Assistant Professor Paula Harper recently published an article in the Boston Globe. The piece, titled "When a ridiculous online ditty leads to the capture of the Venezuelan president," explores how musical memes have become deeply entwined in politics, from the Trump administration's unauthorized use of pop music in social media posts, to the AI-generated song "We Are Charlie Kirk," to Hey Santana's remix of Venezuelan President Maduro's "No War, No Peace" speech.
Read an excerpt of the article below, and click here to read the full piece in the Boston Globe (subscription required to read).
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"By the final weeks of 2025, it had become a regular occurrence: Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, onstage at a major event, would execute an awkward, avuncular, elbows-in shimmy to a dance remix of his own words. “No war, yes peace. No crazy war.” The words popped along atop a thumping dembow beat, accompanied by a blatting trumpet line. The music, like the dance, was kind of crude and amateurish.
Even unserious music can have power, though. In this case, as The New York Times recently reported, Maduro’s dancing to the tune — meant to taunt the United States as its forces closed in on Venezuela — pushed the Trump administration over the edge, clinching the decision to abduct the Venezuelan president and his wife.
Over the past decade, memes have become deeply entwined in domestic and global politics. And while we tend to think of pictures, or perhaps text, when we think of memes, it’s important that we think of music, too.
The rise of TikTok in the early 2020s pushed music to the forefront of the memosphere. Sound files connected dance challenges and other trends, and jumping on a trending piece of audio became the way to join a viral conversation. Music and sound are to the 2020’s social media ecosystem what hashtags were to the 2010s — clickable portals into the swirl of what’s happening now. And politics is happening now, with real-time musical accompaniment."