There’s nothing new about musicians protesting the unapproved use of their songs by politicians hoping to whip crowds into a frenzy of enthusiasm with a solid blast of anthemic rock. The New York Times reported on the phenomenon four years ago, citing Mitt Romney’s and Newt Gingrich’s shrinking set lists as musicians demanded that they cease and desist using their music at their political events in 2012. In previous years, both Jackson Browne and David Byrne successfully sued political candidates for the unauthorized use of their songs in attack ads.
More recently, folks ranging from pop phenom Adele to ragged rocker Neil Young have been telling Trump to take their tracks out of rotation on his stump. But despite his rock-star status when he was alive, it comes as a bit of a surprise that the late Luciano Pavarotti’s recording of the Puccini aria “Nessun dorma” has been alternating sides with the Rolling Stone’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” at Trump events, and the singer’s widow and family want none of it.
In a recent statement in Gazzetta di Modena and later posted in The Times, they said, “the values of brotherhood and solidarity which Luciano Pavarotti expressed throughout the course of his artistic career are entirely incompatible with the worldview offered by the candidate Donald Trump.”
Read the full Times article.