You can now generate an image of Vice President Kamala Harris holding your favorite album. The new one-off site Kamala Holding Vinyls shows an image of Harris outside a Washington, D.C., record shop she visited in 2023 and includes a search bar to enter your album of choice. Click search, and voilà, it’s Harris holding anything from Charli XCX’s brat or Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter to any Kid Rock album you’d like.
Harris visited HR Records in Northwest D.C. in May 2023. The records she actually bought that day were all jazz: Let My Children Hear Music by Charles Mingus, who is “one of the greatest jazz performers ever,” Harris said; Roy Ayers’ Everybody Loves the Sunshine, which she called “a classic” and “one of my favorite albums ever”; and Porgy and Bess, a collaborative album by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.
Though the candidate in the image generator is new, the concept isn’t. A Bill Clinton vinyl generator went viral in 2020. Unlike the Harris version, which is inspired by actual events, the Clinton meme was inspired by a fictional image for a satirical site. In 1999, The Onion published an article imagining Clinton writing a fan letter to Joan Jett that included a doctored image of Clinton enjoying his Joan Jett album collection while sitting shoeless and cross-legged on the floor.
It makes sense that meme generators connecting politics to music would be popular. Music is an important part of modern political campaigns. It’s a way to humanize a candidate and offers them the chance to connect with voters over shared music tastes or through genres that helpfully overlap with voter demographic groups.
The playlist at former President Donald Trump’s campaign rallies tend to be oldies from artists like Elton John and the Rolling Stones, reflecting the older average age of his supporters. In contrast, Harris is more contemporary. She picked “Freedom” from Beyonce’s 2016 album Lemonade for her announcement video and rally walkout song. That along with her campaign’s X account engaging with Charli XCX’s brat album memes have helped endear her to the online left and young voters she hopes to court.
Mitch Said, the creator of the Kamala Holding Vinyls site, posted on X about the concept last week and was live with a finished site two days later. In a DM, he described himself as a “geriatric millennial vinyl dad” who is a duel citizen of South Africa and the U.S. and lives in Johannesburg. He works as a digital consultant and cofounder of Ghostwriter, a beta-stage deck and presentation design startup.
“The site idea came from seeing people posting manually Photoshopped alterations of Kamala’s record choices, and I was drawn to the idea of making it easier and meme-ier to participate,” Said wrote. “It also brought together my personal obsessions: U.S. politics, vinyl collecting, internet culture, playful tech.”
He said most of the humor has come from the “incongruity of Kamala holding up death metal albums or video game soundtracks,” but the personal highlight for him has been getting a “bless you” on X from Questlove, “a musical idol of mine.”
Swifties for Harris can now easily make images to suit their own purposes, and same goes for former #FreeBritney supporters now turning their attention to #KamalaForPresident. Mitch describes the site as a “distraction,” but it also puts the power in the hands of Harris’s supporters to build their own memes connecting politics to their personal music of choice.