The Kennedy Center is not as strategically important as the Panama Canal, nor as mineral-rich as Greenland or Ukraine, but, for more than 50 years, this white marble building on the Potomac River in Washington DC has served as valuable cultural territory in the United States.
A home for the performing arts, including dance, theatre, comedy, classical music, jazz, hip hop, pop and folk, its founding idea lay with Eleanor Roosevelt and was signed into law by Eisenhower in 1958. Its inaugural performance, in early September 1971, saw 2,200 people gather in the Opera House for Leonard Bernstein’s Mass—a work commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in honour of her late husband. Last year, its programme included Emanuel Ax, Bonny Light Horseman and Andre 3000, celebrations of Wagner, Whitney Houston and the Temptations, and the Pennsylvanian soprano Renée Fleming singing selections from Strauss’s Capriccio. Its programming has long suggested a nation that is variegated and joyous.
In mid-February, Donald Trump staged what he termed “a takeover” of the Kennedy Center, uprooting a clutch of Biden loyalists from its board and firing both the Center’s president, Deborah Rutter, and its chair, David Rubenstein. In their place, he installed his own enthusiasts, among them his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, aide Dan Scavino and Usha Vance, wife of JD. The new board duly elected Trump himself as the Center’s new chair. It was the end, the president insisted, of exclusionary “woke” productions, and the beginning of a “Golden Age of Arts and Culture”.
In the days that followed, there came a run of cancellations and resignations. Renée Fleming stepped down from her role as artistic adviser at large; screenwriter and television producer Shonda Rhimes gave up her post of treasurer; and actor and comedian Issa Rae cancelled her sold-out show. The singer-songwriter Ben Folds, the Center’s first-ever artistic adviser to the National Symphony Orchestra, announced his departure on Instagram; the incoming regime was, he wrote, “Not for me”.
Though he, too, is white and male, Folds represents much of what the new administration seeks to upend. A multi-instrumentalist whose work has ranged from chamber pop to collaborations with the author Nick Hornby via a piano concerto, soundtracks and a host of albums, he has long sat at the intersection of the commercial, the cerebral and the faintly comedic. His songs are charged with bombast and rumpled by melancholy, and his lyrics display rum humour and a deep, human tenderness.
This year marks three decades since the release of Folds’s first album—a self-titled collection recorded with his trio, the Ben Folds Five. It was a bewitching record, unleashing a series of piano-led songs of great musical complexity, an absence of lead guitar, a touch of ragtime and a hint of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue—peculiar ingredients in those heady days of Britpop and residual grunge. Folds’s songs detailed life’s quiet disappointments, geekish preoccupations and the fading career of a professional boxer. Above all, in their musical and linguistic vocabulary, they sounded unapologetically educated.
In embracing the role of the misfit, Folds has propelled himself to a position of cultural capital
Folds’s obdurate nerdiness has always been part of his appeal. He has sung of the safe harbour that music can offer the socially outcast, and his fans found a deep connection in his work—the unashamed sophistication and ready wordplay of his songs, his keen character sketches, his covers of Dr Dre, his wilful melding of the highbrow and the low. In embracing the role of the misfit, he found his community and propelled himself to a position of cultural capital.
It is not hard to draw a parallel with Trump, for whom rejection has also proven a great motivator. In his political career he has likewise cast himself as an outsider—claiming to be no part of the establishment and giving voice to America’s overlooked and forgotten.
Where this leads us, perhaps, is to some kind of uneasy understanding. In the president’s recalibration of the Kennedy Center stands a riposte to the intellectual elites who mocked and rebuffed him. It’s not wholly different to Folds, who launched his career with a song called “Underground”, its opening lyric lamenting: “I was never cool in school/I’m sure you don’t remember me.”
Over time, Folds broadened out of the alternative rock scene that the song details, with its mohicans and moshpits and the collective camaraderie of lives brought down. He expanded his repertoire, recorded with chamber orchestras and a cappella groups, explored production, podcasting, photography, grew his world into something wider and more collaborative.
We can only hope now that the president finds a similar trajectory.
