Jimmy Eat World and Open Mike Eagle Join “30 Days 30 Songs”
Image via 30 Days, 30 Songs“30 Days, 30 Songs” has once again expanded its lineup, this time to 50 total tracks, adding 10 more songs to protest the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Jimmy Eat World is the first band in the expanded lineup, with the song “My Enemy.” It was originally released as a B-side to their single “Sure and Certain,” but the song’s lyrics about unchecked fear are extremely appropriate when considered in the context of Trump’s campaign. In the band’s statement, they talk about how to resist the kind of fear-mongering that Trump employs:
There are dangerous and very real consequences for using fear of “The Other” to motivate a potential electorate. While that’s nothing new in politics, what is newly alarming in context of the current presidential campaign, is how seemingly effective that strategy has been for a certain candidate. That candidate used the low-hanging fruit of fearmongering to gain his initial momentum and continues to employ variations of it to sustain his place. The only way to steel yourself against that kind of manipulation is to do the real self-work in discovering and letting go of your own fears. While that pursuit is difficult because it means fighting against your own ego, it remains worth the effort—not just for what it can do for us as individuals but even more for what it can do for our collective society. Are you willing to accept that maybe, just possibly, what you feel as a threat, isn’t?
And released late last night was Open Mike Eagle’s “How to Be Super Petty to Your Ex,” a song that serves as a commentary on Trump’s treatment of his ex-wives and his harassment of women in general. In his statement, Open Mike Eagle said:
This election is a bag of burning alley trash. It’s burning and it smells. One of the people in it is the worst person ever and he’s dangerously close to the most powerful office in the country because he’s learned how to trick poor people into thinking he’s going to do something nice for them. It’s really bad. I feel like we’ve earned this though. We’ve known for a while now that there’s at least two Americas and we haven’t done anything to attempt to bridge the differences in values. So now we have to defend our country from his groping, gross hands.
You can listen to Jimmy Eat World’s song above. Open Mike Eagle’s song is below.