The British rockers have told the Republican’s presumptive presidential nominee to stop using their music at his campaign rallies across the U.S.
“The Rolling Stones have never given permission to the Trump campaign to use their songs and have requested that they cease all use immediately,” a spokesperson for the Stones told the BBC this week.
Over the last year Trump and his team have been making heavy use of the Stones’ 1981 hit Start Me Up at campaign stops during his efforts to secure the GOP nomination, now all but in the bag. The rather aptly titled You Can’t Always Get What You Want has been another oft-used track.
Asked by CNBC Thursday morning about the Stones’ stance, Trump said, “I have no problem with that. I like Mick Jagger.”
The Rolling Stones join a growing list of big names from the music world who’ve told Trump to stop playing their tracks at campaign rallies. Others include Adele, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, Neil Young, and REM’s Michael Stipe.
Whereas most of the artists issued somewhat dry statements along the lines of the Stones’, Stipe declined to hold back. In a statement posted on the Twitter account of REM bassist Mike Mills last September, the band’s frontman wrote, “Go f*** yourselves, the lot of you — you sad, attention-grabbing, power-hungry little men. Do not use our music or my voice for your moronic charade of a campaign.” Tyler, on the other hand, said it wasn’t a “personal” issue but instead related to matters of permission and copyright.
Disgruntled artists may even have the right to sue. “If an artist does not want his or her music to be associated with the campaign, he or she may be able to take legal action even if the campaign has the appropriate copyright licenses,” the performing rights organization American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) says on its website.
Cases of artists stepping in to demand politicians stop using their work surface during many political campaigns in the U.S. Bruce Springsteen, for example, told Ronald Reagan back in 1984 to refrain from using Born in the U.S.A. during his re-election effort, while more recently, in 2008, the McCain-Palin campaign received similar demands from Foo Fighters, Jackson Browne, and Bon Jovi, among others.
