Many progressive Democrats have sunken into a state of mourning since Bernie Sanders’ decision to drop out of the presidential race on Wednesday April 8. The Vermont senator’s decision leaves Joe Biden as the only Democratic candidate left for the 2020 presidential election. You have the right to be upset by this news for many, many, many different reasons.
Recent sexual assault allegations against Biden seem to be at the forefront of many liberal minds as we come to terms with casting our votes for our current Democratic candidate. If this were another article, I might go on to describe in detail why it sucks that we must vote for Biden. Maybe I’d write about how these results might have been avoided or why this is proof that America seems to care very little about the women living in it.
Feel free to pick and choose your own reasons for mourning Bernie’s loss and Biden’s win. I won’t talk about any of that.
This is an Arts article and as such this is about figuring out what next steps we can take as a community. We have to survive this somehow—preferably united and preferably without Donald Trump serving a second presidential term. So, in this article I will be offering you a way to cope with your pain in the form of a musical guide with which to navigate your stages of grief.
Let’s start at the top. According to the Kübler-Ross model, there are five basic stages of grief. Everybody moves at different speeds through the levels, but we generally deal with the same core emotions: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
We start with denial: pretending it’s not real. For the first portion of this playlist, we don’t even need to acknowledge the upsetting incident mentioned in the first paragraphs of this article. This calls for some bad bitch tunes: Nicki Minaj, Lizzo, Rhianna, Doja Cat and anything else that makes you feel like you’re doing just fine.
You know what, let’s even put Bernie’s campaign song on there— “Power to the People” by John Lennon. Bernie is thriving; he’s our future president. We don’t need to think about anything else. God bless America.
The comedown won’t be as fun. Now we transition into anger: getting fired up because you can’t lie to yourself anymore. Crank up Rico Nasty—maybe her song “Smack a Bitch” if you’re specifically thinking about Biden.
“Fight the Power” by Public Enemy is another song to blast as you rage through grief’s angry stage. Do it. Fight the power. Listen to Halestorm and Five Finger Death Punch. Smash a hole in the wall.
It’s okay to be angry at Biden. It’s okay to feel let down by the country you live in. It’s okay to go on a Twitter rant until you feel a little less frustrated with the state of our politics.
In a transition that might hurt worse than the last, we shift into the stage of bargaining: trying to make the problem go away. This part of the playlist is supposed to be painful. You must play the music you despise most in the interest of appeasing the Politics Gods.
For me, hater of country music, I’ll play Blake Shelton, Tim McGraw and Jason Aldean. Don’t chicken out on this part. We must listen, we must cry from the physical pain that the music causes in our souls and we must beg the Politics Gods to give us back our Bernie. Once they see our suffering, hopefully, they’ll take pity on us and make him our president.
As soon as we realize that the Politics Gods aren’t listening to our pleas, we’ll fall into the deep, unforgiving pit of depression: the hollow sadness that we’ve been trying to avoid. This will be a period of tears, headaches, lying in bed under several layers of blankets and long, hot showers.
The perfect artists for this time of despair include but are not limited to Snail Mail, Elliott Smith, Sufjan Stevens, Ritt Momney and Nick Drake. Songs like “Fear City” by Elliott Smith and “Should’ve Known Better” by Sufjan Stevens seem particularly relevant to our current national nightmare.
It’s also okay to be depressed. This is a worst-case scenario. Either way, the country must elect a president who has been accused of rape. Biden only seems marginally better than Trump right now, and we are allowed to be sad about it.
Then, we’ve reached the final stage of acceptance: when we decide there’s nothing to be done about the pain. We revert back to our normal styles of music—for me, Soccer Mommy, Fall Out Boy and Florence and the Machine.
Maybe we’ll resort to playing the national anthem on repeat to remind ourselves that voting for Biden must be done to preserve democracy. Maybe while we do this, we’ll look up Biden’s policies again to remind ourselves that we will be better off if we elect him instead of Trump.
Either way, we must eventually accept that this political mess is our current reality. Let’s just take care of ourselves, take care of our friends and our families and try our best to make a change. Keep that music playing in the background while you do.