STRONGMAN SAD - WHAT / WHY    STRONGMAN SAD project is a very real cartoon of America’s first official strongman, who is, himself, a very real cartoon. Polar Levine, aka Polarity/1 created the animation and the music.
    As a musician (Polarity/1), I’m fascinated by noise and use of sounds of all all kinds to form percussion, ambience and harmony. As an observer of homo sapiens in the wild, human vocal noise is of deep interest sonically and as expression of feeling and character. It’s no surprise Donald Trump would be at the center of my work life for four years.
    Watching the first primary debate I knew he’d be the nominee. He could lie, boast and insult with broad vocal range and not miss a beat or lose tone while lying. In his rallies he works a huge vocal range and variety of characters that are comic, hateful, combative and mournful. Lacking a politician’s background or a conscience, he’s a full-on improv performance artist. As a vocalist he runs the gamut from free jazz to metal to melancholy ballads.
    After the 2016 election I listened to hours of speeches and interviews, organizing folders of issue-based statements, words, phonemes, tones. I composed 7 musical tracks featuring his statements, each based on a particular issue: women, Mexicans, his narcissism, his lies, and finally, his handling of the pandemic through March 2020. I did not cut & paste a portrayal of a person contrary to his true character. The verses feature complete statements. I cut his voice to match the tempo and feel of the music and deleted a word here and there that in no way alters the context, flow and meaning of his statements. The choruses are more cut, but stay true to character. I also used his voice as percussion, ambience and harmony. In one track, every sound is generated from his voice.
    Having spent a year on this obsession as a music project, it begged for an animation obsession. Despite the cartoon effect, the focus is on his actual statements; more of a history project than entertainment. The frames were created in photoshop and assembled in Final Cut.    This project is focused on Donald Trump, not his voters or his family. Whether or not I agree with the world view of his base, I recognize the torment and dislocation they’ve experienced in a national culture that’s been shifting – for better and worse – at tornado velocity; and an economy that treats them as obsolete. 
    The music is available here for free download. The animated videos are on youTube, Vimeo, etc. Pass them around. Vote Trump out in November, 2020.

THE TRACKSproduced by Polarity/1; mastered by Joe Lambert The President of ME    All voices (spoken & sonic): Donald Trump; tenor sax: David Intrator; digital instrumentation: Polarity/1 Mr. Trump and The Women    All voices (spoken & sonic): Donald Trump; congas: André Martinez; guitar & digital instrumentation: Polarity/1The Donald Loves Tacos    All voices (spoken & sonic): Donald Trump; percussion: André Martinez; harmonica, congas & digital instrumentation: Polarity/1 A Very Truthy Trump  All voices (spoken & sonic): Donald Trump; instrumentation: Polarity/1
    Trump loves honesty. It must be true, people are saying it. You can dance to his claim that Barak Obama is the founder of ISIS. No quid pro quo. No collusion. The relationship he had/never had with Putin.Bing Bing Believe Me    All voices (spoken & sonic): Donald Trump; instrumentation: Polarity/1
    Only a serial liar and exaggerator punctuates his sentences with "believe me" as often as Donald Trump does. Trump earnestly asserts his stand as pro-choice/pro-life and alerts an anxious nation that President Obama was/was not born in the USA. Period. You will also hear his extended treatise on climate change that, I swear, was not manufactured in my studio.Strongman Sad    All voices: Donald Trump, all instruments & ambience were made from Trump’s voice
    STRONGMAN SAD is a truly strange track. In Trump's speech to the CIA he whined about reports that his inauguration turnout the day before was not the big big Biggest of all time; and the photo showing empty fields – the same grounds which had been filled to capacity for Obama's inauguration; and how he looked out during his speech and swears he saw a million and a half people. 
    He described this in the high pitched breathy voice  he often uses to express shock over the criticism he gets in the media. In this case that voice was a bluesy lament – an actual blues melody. In his mind this was the most urgent issue on the CIA's plate.
    I made only two or three tiny pitch adjustments to the melody as typically made in any recorded song you've heard in the past few decades when the singer goes slightly off pitch. It’s not autotuned. Check out the speech on youTube. Around 9:40 in he starts on the inauguration crowd and continues after a silly, untrue allegory about the rain that day. You'll hear the melody in . 
    I decided to make his voice generate every sound on the track. Trump is the backup vocal group and bass. Even the drums and percussion are made from chunks of his voice. It took three months of slogging away; lost sleep with dream loops full of audio shrapnel from Trump’s very broad vocal repertoire. Finally it morphed into the bluesy tango you hear.