At Trump’s Rally, the Contradictions Are in the Music

The president-elect danced along with Village People as his rally closed with a live performance of “Y.M.C.A.,” after Kid Rock and Lee Greenwood played.

A onetime foulmouthed white rapper remade as an icon of right-wing country rebellion. An iconic disco-pop outfit with a crossover hit often understood to be about gay cruising that has become a global sports-and-bar-mitzvah anthem.

These are the sorts of contradictory figures who have long animated and energized American pop music, the art form where competing interest groups and creative urges are in the closest quarters, and most likely to collide in unanticipatedly productive ways. The stew of American pop is messy, the result of centuries of creative crossover, willing and forced and sometimes unpredictable.

So maybe it’s not a surprise, then, that even onstage at President-elect Donald J. Trump’s Make America Great Again Victory Rally on Sunday afternoon at the Capital One Arena — seemingly a place inhospitable to these narratives of collaborative difference — these tugs of war persisted.

In the speeches — from Mr. Trump and many of his surrogates — there was nativism and isolationism and promises of record deportations.

And yet for a party and movement built in part on exclusion and a campaign marked at times by race-baiting, there were conspicuous overtures to diversity and inclusion, and sly acknowledgments of the power of the multiracial stew of American pop.

There was Kid Rock, his voice pockmarked and powerful, singing “All Summer Long,” his winning invocation of “Sweet Home Alabama,” before putting on a red Make America Great Again ball cap and taking a turn scratching on his D.J.’s turntable. In a video message during the performance, Mr. Trump promised to Make America Rock Again, interspersed with footage of Run-DMC songs.