This August LA indie rock outfit Silversun Pickups delivered the Romney campaign a cease and desist order re: their song “Panic Switch.” Much to the chagrin of the Pickups, Mitt and Co. were fond of using the song’s chugging guitars and message of generalized anxiety to pump up crowds at GOP rallies. This little legal dust up makes the band the latest in a long string of musicians tsk-tsking Republican campaigns for co-opting their work. The Romney campaign ran into a similar problem earlier this election cycle over the use of K’naan’s song “Wavin’ Flag” and in 2008 Heart very publicly tore into Sarah Palin for her use of “Barracuda” to chum the waters at her campaign events.
Clearly, the GOP has some trouble nailing down the perfect soundtrack for their political ambitions — after all, even the most gun-ho rightie can’t solely listen to Ted Nugent on repeat. Luckily, in this case the right can turn to the same people they always turn to when they need a hand: giant multinational corporations. I am, of course, speaking of the Exxon Singers.
You’re forgiven if you’ve never heard of these pioneers in the world of industrial shmaltz-pop. The Exxon Singers never reached the Billboard charts and even the most thorough googling only turns of a brief mention on WFMU’s wonderful Beware of the Blog. However, the group’s album The Spirit of Achievement was surely a hit around Exxon headquarters circa 1976. And with songs like “America’s Way,” how could it not be?
Produced to entertain, inform, and mildly indoctrinate employees at the 1976 Exxon Convention, The Spirit of Achievement is something of a pro-corporate conservative manifesto set to music. As you can guess, it’s not a project steeped in subtlety. Tracks like “America’s Way” gives a full-throated endorsement of liaise-faire economics with lines like “America’s way, the free enterprise way / that’s what got us here today.” Backed by a triumphant slice of sunshine pop, the Singers deliver these hummable slogans with a straight-froward sincerity. It’s the same constructed wholesomeness you find in that group of crazy kids who, just five years earlier, stood atop a hill and declared their intention to buy the world a Coke.
The rest of the album follows much the same formula, matching up Exxon’s political agenda to show tune-quality cuts that sound hokey and dated even by mid-70s standards. The message ricochets between unobjectionable and vague soundbites (the freedom to use, the choice to choose/ that’s what got us where we are today), to unvarnished policy arguments. On the bubbly hit “Efficiency” the Singers really spell it out:
Reasonable government guidelines, well that’s okay
We don’t mind if the government has its say
But too much control, well that just gets in the way
Of Efficiency!
It may be a little moderate for today’s Tea Party crowd, but in this case, job-creators can’t be choosers.
Writing for Cabinet magazine, record collector Jonathan Ward tracks the history and evolution of these corporate music catalogs. His detailed chronology of the genre draws parallels between the genre’s progression and the changing roll of industry in public policy. What begins in the 1940s as a whimsical means to “bolster worker’s confidence in their company’s future,” eventually transforms by the late 70s into vessels of “hubristic corporate fantasies.”
Maybe for the next Republican canditate’s rally, whichever bowtied intern they have picking the music should skip over his mainstream record collection and reach right for Coca-Cola’s 1979 opus to deregulation “That Big Bottling Plant Up in the Sky,” which proudly declares:
In that big bottling plant up in the sky
There’s no FTC and there’s no EPA
No FDA, to spoil your day!