If, like Lost in Showbiz, your New Year resolution is to invest vast swaths of time in displacement activities, you may already be gripped by Donald Trump’s failure so far to sign any major artists to play at his inauguration. Indeed, it should by now be your primary concern.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think the musical element to the event has to be that complicated. If he’s not retired, can’t they just book that chap who played the banjo in Deliverance? Apart from it being a suitably evocative passage of music, I’m sure Trump would regard it as a yugely gracious shout-out to his Appalachian heartlands. It’s certainly the first and last they will be getting, at least until he “reopens the coalmines”.
Unfortunately, whoever is in charge of booking the gig hasn’t got to this emotional space yet. And so it is that we are currently in the phase where a procession of celebrities are grandly announcing that they have turned it down, presumably because they have nothing in common with Trump’s movement except OxyContin dependency.
Either way, the roll call is seemingly endless. Timberlake’s a no. Dion’s a no. Kiss are no. Revealing his unwillingness to play for Trump, Elton John inquired rhetorically: “Why not ask Ted fucking Nugent? Or one of those fucking country stars? They’d do it for you.” (I do think Theresa May missed a trick overlooking Elton for the top EU diplomat’s job that was vacated this week. But I suppose we know the thing about the prime minister – perhaps the only thing – is that she simply won’t be told.)
Former X Factor runner-up Rebecca Ferguson has revealed she was asked to perform at the inauguration, and replied that she would only accept if she could sing Strange Fruit. Bit of a risky strategy. Rebecca thinks she has ruled herself out with that – but she should be prepared for a surprise, yes, given that Trump is likely to simply regard the song as being about fruit that is strange. Remember, his presidential campaign was marked by a long succession of artists telling him ineffectually not to use their music. And as is traditional with rightwing politicians seeking backing tracks on the stump, it was clear that Trump failed to even understand the choruses of his favourite songs, almost all of which served as savage indictments of the arseoisie to which he indisputably belongs. Keep on Rockin’ In the Free World, It’s the End of the World As We Know It – basically, if it hated on people like him and all their works, he was quite happy to use it as an accompaniment to his arrival for a press conference, typically via a descent on a gold escalator. Never get to fall in love / Never get to be cool …
Anyhow. One big surprise is that Andrea Bocelli won’t do it. Did you ever? Bocelli is the original tenor-for-a-tenner (10 million, but the point stands). He’ll do Time to Say Goodbye at a wedding at the drop of a cheque – yet apparently even he feels there is “too much heat” with this one.
Hang on – speaking of expensive wedding singers, what about Sting? Surely, surely Sting would be up for it? A few years ago, Sting took between a million and two million to do that gig for the regime of the late hideous Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, who was accused almost hourly by human rights organisations of things such as conscripting armies of children for slave labour and boiling his enemies. Say what you like about Trump, no one’s accused him of boiling anyone yet. Like I say: don’t rule Sting out before time.
Or what about Mariah Carey? After the singer’s very public technical malfunction in a Times Square performance on New Year’s Eve, Mariah’s agent should be seeking to get her back on the horse as quick as possible – and where better than at the inauguration? Furthermore, we are talking about an artiste whose most famous quote is her reply to an interviewer’s question concerning Jennifer Lopez. Namely: “I don’t know her.” Mariah is probably the only celebrity who could carry off some line about not even knowing who Trump is.
My own preference, however, is for Trump to do what he always does, and turn to his kids. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: the Von Trump family singers. As well as being a nod to his Mitteleuropean heritage, please just picture them all in their best clothes, doing So Long, Farewell on the world stage. It’d KILL. I see the family troupe as comprising Ivanka, Donald Jr, Eric, Tiffany, Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner, and whichever of Donald Jr or Eric’s wives is less likely to have repaired to a “rest facility” by 20 January. Most adorable star of it all is naturally Barron Trump, who would take the Gretl von Trapp role. This would leave Barron last on stage at Papa’s party, inching backwards up the stairs as the world bids auf wiedersehen and goodnight to America. Picture the moment, as he quavers, “The sun has gone to bed and so must I,” before curling up in mock sleep and being borne offstage by Ivanka. I’d rather watch that than Taylor Swift any day.
Still, poor dear little Barron, who never looks anything other than terrified. Surely someone must rescue him from the clutches of the gauleiters, and smuggle him and Melania across the mountains to a metaphorical Switzerland – Canada – where they can live freely and wear clothes made out of reproduction Louis Quatorze curtains? If they don’t, he could well be appointed head of the NSA before he hits puberty.
In the end, though, these should be sobering times for the celebrity community, who have been forced by various events in rightwing populism to confront the limits of their previously assumed superpowers. Contrary to the received wisdom of a couple of decades of the most overblown celebrity culture, no amount of endorsements or threats to move to Canada seem to wield any real clout these days. Hillary Clinton’s final rallies included performances by Jay Z, Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga and Bon Jovi, and somehow – I believe there’s a Los Alamos computer tasked solely with explaining this mathematical impossibility to the celebrities – she still lost. Celebrity endorsement is not what the media and others used to imagine it to be – in fact, some have suggested it is a form of “elitism” that may even move the dial a few points in the other direction.
So whatever musical entertainment or otherwise is finally scraped together for the inauguration, the celebrity community probably needs to get away from the idea that their refusal to perform is any sort of exercise of power. Guys: he is about to take delivery of the most apocalyptically sophisticated nuclear arsenal on the planet. I expect he is quite pissed off he can’t book Katy Perry – but there’s the end of the world; and then there’s the end of the world.
