Do we really WANT to know our politicians' music tastes?

Near the end of the Coen Brothers' O, Brother, Where Art Thou?, our main characters, escaped convicts who happen to record a hit single while on the run, find themselves on stage performing their hit... and right in the middle of a political campaign.  It is one of the two gubernatorial candidates, the challenger Homer Stokes, who exposes the "Soggy Bottom Boys" as detrimental to society, having interfered with a lynching.  Stokes explains:

As you can see in the above clip, the crowd rejects Stokes' condemnation of the group and literally run him out on a rail... as a live radio audience listens to the excitement. The incumbent, "Pappy" O'Daniel, seizes the opportunity his opponent has given him and pardons the cons live on-air.   (The medium is the message!)

Oh, well. This Homer (the film is loosely based on The Odyssey) should have kept his mouth shut. And many of us would prefer our politicians not discuss their music tastes on the trail. To wit:

Recently it's come out that  presumptive Republican VP nominee Paul Ryan's favorite band is Rage Against the Machine. Rage's guitarist Tom Morello has published a short piece at Rolling Stone's web site, in which he wonders what could be the band's appeal to Ryan, since, in Morello's view, Ryan supports the very things that the band rages against!

Of course, Ryan isn't the first politico -- or human being, for that matter -- who likes an artist whose own ideological views are different from his own.  And we know of course that politicians will exploit a pop star's fame if it will help their own campaign.  It was true of the fictional governor, and it was true of President Reagan when he tried to show his appreciation for Bruce Springsteen, who asked Reagan not to mention him on the trail since apparently he didn't really understand "Born in the U.S.A."   And Springsteen is always a good example here, since so many of the working-class fans of his music still consider themselves old-school Republicans.  True, Springsteen's audience is probably not as large as it once was since he came out and endorsed Democratic party candidates like John Kerry and Barack Obama, but that's a separate issue, that of the role of the pop star in politics.

Since the election of the first Boomer to the White House, Bill Clinton, rock music tastes have become a part of the candidates' profiles.  Clinton's Vice President, Al Gore, was a big fan of Frank Zappa; ironic that Zappa would offer testimony at Senate hearings on censorship spurred on by Tipper Gore's Parents Music Resource Center.  But as is often the case, we tend to get embarrassed when politicians display their ignorance in the cultural sphere: think of those Congressional hearings on steroid use in baseball, where representatives didn't know names or history.  

So Paul Ryan joins a list of rock fans who don't care what the message is of their favorite rock band.  But I must admit this is pretty funny.