Reinvention: What A Political Party Could Learn From the Arts
Reinvention in the Arts
Friday night, I turned on our public radio station. On weekend nights, the station broadcasts a jazz show called “Eric in the Evening,” named for a long-time but recently deceased host named Eric Jackson. I sometimes listen to the show when I want mellow, late-night music, and have done so for more than 40 years.
This time was different. The music I heard immediately caught my attention. It had a full, blaring, untamed sound – a gravelly voiced male singer and fast licks on an electric guitar, supported by brass, woodwinds, drums, and bass. It seemed like a cross between jazz, blues, and rock, with the whole being greater than the sum of its parts (as any worthwhile musical collaboration should be). And it sounded amazing.
What caught me most, though, was a familiar chord progression. I knew I had heard it before, but I couldn’t quite place it. At first, the words were difficult to make out too, yet the melody was familiar. Eager to identify this extraordinary track, I did what any respectable, phone-carrying boomer would do: I opened my Shazam app. Within seconds, the app revealed the song’s title -- it was Eric Clapton’s “Layla.”
The gravelly voiced singer was the songwriter himself. I had speculated that it might have been a young Tom Waits, from the era when Waits’ voice was just beginning to get rough. But the Shazam screen wouldn’t lie. It showed a guitar-bearing Clapton sitting next to a trumpet-wielding Wynton Marsalis. It was a live performance from New York City’s Lincoln Center recorded in 2011. And it was a version of the classic song that I had never heard before.
Like most of my generation, I had heard the original countless times. When I was in college in the 1970s, someone with a loud stereo system would blare the music from his dorm room, perhaps as a gift to those of us throwing frisbees in the quad beneath his window. Years later, I enjoyed Clapton’s live acoustic version. That one, too, took me a minute to recognize, but once I grasped its quieter, more intimate sound, I knew I had to add it to my music collection.
I’ve heard other revelatory covers before, versions of great songs that present them in a whole new light. I have created playlists of covers in my Spotify account, including one I call “Good Dylan Covers” that includes 93 tracks performed by almost as many artists. Years ago I went through a phase of buying CDs that included nothing but covers of some of my favorite artists, like Joni Mitchell, Paul McCartney, Jackson Brown, and The Band. And it was a cover that introduced me to a rising star in pop music, Ed Sheeran.
The first time I heard Sheeran was in 2014 in a televised “Tribute to the Beatles” concert. The lad opened the show with his own version of “In My Life,” a version that wasn’t radically different from the original but was a simple, solo acoustic rendering with a staccato guitar strumming style. If it didn’t significantly alter the presentation, it at least introduced me to a talented new artist, one who was brave enough to perform the classic song not only on tv, but also before a live audience that included Paul, Ringo and the Lennon and Harrison families.
Still, the covers that most impress me are those that reinterpret good, familiar songs in creative new arrangements. Especially for those of us of a certain age, who have listened to and, to some extent, become bored with the same versions of the same decades-old songs, discovering new versions that rearrange the rhythms, the melodies, the harmonies, and/or the instrumentations in fresh and appealing ways, while staying true to the originals’ core attributes, can keep the tunes alive for new generations and revitalize them for old ones. Jazz does that best, but the art of re-imagining a song is not confined to any one musical genre. To extend, though clumsily, a Biblical metaphor, in music as in life there is nothing wrong with putting old wine into new wineskins, and much to be said for it.
Music isn’t the only artistic field for which this is true. The periodic updating of visual art also can reveal new dimensions of beauty and truth, dimensions that are more relevant to changing times. Think, for example, of the many versions of “Madonna and Child” that have appeared throughout the ages.
The same is true for literature, by which I include plays, novels, and film. Romeo and Juliet was brilliantly reinvented as a 1950s-era musical about rival gangs when “West Side Story” was first performed onstage in 1957. That rendering was then presented as a blockbuster film in 1961, which Steven Spielberg adapted again 60 years later (in my opinion, less successfully). Shakespeare’s plays are frequently updated, sometimes placed into contemporary settings even while staying true to their texts, to enhance their appeal to contemporary audiences. So are the works of other great (though not-as-great) playwrights and film producers.
In the realm of fiction, two novels sitting on my bookshelves patiently waiting to be read are Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead,” winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023, and critically acclaimed “James” by Percival Everett, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in 2024. The former was inspired by Dickens’ classic “David Copperfield,” and the latter is a re-imagining of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” told from the point of view of the enslaved person Twain named “Jim.” Old wine, new wineskins.
Why do artists go to the trouble of reinterpreting great works? I suppose because the core virtues of the originals are eternal, but the times and cultures to which they relate constantly change. What worked on stage in 1925 might still work on stage in 2025, but might feel more relevant to a contemporary audience if it were updated from its jazz-age roots to a contemporary setting with contemporary characters. Friday night I could have listened to the original version of “Layla,” but it would not have grabbed me the way the new-to-me Clapton/Marsalis version did. That chance listening experience awakened me to a whole new way a familiar song from half a century ago could exist in today’s world and appeal to listeners both old and new.
Reinvention in Politics
These lessons from the arts also apply to the art of persuasion. As great as the Lincoln-Douglas debates were in the late 1850s, the Illinois Senate candidates’ speeches would no doubt have to be rewritten to appeal to an audience from the 2020s. Bill Clinton’s campaign appearances in 1994 promised a break from the past by opening and closing with the recording of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” (which Fleetwood triumphantly performed live at his inauguration.) President Obama’s slogan that helped propel him to victory in 2008 was “Hope and Change.” Such forward-looking memes work best for a party trying to wrest power from incumbents, but even incumbent parties need to adapt to changing times and an influx of new, young voters.
Obama’s messaging during his 2008 campaign and the one that followed four years later was both timeless and non-partisan, grounded in such values as human dignity, kindness, generosity, international engagement, and collective responsibility for people and planet. They weren’t new, but they were newly packaged, presented by a political newcomer who happened to be a young, dynamic, and energetic communicator. Obama believed in the values he espoused, and he had a gift for inspiring new and old generations of voters (much like Bill Clinton had a decade-and-a-half earlier). To a great extent, in the words of Marshall McLuhan, the medium was the message, and the characteristics and talent of the person delivering the message were part of the medium as well.
Fast forward 17 years and it appears that Clinton’s and Obama’s party has lost its way. It continues to embrace its important core values, but seems unable to present them effectively through new voices and in the new forms that will resonate with a majority of today’s voters. There has been a modest changing of the guard, but some of the old and aging leadership remains in place. The party seems torn between those who think it lost in 2024 because it was too progressive, and those who think it lost because it wasn’t progressive enough. Its focus on saving democracy, while necessary, overshadowed its focus on what voters, and especially young voters, were most concerned about -- the receding promise of the American Dream.
Democrats need to accelerate their transition from a party of old, dyed-in-the-wool politicians to one that can better communicate its values to a wider, younger audience. To borrow again from the world of film and music (the recent biopic “A Complete Unknown”), it needs less Pete Seeger and more post-Newport-Folk-Festival Bob Dylan.
Last year, the party moved too late to transition from the old (Biden) to the new (the untested Harris). Now, it can’t afford to wait any longer. Sure, the Democratic caucus in the House includes plenty of young and exciting faces, and the two middle-aged House Democratic leaders are very capable, but the party as a whole still seems to be clinging to old ways of doing business, or at least struggling to unite around a new one. Making David Hogg Vice Chair of the DNC is a good start, but it is only a start. Like Dylan forcefully pushing folk music beyond its quaint, banjo-picking roots, someone needs to shake things up, and fast.
One can almost hear the party’s voters paraphrasing a line from the song that started this post, “Politicians, won’t you ease our worried minds?”