Village People's Victor Willis Says He Didn't Expect 'Y.M.C.A.' To Become Trump's Anthem

TMZ

And there's this ... Harvey noticed the Village People kinda kept their distance from Trump during the performance. Victor telegraphed he wasn't necessarily down with the President's policies, but hey, business is business!

Transcript

00:00What did you make of when this became kind of the Trump anthem and did you ever see that

00:09coming?

00:10No, not really.

00:11Um, at first it was kind of strange, um, I didn't really, you know, I got so many complaints

00:20and so many people calling me, which was basically from the gay community that were complaining

00:28about me allowing Trump to use his songs.

00:32There was a period when Trump was running, when you guys were firing off cease and desist

00:37letters saying, don't do my song, uh, at your rallies.

00:42And you then turned around and kind of embraced it all and performed at the inauguration.

00:48So what was the shift?

00:50What caused that?

00:51We were like sitting and looking at one of the rallies one day and I noticed that, um,

00:57he genuinely liked the song.

01:00And so I said, you know, I said, you know, um, whatever, however you look at it, it seems

01:06like he really enjoys the song.

01:08And I said, and it seems like the people, the American people are having so much fun.

01:14Uh, each time he plays it, everybody seems to enjoy it.

01:18And I said, and all these other artists are like telling him, no, cease and desist, cease

01:22and desist.

01:23And so I said, well, no, why don't you contact BMI and just tell him, like, to let him keep

01:28his, um, his political use license and, um, let him use the song.

01:33And, um, I was basically glad I did, you know?

01:36I want to ask you about, uh, the inauguration.

01:38I, you know, I couldn't wait to watch you guys.

01:42And I noticed that, and, and maybe I'm wrong here, but you didn't get close to Trump.

01:50You weren't really interacting with Trump.

01:53He was kind of doing his thing.

01:54You guys were doing your thing.

01:56Was that intentional?

01:58Because I, I just wondered, you know, my sense was maybe your politics don't align because

02:04you had such problems with him in the past that you're going to do the inauguration,

02:09but it's not like you are, you know, checking all the Trump boxes.

02:14Well, I was being, uh, respectful basically to the, to the president, um, which acts like,

02:22you know, how you doing, sir?

02:25I appreciate it.

02:26Thank you for inviting us, et cetera.

02:28I was just being respectful to him.

02:30Um, at that point, my mind had, it had, I wasn't thinking about, oh, well, what you

02:36did, uh, as a president or what I like or what I don't like.

02:40I mean, I was, I was thinking about getting ready to go and perform and do my song.

02:45Did you get pushback for performing?

02:47Oh yeah.

02:48I mean, you know, I had hundreds of thousands of comments on my Facebook, but I mean, they

02:55were basically coming from basically, most of them were coming from the gay community

03:00and they were basically at that point claiming like they, that they were the ones that made

03:05me famous.

03:06And now I was turning my back on them and, um, it was a shame on me and I must've needed

03:12the money and, uh, must be selling out and all this stuff and they would never listen

03:17to my songs again.

03:19And they were going to take me out of their playlist and all of this.

03:23I mean, I got hundreds of that, you know, then I got thousands of people saying, thank

03:28you that we appreciate the fact that you, you know, you just went on and just perform

03:33the song because that's what you do.

03:35That was what I was doing it for, it was music.

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