Okay.
So what is really going on here?
This is a well-known clip.
It is Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on Arsenio Hall in 1992
before sitting down for an interview.
It is just political legend.
“Bill Clinton won the election because of that saxophone.
” That was the TMZ guy talking about it.
I told you this was a mainstream idea.
But why?
I mean, how could something like this win the election?
I researched it.
I looked at the newspaper clippings
and watched the rest of the show
and saw a lot of Bill Clinton playing the saxophone.
And I think that what really happened
when Bill Clinton played sax on Arsenio is a lot more interesting
than the story we've been told.
I've got a surprise.
This is Uptown Bill.
He was only $30 on eBay, which honestly I think is a good deal.
“Watch him move and groove to the soulful sounds of his sax.”
Okay.
So back to the story.
I'm going to give you the cynical explanation
first that the saxophone performance
was part of a calculated political strategy.
But to understand that you don't just need to know about blowing,
you have to understand “a giant sucking sound going south.”
Look R Bill's reaction there.
He kind of loves Perot.
You can tell. Okay.
So if you don't know, this is Ross Perot.
And in 1992, he was the third party candidate.
He ended up taking in, honestly, incredible percent of the vote.
But it was even more incredible early on.
These are the Gallup polls during the election.
Look at June 1992.
Perot was in the lead.
Everybody was thinking, is this guy actually going to win?
And so time was this is really important.
June 2nd is when Clinton pretty much won the nomination.
So he has a quick decision to make.
How does he carve out a political identity
for himself against an incumbent president
and a surprisingly strong third party candidate
who definitely knows how to get media attention?
“I love this.
Nobody else will even talk about it.
Like I've said, it's like a crazy aunt in the basement.
Everybody knows she's there, but nobody talks about it.”
And literally
the day after he wins the nomination, he's on Arsenio Hall
playing a saxophone.
By the way, he had to actually stand in the background
during the rest of the monologue like he was part of the band.
I love the idea of a future president feeling
super awkward in the background.
Now the saxophone is a weird, confusing signifier,
but I'd argue that the thing Clinton is going for here
is: I'm young, I'm cool.
Arsenio itself was a new type of late night show.
It was syndicated,
and it was competing against the old guard of shows
like The Tonight Show.
This was a new youthful place
for a presidential candidate to show up. And he continued it.
Very shortly after,
he shows up for an hour long interview on MTV, which, well,
you know, young people used to watch cable
and MTV used to be the channel that they used to watch.
A lIttle context is necessary there.
Not going to lie, Clinton's youth references need a little work.
“What was your first rock
and roll experience?” “Oh, going nuts over Elvis Presley.”
But just in case you think that June 1992 was just him
courting kids,
this was actually like a blitzkrieg
for political branding for Bill Clinton.
And he was also going
way to the center with his Sister Souljah moment.
“You had a rap singer here last night named Sister Souljah.”
If you haven't heard this term, it is kind of a political trope
that is based off a controversy
with the writer and musician Sister Souljah.
“She told The Washington Post about a month ago, and I quote,
‘If black people kill black people every day,
why not have a week and kill white people?’”
Clinton gave a speech that was sort of controversial at the time
because it pushed back against her.
“And when people say that if you took the words white and black
and you reversed them,
you might think David Duke was given that speech.”
He was showing that he was a centrist.
It's become kind of
a political move to do this, to push back
against the fringe of your own party
so that you can establish yourself in the center.
So let's recap this crazy June 1992.
Clinton gets the nomination,
but he has to immediately scramble to beat Bush and Perot.
So he says, I'm willing to have this Sister Souljah moment,
but I am also going to be young. I'm going to be cool.
In fact, his saxophone obsession is so clearly
a masterful political move
that he even formed something called the Saxophone Club.
It is a special group trying to attract younger donors
who might not have as much money as older donors,
but are still enthusiastic about the campaign.
So this sax thing is the most transparently
political move ever, right?
I think it's like a little more complicated.
Okay, so I opened him.
I don't think he works.
I have to actually manipulate his body myself to make him groove
and move so... (Manipulation sounds.)
So here's the thing:
I think Bill Clinton played the saxophone for political reasons,
but I also think that he
really, really, really likes the saxophone.
“Recently,
people have been making a big deal
about President elect Bill Clinton playing the saxophone.”
He had a murderer's row of saxophonists at his inauguration,
which was hosted by Will Smith.
I did not know that.
And then he played at his own inaugural ball.
Okay. I know what you're thinking:
“This could still be political.” It's all very public,
but there's a little more evidence than that to
first.
Here he is in April, playing it
well before the Arsenio Hall appearance,
and he kept it going way after he had a music room.
Here he is, playing it for the troops at Camp Casey.
World leaders are always giving him saxophones
and he's like, sweet.
I will play this saxophone now.
He did it with Boris Yeltsin and, perhaps most famously,
Vaclav Havel.
the Czech president, gave him a sax.
Clinton went on stage at this super famous jazz club,
and he had a jam session with the saxophone.
And now somebody released a like album of him
playing at this club.
And the critics were like, “Oh, he's
not that great.”
But still, he's clearly kind of into the saxophone.
If you are still not convinced,
I now present to you the strongest argument
that Bill Clinton is actually obsessed with the saxophone,
which is his love affair with the man named Kenneth Gorelick.
Who is Kenneth Gorelick?
Well, you might know him better as Kenny G.
Kenny G is the most famous smooth jazz saxophonist of all time.
And Bill Clinton loves him.
Kenny's at the inauguration, but he's elsewhere, too.
Bill gushes over him in that same MTV interview,
where he's trying to appeal to all the young people.
“If I could play in any band, which one would it be?
I would play with Kenny G so I could learn something.
I got to play with him.
Last week, by the way,
was a real highlight of the whole California primary.
It was great.”
Then in 2000, Clinton has Kenny G play
at a governor's ball
well after Clinton's presidential campaigns are over.
And even in that 2022 TMZ clip that I showed in the beginning,
Bill Clinton actually goes back to bring up Kenny G.
“In the conversation I got, I said I sold Kenny G my saxophone.
I acquired
one made by Adolf Sax in 1861”. And one final piece of evidence.
Look in the music room.
Yeah.
Enhance. Gorelick!
That's Gorelick.
Groove.
Now that that's over, let's talk Schrödinger's politician.
I think the instinct with the Clinton story is to come with this,
take away
that it's about the celebritization
of politics, or something like that.
But I don't really quite buy that.
I mean FDR used the radio.
Ronald Reagan was a movie star. Nixon showed up on Laugh-In.
“Sock it to me.”
There's a million examples
of presidents adopting new mediums instead.
I think this says something unique
about Bill Clinton's skills as a politician. Okay.
So you probably know about Schrödinger's cat.
Skipping the nuance, it's
sort of a
thought experiment
that looks into the paradox of quantum superposition.
Basically, the take home point
is that this cat in a box could be dead
and alive at the same time.
Those two contradictory states could exist simultaneously.
I think Bill Clinton playing the sax shows us
Schrödinger's politician.
He is able to be both deeply cynical and poll-driven
and really calculating and at the exact same time,
he can be totally authentic and personal and purely himself.
So let me answer the question
about Bill Clinton's appearance on Arsenio.
Was it the perfect
poll-driven way to appeal to the youth vote
at a crucial time in the election?
Or was it a deeply
personal musical performance,
a man playing the instrument that he loved?
(Long pause.) Yes.
Okay.
That's it for this one.
Yeah. I kind of hurt Bill when I threw him.
So that's not good.
If you haven't been here before, this is a personal channel
where I post personal videos, history videos, stuff like that.
Yeah. I'd love to know your opinion on Bill
Clinton playing the sax on Arsenio.
I'm sure that there are a lot of other opinions out there.
Bill Clinton, he tends to draw some opinionated discussion.
And I'm here for it.
I still enjoyed getting to delve into the history
behind this, though. Learn a bit more about it.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.
Going to see if I can fix his head.
Shoot.