Wait, was that Kamala Harris emerging from a record store brandishing a vinyl copy of the Grateful Dead’s Live/Dead? No, it was actually Charli XCX’s Brat. No, hold on, it was Frank Zappa’s One Size Fits All. Or maybe it was Nirvana’s Nevermind or GZA’s Liquid Swords?
All those answers are right — sort of.
In the week since Harris became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, music nerds have been having fun with a photo, taken last year, of Harris emerging from HR (Home Rule), a record store in the Washington, D.C. area. As part of Small Business Week, Harris popped into the indie shop and walked out with LPs of albums by Charles Mingus and Roy Ayers as well as the Ella Fitzgerald-Louis Armstrong collaboration, Porgy & Bess.
Last week, Mitch Said, a web designer and consultant based in Johannesburg, South Africa, began noticing people on the internet swapping out the Mingus album for other, more unexpected examples. “I wanted to make one for myself,” he tells Rolling Stone. “And I thought it would be nice and fun to make everyone be able to do it really easily.”
The co-founder of a new startup, Ghostwriter, and a consultant for the company Digital Kinetics, Said (who is of dual South African and American citizenship) got to work. Last Friday night his time, his site Kamala Holding Vinyls went live. With it, one can quickly type in the name of an album and have it instantly replace the Mingus record Harris was actually displaying (Let My Children Hear Music).
The result has been a meme-a-thon avalanche of Harris “holding” copies of modern classics (De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising), cult favorites (John Cale’s Paris 1919), and various underground punk and DIY records. Not surprisingly, Sonic Youth’s Goo, which has generated many memes itself, is also among them. Said himself started with British techno band Burial’s album Untrue, which he calls “a soundtrack to many moody evenings” in his life.
The memes certainly play off Harris’ taste in music. During her presidential bid in 2019, the then-Senator posted a summer playlist that included a list of songs by artists rarely, if ever, associated with a presidential candidate beyond Barack Obama: among them, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Funkadelic, Buena Vista Social Club, Ariana Grande, A Tribe Called Quest, Bob Marley, and Bad Bunny. “She has genuine musical cred,” Said says. “But people like the incongruity of having her hold stuff she probably wouldn’t love.” He says he’s noticed that people especially seem to enjoy inserting “extreme stuff,” like albums by Cannibal Corpse or anything produced by Steve Albini.
Although he doesn’t have any hard data, Said estimates his site has been visited a million times, and hundreds of tweets testify to the rush to cover swap: “I thought there might be a little bit of kudos and interest, but I was not expecting how many I’ve seen.” To Said’s shock, Questlove posted a response to his initial post, simply writing, “Bless you.” The memes look so real that one of them briefly fooled producer and drummer Narada Michael Walden, who posted one of Harris allegedly carrying a copy of the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s fusion standard The Inner Mounting Flame (“Amazing!”) before his followers corrected him. (Walden was in a later incarnation of that band.)
At least neither Said nor Harris needs to worry about how the Charles Mingus estate feels about Said’s meme-generating site. “We think it’s all great — we’ve used it ourselves,” says Mingus’ stepson Roberto Ungaro, who manages the Mingus estate. “Anything that points us in the direction of Mingus, his music and his values, is moving in the right direction.”
From Rolling Stone US
