Dwayna Litz Turns Protest into Anthem “Dump Trump” —Review by Australia’s number one entertainment magazine, Happy Mag
“…There is something genuinely refreshing about how strait-laced the whole thing is.
Musically, ‘Dump Trump’ harks back to a quintessential kind of country songwriting where the lyric is king. The playing is tight, the chorus is immediate and Litz sings with the conviction of someone who knows exactly what she wants to say…
She turns Trump’s own political branding back on him, takes aim at late-night posting, the Epstein files, war and US support for Israel, and repeatedly returns to her opposition to what she describes as the funding of genocide…Nothing really gets left out. One minute she is taking a dig at Trump’s online behaviour, the next she is zooming out considerably further: ‘This is super power suicide / We’re now an empire in decline.’
That is where ‘Dump Trump’ becomes more interesting than its deliberately blunt title suggests. Empires rise and empires fall. Litz clearly believes she is watching the latter happen in real time, and rather than dress that anxiety up in something prettier, she puts it straight into the song.
There is anger here, yes, but underneath it is a fairly traditional country impulse: concern for home, community and what gets left behind when the people running things lose sight of both. Litz even reaches back to Abraham Lincoln, invoking his famous warning about a country ultimately destroying itself from within…
She is also adamant that her songs remain human-made, describing AI songwriting as fundamentally at odds with her habit of writing when something simply pours out…Whether you agree with every line is almost beside the point..Protest music that spends too much time worrying about pleasing everybody usually isn’t much useas protest music.
‘Dump Trump’ plants its flag, names names and gets on with it. Heart firmly on sleeve, Litz has made the kind of country song that remembers the genre can do more than tell you who broke your heart. Sometimes it can tell you exactly who pissed you off.”
Happy Mag, Australia
