Bernie Sanders’s BS-proof polemics have resonated with millions of millennials on Instagram. They’ve also won over the music industry’s most important voting academy, which last night presented the 74-year-old senator and punk icon with his first official Grammy nomination. Bernie Sanders vies for the spoken word award thanks to his audio book version of Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In. The recording highlights the dulcet tones of narrator Mark Ruffalo rather than Bernie’s curmudgeonly Brooklyn cadence, but as America’s Grandad would shout at you while wagging his finger in a ferocious manner, it’s the policies that matter. Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In was written during and in the wake of the 2016 presidential race. It lays out Bernie’s anti-establishment positions on everything from free college tuition to income inequality.
Bernie is up against some stiff competition for the Grammy. Other luminaries nominated in the category include Neil Degrasse Tyson, who possibly endorsed Bernie for POTUS in a now-viral tweet that compelled Christians to examine Jesus’s policy on border walls. Tyson’s Space 101 guide Astrophysics for People in a Hurry also evidently struck a cord with the Grammy academy. But Bernie might have a leg up over the competition. He already has a mixtape under his belt, in the form of seminal 1977 folk album We Shall Overcome. That effort might have missed out on a Grammy nod, but it celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, so we’ll have at least one of Bernie’s musical feats to celebrate in the near future.