Yesterday afternoon, Bernie Sanders (aka a member of Bernie Sanders’ social media team) retweeted a link (which has since been deleted, it seems) to a song called “Superdelegate,” via someone named Lukas Autry Nelson:
What was immediately apparent was that this was one weird song, from the old-school, psycheledic sound to the extremely literal, often painful lyrics: “Change your mind, superdelegate/ You have to find just where we’re at/ You’re a fool/ You can be bought by who you represent.” Gawker’s Ashley Feinberg went so far as to call it “why-is-blood-streaming-from-my-ears bad,” and while that may be a tad extreme, there’s no denying that as far as political protest songs go, “Superdelegate” is no “Killing in the Name”—especially since its message targets an oddly specific and not particularly sexy aspect of our political system.
That actually made it a pretty good fit for the Sanders campaign, since he and his supporters have been vocally opposed to the huge lead Hillary Clinton has gained from said superdelegates. Still, within 24 hours the tweet had vanished, along with Sanders’ retweet, probably due to the scorn the song attracted after Gawker’s post: “Senator, hire better Tweeters,” wrote one commenter. “My brain is literally in pain right now,” wrote another.
But an already strange sequence of events gets even stranger when you look at the players involved: Lukas Autry Nelson, the man behind both the original tweet and the song itself, is the frontman for Promise of the Real, a band that describes its music as “cowboy hippy surf rock,” as accurate a description of the genre “Superdelegate” falls into if there ever was one. He’s also Willie Nelson’s son (yes, that Willie Nelson). POTR have toured with Lukas’ father and with Neil Young in the past, and they released their third album, Something Real, earlier this year. Now, apparently, they are also #FeelingtheBern.
