UPDATE: Clinton supporter busted for unauthorized use of Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl”
UPDATE: A spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s campaign has now confirmed that the video was created by a supporter, not the campaign itself. The original article is below.
Here we go again! For the 100th time this election season, a politician is getting in trouble for using a song without permission, so let’s all have a good laugh and see which of those goofballs it was this time. Was it Donald Trump again? Was it a desperate grab for relevancy from Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz? Maybe it was Jeb Bush, throwing one last killer house party before his mom comes home and tells him to clean up his campaign headquarters? Actually, it wasn’t any of the Republicans. It was Hillary Clinton—or at least someone associated with her campaign (probably).
According to this Death And Taxes post, a YouTube video has been going around that celebrates Hillary Clinton’s feminist past and features Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl” playing in the background. However, it turns out that nobody actually asked Bikini Kill if that was alright, so founding member Tobi Vail had the video pulled from YouTube and effectively scrubbed it from the internet. Vail happens to support Bernie Sanders (a quick glance at her Twitter page proves as much), but she told Death And Taxes that this wasn’t about personal politics. She says the video was “basically an advertisement,” and Bikini Kill doesn’t license its songs for ads, so that “should be the end of it.”
Death And Taxes suggests that the video could’ve been made a by Clinton supporter and not the campaign itself, but it’s gone now either way. With more than eight months to go before the election, though, we’ll have plenty more opportunities to see the candidates conveniently forget how music licensing works just so they can look cool for a few seconds. (Trump is probably doing it just as you read this.)