The Village People responded with a firm “no” when asked to perform at President Trump’s first inauguration.
They also declined to appear at Mar-a-Lago last New Year’s Eve.
But the iconic group of the disco era is ready to at least consider playing President Trump’s inauguration and singing his campaign anthem Y.M.C.A. if asked.
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“We’re expecting their call any day now,” Karen Willis, the group’s manager, told the Daily Beast. “And we won’t rule it out.”
Willis is also the wife of Victor Willis, the lead singer and singular constant in a group that drew its name from Greenwich Village and has a changing cast of 30 different people over the years. (He is the cop or the Navy officer.) Only he and a drummer have been with it from the start, though the present members have been together for more than a decade. He has the final word on what it does.
“It’s going to really be up to Victor whether or not the group actually shows up to perform the Y.M.C.A. for Donald Trump,” she said.
She figures it is unlikely her husband will accept this latest invitation given his response to the previous two.
“But this time is a little different,” she said. “It’s [Trump’s] anthem. So we’re going to seriously think about it this time.”
She added, “He said he would only do it if he felt it would be a means to bring the country together.”
Meanwhile, the group has been surprised to see the 1978 hit back in the charts after nearly half a century.
Early this year, she had asked her husband if he wanted her to call the performing rights organization BMI and have them stop Trump from playing the song, as many other artists have done.
“Victor said, ‘No, no, no, let’s just see what happens,”’ she remembered. “Maybe he’ll just get tired and stop playing it.”
Y.M.C.A. remained the closing song at Trump’s rallies. Karen and Victor Willis got a big surprise three weeks ago, when they were checking the progress of the group’s new single Goddess of Love. Y.M.C.A. had suddenly appeared as number 14 on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic chart after 47 years.
“I was like, ‘Is this a mistake?’” she recalled. “We were surprised.”
And it rose to number 4 last week. “With a bullet,” Karen noted.
She meant with an arrow indicating that it is expected to rise.
“And now it’s headed to possibly number one,” she added. “We have no doubt that it had to do with Donald Trump using the song that it’s back on the charts again.”
She continued, “He loves Y.M.C.A. I mean, whenever that song comes on, he’s always dancing to it.”
One continuing mystery is why Trump loves it. The answer may be that along with being a showman, he is also a kind of DJ.
Y.M.C.A. was released in 1978, when Trump was a regular at the disco of all discos, Studio 54. Co-founder Ian Schrager has said that he never saw Trump dance. He also did not drink or take drugs. But, by his own account, he did like to look at beautiful women.
And on the dance floor, the women–and everybody else–would move to the beat of the songs chosen by the club’s DJ.
“It truly was a sensational rush to have the audience in the palm of your hand,” Mark Knight says in Diary of a Studio 54 DJ.
The DJ’s power was particularly manifest when he put on Y.M.C.A.. And to hear it in later years was to go back to the wild 33 months for which Studio 54 existed. Trump went there when it was open with his first wife, Ivana, and he attended a one-night revival on the 40th anniversary with his third and current wife, Melania.
In February of 2022, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that guests at Mar-a-Lago had received an announcement that, “Great music will be played during dinner on Friday and Saturday evenings with President Trump playing the role of Disc Jockey. The music will be amazing, and be lots of fun and will go until the late evening.”
Trump used a playlist on his iPad. And one song remained his favorite because of its effect, not the lyrics.
“You know what gets ‘em rocking? Y.M.C.A., the gay national anthem. Did you ever hear that? They call it the gay national anthem. But Y.M.C.A. gets people up, and it gets ‘em moving,” Trump told YouTubers the NELK Boys for their Full Send podcast in March 2022. “People love it when I do it.”
He had also begun playing the song at his rallies. Trump the showman would beguile his followers with an image born of the TV show The Apprentice. Trump the star entertainer would fire them up by stoking fears and promising to fix it all.
Trump the disc jockey–whom those at Mar-a-Lago had taken to calling DJ Trump– would mix patriotic tunes with a song whose power he learned long ago at Studio 54. The lyrics were not important. What mattered was the effect.
And since he was up on stage and would not just be one of a mass of sweaty clubbers on a dance floor, he even moves to the beat a little bit.
“Whenever the song comes on, as you watch him, he’s always dancing to it,” Karen Willis noted.
The question is whether her husband and the Village People will agree to play the inauguration if asked. She said that their decision might not be clear yet–but their playlist would be: they would be sure to include the song that is likely to hit Number 1 on the charts as early as Monday.
“They would definitely perform Y.M.C.A. and watch Trump dance to it,” she said.
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