This week Donald Trump tweeted a new campaign ad that borrowed the animation style used in Norwegian synthpop band A-ha’s iconic video for the 1985 hit “Take On Me”. The ad tries to make the corrupt con man likable using an animation style known as rotoscoping which involves tracing live-action film with pencil drawings. Twitter noticed.
Rolling Stone asked keyboardist and co-songwriter Magne Furuholmen how he felt about Trump borrowing the video’s look.
Replied Furuholmen: “Even blind pigs can find truffles. … You write a song in your youth and you don’t write for a particular group of people one way or another; you write it for everyone. But then stuff like this happens.”
“We make our music for everybody,” the keyboardist added. “We didn’t intend to make our music part of a divisive campaign and, all things equal, would have preferred it not to have been.”
Furuholmen said his “heart bleeds” for “the America we believed in growing up” and said his recent song “This Is Now America” was a direct response to Trump.
