Five songs that helped shape presidential campaigns

1992 – “DON’T STOP” – Bill Clinton

Heading into 1992, the Democratic candidate for president had lost five of the previous six elections. About eighteen months out, incumbent George H.W. Bush seemed so secure that many of the biggest names on the blue side of the aisle decided to sit this one out.

That opened the field for some younger, ambitious contenders, and no one was more ambitious than the governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. He welcomed the challenge, and when disastrous economic news began to derail the Bush campaign, Clinton was poised to take the prize.

He was aided by a song from a British singer/songwriter who had been a major pop hit fifteen years earlier. Christine McVie’s song, from Fleetwood Mac’s record-setting Rumours album, seems almost perfectly suited for a political campaign designed to turn the page on an old regime and focus on the future: “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow – Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here – It’ll be better than before – Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.”

It was the first modern rock song to play a significant role in a presidential campaign. It played at the Democratic convention and the band performed in at one of Clinton’s Inaugural Balls.

2008 – “YES WE CAN” – Barack Obama

There were a number of songs associated with Barack Obama’s meteoric presidential campaign in 2008, and none may have had a greater impact than “Yes We Can.” It was assembled by Black Eyed Peas’ performer/producer William James Adams, Jr. better known as will.i.am. He used snippets of a speech written by Jon Favreau and delivered by Obama after narrowly losing out to Hillary Clinton in the 2008 New Hampshire primary.

will.i.am set the candidate's uplifting words against a relatively straightforward musical arrangement, and then produced a video in which dozens of celebrities spoke alongside Obama, occasionally singing a phrase or two, but mostly just repeating his words. The musical accompaniment consisted primarily of a simple acoustic guitar and the rhythmic chanting of the crowd that initially listened to Obama’s speech.

Musical stars like John Legend, Common, and Nicole Scherzinger took part, as did other celebrities from Scarlett Johansson to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The approach – essentially a political version of the sampling that had become SOP in many pop songs of the day – gave it a new fresh approach. And Obama’s repeated emphasis on the title words became a slogan for the campaign.

Though we may never know how instrumental the song/video was in the election itself, by the Summer of 2008, it had been streamed more than 20 million times on YouTube.