Rock Nation: Jimmy Carter and the music-industrial complex

Hot on the trails of her 2016 Presidential Campaign, Hillary Clinton paid a visit to New York Radio Show, The Breakfast Club. As with all media visits during election time, every appearance provides an opportunity to convert skeptics into believers. As the interview drew to a conclusion, Clinton was posed with one final question: “what is something that you always carry with you?” 

Her quasi-instinctive response of “hot sauce” drew an eruption of laughter and disbelief from the show’s hosts. Pressing her for clarification, she was asked “are you getting in ‘Formation’ right now?”, ascertaining whether she was alluding to a viral lyric from the politicised, Beyoncé anthem of the same name. “Hot Sauce in my bag, swag?” the host continues, still noticeably in disbelief that Clinton genuinely resonates with the song. After gathering himself the same host says, “now listen, I just want you to know, people are going to see this and say ‘okay, she’s pandering to Black people’”. Clinton responds with a wry grimace: “okay… is it working?”

Clinton’s attempt to align herself with a pop superstar is by no means a new election tactic. Every four years, US Presidential candidates selectively unite with musicians to sway voters from specific demographics in their direction, with varying degrees of success. It has been suggested that, as a nation, American voters’ habits tend to favour spectacle over policy. Presidential contenders whose agenda pragmatically often fails to back the interest of the vulnerable classes — Carter’s deregulatory policies, Obama’s mass deportations — not just sweeten but conceal unsavoury attributes into a palatable veneer of  celebrity-approved decorum. By appealing to a voter’s affective connection with their favourite musician, a politician stands a significantly stronger chance of seducing the undecided and disenchanted.

“Music is the best proof that people have one thing in common. No matter where they live and no matter what language they speak”, explains former US president Jimmy Carter. The former head of state features in a new documentary exploring how his very personal (and, inevitably, electoral) relationships with the likes of Bob Dylan, The Allman Brothers, Cher, Willie Nelson and Nile Rogers soundtracked both his admission into, and life inside The Oval Office.

Titled Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President, the film also serves to shed an alternative perspective on a president whose domestic legacy outlines a slightly square and bureaucratic figure. In contrast to this reputation, director Mary Wharton wanted to cast a lens on Carter’s declared love of music, and use of the latter as a tool of social unity. As the film releases on Arte, we asked Wharton about the remaining traces of the American Dream, the ingrained voting reflexes of a society of spectacle and the credibility of bonds between political leaders and musicians.

The film begins with some shots of Jimmy Carter’s hometown of Plains, Georgia before cutting to a clip where he divulges with a chuckle that: “those Allman Brothers helped put me in The White House by raising money for me when I didn’t have any money”. The emphasis on Carter’s humble peanut farm beginnings in a small, Southern town perfectly sets the scene for the early stages of an American Dream narrative. Do you feel as though belief in the American Dream is still alive in 2020 and would you say a function of the film is to affirm renewed belief in mythology of the Dream?

Absolutely! I still want to believe in the promise of the American Dream, despite the fact that it has taken a beating in my lifetime. I think that corporate America has systematically drained the life out of the dream for most Americans by valuing profits over people to the point that we now find ourselves in a period of the greatest of income inequity since The Great Depression. By reminding Americans that we once had a leader (in the not-too-distant past) who pursued policies that allowed the American Dream to flourish, I hope that audiences will come away with a new faith in the ideals and principles that this ideal was founded on.

You’ve noted in an intervie​w with The Guardian that Carter isn’t remembered as “a particularly cool or hip guy” and thus his affinity for rock’n’roll feels unexpected. Are you, in some ways, trying to rewrite the narrative on how his presidency is collectively remembered by shedding light on more of who he was as a person?

I always believed that President Carter has gotten a bad rap, because even liberals will say things like, “I love what he’s done post-Presidency, but he was never a very good President”. Maybe I have a different idea of what makes a “good” President, but I believe that a President whose choices reflect a strong moral compass, and who was willing to sacrifice his own political fortunes for the greater good of the country is about the best that we could ever hope for. The film’s producer, Chris Farrell and I wrote a treatment for this film in which we said that we hoped that by using music as the lens through which we viewed President Carter, that it might make audiences re-examine their preconceived notions about him. It’s less about trying to rewrite the history than it is about asking people to look at it differently and maybe think about what’s truly important in a leader.

In a similar vein, the film uses the nostalgia people hold for the likes of Bob Dylan, Nile Rogers and Willie Nelson to create a common ground between the viewer and Carter. Would you say that music ages more positively than presidencies and if this is the case what is the reason for that?

I believe that music is more powerful than presidencies because it touches our soul and opens our hearts. Carter speaks in the film about the power that music had in helping to change hearts and minds about race relations in America during the Civil Rights movement. Music reminds us that we, as humans, have a lot more in common than we are different and helps us to connect with our own humanity and feel empathy towards others.  Music brings us together whereas politics divides us and together we are stronger.

The film makes the point of emphasising how Carter’s close relationships with popular musicians helped him secure significant portions of the ‘youth vote’ in his Presidential campaign. Do you think the artists that aligned with Carter were aware of just how large a sway they controlled?

No, I don’t believe those artists quite understood their power at that time (nor did anyone else, for that matter). When Bob Dylan speaks of his first meeting with Jimmy Carter, he talks about being surprised that his music had reached into “the establishment world” that Jimmy Carter inhabited. In 1976, there was still a huge divide between the counter-culture world of rock and roll and the establishment in America, and the Baby Boomer generation was only old enough to have voted in one Presidential election at that point. The anti-war, Democratic candidate George McGovern, who had the support of many young musicians, lost in a landslide against Nixon in the 1972 election. So there was no reason to believe at the time that aligning with these figures would help Carter win the election. Carter associated with these people in spite of all the advice he was being given at the time that it could be detrimental to his image, and because he understood that musical concerts were an effective fundraising tool for his campaign.

The relationship between musicians and politicians has largely endured post-Carter, with Barack Obama aligning himself with Jay-Z and Beyonce, President Trump with Kanye West, and Hillary Clinton with Rae Sremmurd, to name a few. Do you think that in an era where musicians and celebrities largely hold a cultural monopoly, and, frankly, a disproportionate ability to sway elections, there is concern to be raised over how genuine the links formed between politicians and musicians are?

In my opinion, whether or not the relationship between a politician and musicians is genuine should be less of a concern than whether a politician maintains relationships with those who might stand to benefit from the policies they put forward. For example, I don’t see how Kanye West benefits from his relationship with President Trump, but I do have concerns about the fact that (as The New York Times reported) there have been “over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments who patronised Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration”. Bernie Sanders’ campaign embraced a number of young, popular musicians, including The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Diplo, Tom Morello, Cat Power, and Kim Gordon. While I don’t believe Bernie Sanders sits around listening to the Chili Peppers and Sonic Youth in his spare time, his association with those musicians was not enough to save his campaign. I think concerns about the nature of these relationships are perhaps overrated.

The film highlights an incident recounted in Willie Nelson’s biography where a “a big fat Austin torpedo” was said to have been smoked within the White House along with a member of White House staff. Whilst this can be seen as a light-hearted moment that resonates with the middle-class American audience, were you at all concerned about exploring the topic given how many people, particularly from low-income backgrounds, have been incarcerated for Marijuana possession in the US—secondly, does this perhaps affirm the belief that there is one law for the many, and another for the privileged few?

I agree that we have a long way to go towards reversing some of the racist drug enforcement policies in America. As someone whose family was torn apart when my father was sent to jail on marijuana charges, I don’t take the criminalisation of drugs in this country lightly. When we treat a public health issue as a political tool there is often a heavy price to pay, and unfortunately it is usually the people from low-income backgrounds who suffer the most. But with the decriminalisation of marijuana happening all across America, the humour to be found in the Willie Nelson story told in our film serves to illustrate how far we’ve come. You mentioned Barack Obama’s relationship with Jay-Z before. Jay-Z built a career unafraid of avoiding references to his drug-dealing past, and yet he was welcomed into the Obama White House and is widely celebrated as a symbol of The American Dream, whereas Carter’s association with Gregg Allman was seen as possibly a political suicide after Allman was tainted by a drug scandal. I think that for the most part, Americans today are less likely to fall prey to racist schemes such as the War on Drugs waged by the Reagan Administration. As the pandemic continues to rage across this country, I hope that people will wise up to the fact that politicising public health only serves to preserve the power of those who are doing the politicking.

Would you say that the Carter Presidential campaign exhibits a voting reflex of the American public to vote for the candidate with the greater accompanying spectacle as opposed to voting with a more policy-driven agenda?

I would agree that a certain segment of the American public will vote for the candidate that says the things they want to hear, without looking too carefully at whether or not the actual policies of that candidate match the messaging of the campaign. However, I don’t believe that the success of the Carter campaign was a reflection of that. Carter was able to mobilise the young peoples’ vote by aligning his campaign with musicians, but he also followed through on the campaign promises that he made to those young voters, such as when he pardoned the so-called “draft dodgers” and welcomed home hundreds of thousands of young Americans who had left the country to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War (an issue that was important to his friend, Gregg Allman). Carter campaigned as a man of the people and as President he introduced a number of ambitious programs for social and economic reform, and included a relatively large number of women and minorities in his cabinet. I would argue that Carter’s policies in office were a direct reflection of the messages he put forward in his campaign. If voters were swayed by the killer soundtrack of the Carter campaign, they were lucky to have elected a man who cared as deeply about enacting policies that benefited the American public as he did about the music that he listened to in his spare time.

‘Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President’ directed by Mary Wharton is available to view on Arte from the 20 October 2020 till 17 January 2021.