We have to imagine it’s hard to make videos promoting ICE’s ongoing efforts to make America a whiter and more miserable place. Not in terms of actual effort, mind you—the White House’s PR wing seem to crap this stuff out on a sort of loathsome, AI-assisted autopilot. But in conceptual terms, how do you wrestle with trying to put actual good music over videos of a bunch of police academy rejects hassling and detaining immigrants, when everybody who makes good music actively hates your guts? It’s created a recurring cycle that’s cropped up several times over the run of the second Trump administration, as videos have gone out with songs embedded in them, bands have protested, and the Right has treated it as simply the latest iteration of Trolling As National Policy.
Now Radiohead has become the latest band to be forced to ride this irritating carousel, issuing a statement today in response to an ICE video set to the band’s 1997 single “Let Down.” Per Billboard, the band wrote of the song’s inclusion—in an ICE Twitter video purporting to show “thousands of American families” supposedly harmed by the actions of illegal immigrants—that “We demand that the amateurs in control of the ICE social media account take it down. It ain’t funny, this song means a lot to us and other people, and you don’t get to appropriate it without a fight.” The band’s statement then ended on the bluntest note possible: “Also, go fuck yourselves.”
This phenomenon is common enough at this point that Wikipedia actually maintains a page of “Musicians who oppose Donald Trump’s use of their music,” including several who’ve directly protested ICE using their songs in their videos. That includes Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, SZA, and more, at least some of whom have managed to get the videos pulled down by using DMCA requests. Still, you can see why ICE’s social goons keep pulling this particular move: It’s basically consequence-free, kicks up a little attention, and, in some nebulous way, presumably “triggers the libs.” Who they of course hate, at least in part for their dark and terrible control of the eldritch force known as “Music that doesn’t sound like complete and total shit.”
