In recent weeks, he had made it a ritual of his campaign meetings: a furtive sway on a well-known Village People song, the disco hit YMCA. But the rights holders of the piece have little taste that their 1978 hit, written by two French people (Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo) and an American (Victor Willis), was thus distributed in a frantic way to the four corners of the United States, in the end of each of the Republican candidate’s meetings. The latter also broadcast on Twitter Tuesday, to call to vote on election day, a montage of several sequences of his meetings where we see him sketching dance steps, all smiles, with the famous title in soundtrack.
The beneficiaries of French authors, “As the company Scorpio Music, owner of the work, discovered with amazement this misappropriation, which is more for partisan and electoral purposes for the benefit of Donald Trump, which they would never have accepted”, wrote in a press release Me Richard Malka, their lawyer.
This song – whose choreography is as famous as the lyrics, with the band members dressed as cowboys, Indians, policemen, construction workers, bikers and soldiers – references a male Christian youth movement, the Young Men’s Christian. Association. But in the 1970s and 1980s, she was also considered a standard bearer in the gay community.
