Photo Credit: Mike Sington / X|Twitter
Donald Trump played a video of Celine Dion singing “My Heart Will Go On” at his Montana rally. Now the singer and her management team are speaking up, calling the use “unauthorized.”
Her management team and Sony Music Canada released a statement, saying the use of the “video, recording, musical performance and likeness of Celine Dion” was “in no way authorized, and Celine Dion does not endorse this or any similar use. And really, THAT song?” the statement concludes.
The song was released in 1997 as the theme song for the movie ‘Titanic,’ a love story set on the doomed passenger liner which sank to the bottom of the Atlantic in 1912. Of Course, Celine Dion isn’t the first artist to object to a Trump campaign using her music at its rallies. The Rolling Stone took issue with the use of “Start Me Up” during a rally in 2016, going so far as to issue a cease and desist for the usage.
Rihanna went down the same road, issuing a cease and desist after the Trump campaign played “Don’t Stop the Music” in 2018 during a rally. In fact, so many musicians have spoken out against the use of their music during Trump campaign events that they now have a Wikipedia page dedicated to their objections.
Some of the artists who have objected include Adele, Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen, John Fogerty, Elton John, Free vocalist Paul Rodgers, the estate of Isaac Hayes, Axl Rose, Johnny Marr, Linkin Park, the Leonard Cohen estate, the family of Luciano Pavarotti, Neil Young, Nickelback, Ozzy Osbourne, Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie, Pharrell Williams, Phil Collins, the estate of Prince, Brian May of Queen, R.E.M., the estate of Sinéad O’Connor, the family of Tom Petty, Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider, the Village People frontman Victor Willis, Jack White, and Yoann Lemoine.
The choice to feature “My Heart Will Go On” is a strange one, since it is the theme song for a movie in which a ship sinks. For those reasons, political campaigns typically avoid imagery that could be associated with any kind of sinking. Maybe the next song the Trump campaign will borrow is Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald?”
