R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills was not pleased, by any reckoning, with a video shared by President Trump on Friday featuring the band’s 1993 single “Everybody Hurts.”
“By the way,” the musician wrote in a tweet tagging the Twitter user credited with creating the video, “go [expletive] yourselves.”
“Measures have been taken to stop it,” Mr. Mills, 60, said in another tweet tagging Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, adding: “you need to get on this.”
Shared by Mr. Trump on Twitter earlier Friday, the video mixed footage from the president’s recent State of the Union address with audio of “Everbody Hurts,” the fourth single off R.E.M.’s acclaimed eighth studio album, “Automatic for the People.”
A melancholy, waltz-like ballad, the song is played over a more than 2-minute long montage showing lawmakers, mostly Democrats, reacting somberly to Mr. Trump’s speech.
The video included a watermark on the bottom bearing the Twitter handle @CarpeDonktum.
“I tweet and meme in support of Donald Trump,” reads the user’s bio.
Mr. Mills, however, is hardly on the same page.
“You are a fraud, a charlatan, and a con man. You know it, I know it, soon everyone will know it. You can’t be gone soon enough,” the musician wrote in another tweet tagging the president.
Mr. Trump’s tweet of the video had been shared over 21,000 times within three hours of being posted Friday prior to ultimately disappearing from the platform the following morning.
Twitter declined to comment when reached by The Washington Times early Saturday beyond pointing to the platform’s policy for handling copyright complaints.
Representatives for neither the White House nor Universal Music Publishing Group, the firm that owns the rights to the song, immediately returned messages seeking comment.
Artists who previously issued statements opposing the usage of their music by Mr. Trump include Neil Young, Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose and Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler, among others.
Formed in 1980 in Athens, Georgia, R.E.M. released 15 studio albums prior to dissolving in 2011, albeit not before earning three Grammy Awards and a slot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Mr. Trump previously provoked the defunct group upon using another one of its songs, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” during an election campaign rally in 2015.
“Go [expletive] yourselves, the lot of you—you sad, attention grabbing, power-hungry little men,” R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe reacted at the time. “Do not use our music or my voice for your moronic charade of a campaign.”
More recently, Mr. Stipe, 59, had been slated to participate in a demonstration last year protesting Mr. Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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