Jesse Rifkin is a piano bar performer in D.C.
The highlight of my week remains the same, every week. I perform at one of D.C.’s most popular piano bars. As an iconic song builds toward its cathartic chorus, I yell “everybody” into the microphone, stop playing the keys, and the crowd of more than 200 sings a cappella.
“Sing us a song, you’re the piano man!” “Bye bye, Miss American Pie!” “Don’t stop … belieeeeeeeving!”
But when I yell “everybody” during more contemporary songs, usually only half the audience knows the chorus. And that split tends to cleave demographically.
Take the pop smash “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan. Believe it or not, it has ended the decades-long run of “Piano Man” as the most requested song at piano bars, as some of my fellow performers will confirm. Released in 2020, the progressive ode to the titular fictional gay bar features lyrics including: “Where boys and girls can all be queens every single day.”
Of the hundreds of audience members to request it at my performances, young women comprise at least 90 percent. While we obviously don’t know the political affiliations or motivations of the people requesting it, young women represent one of the country’s only demographic groups that voted majority Democratic in the 2024 presidential election.
So what song do many young men request instead? “Ignition (Remix)” by R. Kelly. The R&B slow jam from 2002 actually gets requested more since the singer’s 2021 conviction for sex trafficking. Women have stopped requesting it almost entirely. It’s unclear why guys are favoring it more, but one explanation could be a stand against cancel culture, which, surveys indicate, men are more likely to oppose.
Are we still producing anthemic songs that everyone can know and sing anymore? Songs like “We Will Rock You,” “Living on a Prayer” and “Sweet Caroline”? Or are we only creating songs for certain subgroups? Granted, some songs decades ago seemed like they were designed to mostly appeal to one group or one gender. Take “Sweet Home Alabama,” a ballad that’s probably not trying to woo someone from Boston. Or “Dancing Queen,” with lyrics aimed at women in the second-person tense: “You are the dancing queen.”
The difference is, back in those songs’ eras, people across demographics still seemed to know and enjoy them. Whether from performances on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” spins on Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40” or others, that was a time of cultural commonalities regardless of personal taste or ideology. Into the 2000s, people united at the piano over “All Star,” “Hey Ya!” or “Party in the USA.”
I see that lingering bond firsthand. When I perform older songs such as “Take Me Home, Country Roads” everyone sings the chorus. When I play “Man, I Feel Like a Woman,” men and women know it.
Yet for their modern-day equivalents, that’s far less likely. By not singing communally, we lose the emotional experience to feel bonded with those from other groups or ideologies. This lack of kinship plays out across multiple domains throughout our society with more serious impact. Studies and surveys find Americans in the 2010s and 2020s are increasingly unlikely to have cross-ideology friendships, to live near neighbors who disagree politically, or to date across party lines.
This year has been marked by some new attempts to bridge political divides — from California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s podcast where he interviews right-wing influencers, to C-SPAN’s show “Ceasefire” featuring cordial joint interviews with opposing politicians. Perhaps 2026 can also be a year for new steps to bridge cultural differences. After all, politics is downstream from culture.
Start small. Try appreciating songs others love — even songs that would never show up on your preset stations or playlists.
I’ve led a spectrum of humanity in singing the iconic “na-na-na-na” outro from “Hey Jude”: young and old, men and women, every race and ethnicity. Hopefully our culture will once again create songs so universally beloved. And if that happens, hopefully you can make an effort to listen. So that the next time I’m headlining at the piano bar, we can all sing it together.
The post Polarization comes for the piano bar appeared first on Washington Post.
