessitating additional evaluate in official paperwork and proposals, or discouraged the usage of amongst staffers. The eye paid to those phrases displays Trump’s campaign in opposition to range, fairness, and inclusion, in addition to his workforce’s stances on coverage points resembling power and vaccines. Gordon picked a few of these phrases to remodel “Bye Bye”—making her, considerably curiously, one of many few established musicians to launch music immediately impressed by Trump’s second time period.

For all of the chaos and consternation brought on by the president this 12 months, the leisure world’s response has been comparatively muted. Bruce Springsteen, that liberal stalwart, kicked off his tour with an anti-Trump sermon; stars resembling Doechii and Girl Gaga have made awards-show speeches in help of immigrants, trans folks, and protesters. However outright protest music responding to current occasions has been uncommon. “I feel individuals are form of largely simply nonetheless surprised and don’t know what to do,” Gordon informed me in a video chat earlier this week.

The reminiscence of what occurred the final time round is perhaps contributing to the hesitation. Trump’s rise to energy in 2016 spurred a fast response from common tradition, leading to diss tracks (Nipsey Hussle and YG’s “FDT”) and provocations from luminaries (keep in mind Madonna desirous to explode the White Home?). The indie-rock world united for a compilation referred to as Our First 100 Days: one monitor launched for every of Trump’s first 100 days in workplace. However at present, lots of these efforts really feel like both artifacts of a bygone motion—the pink-hatted #Resistance—or just inconsequential. After I spoke with Gordon, she mentioned, with amusing, that she had no reminiscence of contributing to the Our First 100 Days venture.

The brand new model of “Bye Bye” caught my consideration as a result of it’s deadpan humorous, and since it avoids a few of the pitfalls that await many anti-Trump protest efforts. The president and lots of of his supporters appear to make use of liberal outrage as gasoline, which suggests strident criticism has a means of backfiring. Steve Bannon’s said technique to “flood the zone with shit”—to stoke a number of incendiary media narratives each day—could make realizing what to protest first troublesome. The firing of human-rights employees? The extrajudicial deportations? The dehumanization of trans folks? The bid to flip Gaza right into a resort? How do you choose?

Gordon’s track cuts throughout subject areas by highlighting the darkish absurdity of an ascendant political tactic: controlling coverage by controlling language. It additionally doesn’t sloganeer; as an alternative, it presents a patently ridiculous jumble of phrases for listeners to replicate on. (Theoretically, a MAGA loyalist may even benefit from the sound of diversity-related jargon changing into a heavy-metal hit record). “I needed to have some actually mundane, bizarre phrases in there like allergy or measles or tile drainage,” she informed me. “It’s unrealistic to suppose they might really ban these phrases, as a result of everybody makes use of them each day. However I feel if they’d their final fantasy, perhaps.”

Gordon and her former band, Sonic Youth, emanate the form of inscrutable hauteur which may appear at odds with outright protest. However this isn’t her first such effort on this vein. Sonic Youth arose out of the punk-rock underground of the Nineteen Eighties that was boiling with outrage in opposition to Ronald Reagan. In 1992, their track “Youth Towards Fascism” featured Thurston Moore—the band’s different singer, and Gordon’s now-ex-husband—sneering, “Yeah, the president sucks / He’s a warfare pig fuck.” That very same 12 months, the Gordon-led “Swimsuit Subject” skewered male chauvinism, a subject she returned to with the hilarious “I’m a Man” on The Collective.

Speaking along with her, I remembered that although Gordon is commonly related to Gen X disaffection, she’s actually a Child Boomer who got here of age attending Vietnam Battle protests and listening to folks music. The video for “Bye Bye 25” splices photos from the current anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles with photographs of her holding cue playing cards within the fashion of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video. She informed me her favourite protest track is Neil Younger’s “Ohio,” which decried the state violence at Kent State College in 1970. Younger, she suspected, didn’t intend to write down an out-and-out rallying cry. “These lyrics had been describing a time,” she mentioned. “That’s what I hope I’m doing with my music and my lyrics—actually describing what’s occurring.”