Portrait of the Artist as Electoral Rot

Bernie Sanders was that bold experimental album that could have changed music forever until the record company got involved and tried prevent it from ever getting made, afraid it would either not move enough units to produce a profit or be such a roaring success that they'd have to re-train their boring, staid A&R men to suit a new business model. Maybe one day it'll be released posthumously or a few years down the road.Like The Velvet Underground & Nico, everyone who buys a copy will put out their own ground-shaking album.

Hillary Clinton is solid pop, fairly risk averse, you wish they'd stop making this stuff, but it's not her fault and you can tell she really loves exactly this type of careerist solo work. Also, she has a fairly solid discography that people shit all over (sometimes for good reasons), but really deserves a reassessment. There's some really terrible ballads and some horrible collaborations with the industry's biggest monsters (Dr. Luke and R.Kelly both on that same Iraq War track!), but it's fine. You wouldn't turn it off it was on at someone else's house, but you'd never actively put it on yourself.

Donald Trump is the rich actor who spent his entire career doing something else and now decided he wants to give music a try. He has no musical skill, nor talent, nor appreciation of the aesthetic nuances and subtleties of the artform, but who puts out an album he says is going to change everything and put music back to the way it's supposed to be. In actuality, it's just a shitty jumble of half-forgotten covers of problematic acts and half-plagiarism of bands whose time has come and gone. The lyrics are just narcissistic boasts and incendiary put-downs of other, more talented and creative musicians. Even given its retro-reactionary swing toward music's worst tendencies, it's even worse than a retread because it's hackneyed and amateur, but in a bombastic and overproduced way rather than being charming and DIY. His album rejects all the outside genre innovations of the past 30-40 years and it definitely has no soul or grit about it. Even Clear Channel and Live Nation are struggling to justify its existence. Also, dude is touring with Skrewdriver.

In addition, this is a world where we only put out 2 albums every four years and a woman has never had a #1 or even recorded an album.

[Break up the sentences above and add wacky GIFs that undermine the severity of the situation. Buzzfeed pay me $50. Share with 20 friends. Run again in 4 years if world not reduced to simmering rubble. ]