Kip Pegley and Rebecca Draisey-Collishaw publish article in *Music & Politics*

“Disinclined to Politicize”? Music and Canadian Politics 2.0

Musicians, scholars, and even reference materials are surprisingly united in the contention that music and politics occupy separate spheres in Canada. This article disputes this claim, offering three case studies of songs written about Canadian politicians. Tony Turner’s “Harperman” (2015), Adrian Sutherland’s “Politician Man” (2019), and Brock Tyler’s “Speaking Moistly” (2020) are drawn from varied social and political contexts—namely, the 2015 and 2019 Canadian federal elections, and the first Canadian wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020—and participate in discourses about federal party leadership, political interference, decolonization, and pandemic management. Our analysis explores how genre expectations shape interpretations of meaning and affect, how recording, mediation, and social media participate in the curatorial process, and how comedy both enables political engagement while also augmenting potential for widely divergent interpretations of meaning. Our examples—songs that can be understood as “protest songs” and “campaign music”—include a meme song, pointing to the limits of genre labels and expectations of form(s) in an increasingly mediated and partisan world. Political affect, we suggest, arises not from the intentions of creators—or, indeed, the form and style of music and lyrics—but through contexts for performance and circulation, as well as acts of curation by performers, mediators, and audiences alike.