perfidy

I share your feelings about the video in particular. However, did you think it was a little funny that even though we supposed to "mosh through the marsh" (use rage to break down the lack of clarity), the figures in the video were rather orderly and uniform in their behavior?

J,
I haven't seen it. Just going by what you've given me to work with, I'm not seeing what makes it special.

Hating Bush is hip, now, and happening. Like any trend, alot of the hate Bush teeny-somethings couldn't even precisely explain why it's cool. They just know that if anyone asks, that's what they're supposed to say.

Maybe Mathers has thought long and hard about his stance on politics, and the candidates, and is trying to communicate his path to a better future. But ain't it grand when zillions of people in your target audience feel precisely the same way toward the issues as you when it's time to sell new product?

Well sure. But how does that differ in any way from the old-good protest stuff like "Fortunate Son," "Clampdown," or "If I Had A Hammer"?

I'm mainly just impressed that the message is "Vote!" and not "break shit and yell!"

Nat, you are dead right. "Mosh through the marsh" isn't the greatest line in history, although as GL has pointed out , it's likely that Mr. Mathers hasn't sharpened his policy chops to the point where he can freestyle convincingly about rent control or marginal tax rates or whatever.

Well, anyway. I likey.

J,
I just watched it, thanks to the link you helpfully provided and that I COULD have clicked on 2 hours ago but pre-lunch jitters prevented.

Yeah, his message is "Vote", but his message is also "break shit and yell." Consider the language; much of it is the discourse of the martial- we have to "march", "storm", "charge", and "fight" as "They try and stop us" (Martial Mathers?). Yeah yeah, the Man keeping you down.

Is there a more effective rallying cry than to convince people they are persecuted in some way? Is there a better way to energize young people than to tell them that grown-ups are making their lives difficult somehow?

GL, I honestly don't think there is a better way. Like Lisa Simpson said, "making teenagers feel angst is like shooting fish in a barrel." What-- are you going to appeal to teens'/young adults' sense of probity and civic duty? Better they care at all at this stage-- care enough to find out the deal and vote. When they get a few more years on them, they'll grow up and mellow out offa the persecution complex, but one hopes, still remain more than minimally involved in public life. It might be a cynical road to giving the populi a lasting vox, but it's also a potentially effective one.

If only highflown rhetoric and appeals to the embetterment of our inner light still worked as well as it did when Benjamin Rush theorized about the ideal education of the public man, there'd be no need for Eminem, but such appeals will get you exactly as far as trying to frug your way through a breakdance competition.

What interests me is the coupling of martial rhetoric with suffrage. That's kind of new in this forum, especially since somehow Mr. Mathers comes off less preachy and sanctimonious than, say, Chuck D.

(On the other side of the coin remains the old question: who let them in here? Just like the old John Q. Adams backers when they recoiled in horror from the Necon's Favorite Man of Action The President Andrew Jackson.

J,
Let me add that I liked the flow of the song, the melody, and the beat. I SHOULD like the song, by that account.

I think you've persuaded me in one way. I can appreciate the buildup to revolution in the video, this switch, where instead of blood in the streets we really just want to queue up and wait to vote. In another way though, how much of Eminem's audience, or the entire bloc of eligible voters for that matter, really studied the issues at hand and arrived at reasoned conclusions?

And the lyrics themselves came across to me as hackneyed- unless we fight, They will continue to keep us down. No one's stopping anyone from registering to vote, and federal storm troopers are not keeping anyone oppressed. That sounds like ANSWER press releases, or vacuous people needing a cause for something to do, not lyrics.

As for Chuck D, he might have taken himself too seriously, but Flavor Flav was always there for comic relief. Em doesn't have anyone to temper his apparent sense of self importance.

Regarding the olde tyme presidential trivia, I can say only this: my sarcasm-fu is no match for your histori-jito.

GL, here's my rebuttal to the "reasoned conclusions" hypothesis.

When, if ever, has the voting populace as a whole come to reasoned conclusions? My sense is that elections work somewhat like markets do. There's a whole school of economic thought-- the efficient markets hypothesis-- that holds that market behavior (e.g. the movement of the NASDAQ) accurately reflects the underlying reality the market describes. That is, regardless of who is investing-- me, you, Warren Buffett-- as long as there's enough people investing, the aggregate of all our individual decisions about (say) the worth of Abbott Labs ends up valuing their stock at just about what it should be if evaluated on its own by some omnipotent expert. Math-wise, this holds up pretty well. However, it is true that this hypothesis is vulnerable to attack. Just this month its foremost proponent, Eugene Fama, very publicly recanted his 40 year hard line against the idea that poorly informed investors could skew the market away from "truth," and now accepts that irrationality can to some degree affect market performance, there's a lot to the idea. Example: if you strip away the doc-com stocks that caused the late-90s bubble, the underlying stock market excluding those stocks didn't get too far out of whack with historical returns. Moreover, the "investor ignorance" that caused the bubble was fairly soon corrected when millions of people simultaneously became a bit more broke, and the magic of mean-reversion did its thing. Other example: The Iowa Electronic markets are predicated completely on this idea that an aggregate of individual opinions will tend to reflect actual circumstances.

All this is a roundabout way of arguing two things. First, what nation-state's populace outside ancient Athens (and your occasional small New England town meeting) was made up of maximally informed voters? Indeed (I wonder as a brain exercise), would an ideal model reflecting "informed" voters' choice, in aggregate, differ from what actually happens in an election? Provided the efficient markets hypothesis even partially describes the actual outcome of voter behavior, I think it's good when people vote, period. Second, IF people are voting, and IF, as I suspect, they end up frequently being wise in their ignorance, what's the problem with hoodie-wearing kids voting? If they know the name of the local sheriff up for re-election, and they know his name because he's been a real tool about busting skaters, they vote against him. Perhaps their vote is offset by the bluehairs who are pleased that hooliganism is on the decline; perhaps it is not. Either way, they made their preferences-- however arcane they may be-- known.

In the end, I seriously doubt Eminem is going to succeed in bringing out the hoodie crowd on November 2, but as far as ideas go, I think it's a good one well executed.

Uh, why exactly was that different than the asinine hyperbole we've all heard a million times before? It's not even that good of a song...

But now, in your opinion, has Eminem's song topped your 'bar-none' appraisal of "Jimmy Carter Says 'Yes'" as being the "the GREATEST political song I've EVER heard"? hahaha!!!! ;) ;)

J,
There's no problem with getting out the hoodie set to vote. I just think it's pathetic and sad if they make their choice because it's cool to hate Bush. It's pathetic and sad if they get their information from a music video right out of the Propagandist's Guide to Moving Pictures*.

Eminem's ultimate message of being politically active at home, but in order to be pacifistic abroad, comes across as press release from the lefty Left.

Do you see a related disconnect here? That these Rock the Yoots messages or programs insist that the MTV Beach House crowd is suddenly serious? I don't buy it for a second.

*Not a real publication, but should be.

In order since my last comment:
Alsadius, I beg to differ. Good hook, good flow, good rabble-rousing. It's a matter of opinion, but I sure dig it.

Chloe: I see someone's been going through old posts! No, "Jimmy Carter Says 'Yes'" is still the GREATEST EVER and will remain so for the foreseeable future. You can't top perfection.

GL, your point is well taken, and I can't really rebut that except to say that I find top-down Rock the Yoots drives fatuous and self-congratulatory. I suppose I'm willing to spot young people some leftie bullshit on the assumption that over time they'll grow out of it (I sure did, though I never really bought into the flavor of the week leftie bullshit I encountered in college), which makes me less concerned about the shortcomings of the actual message being conveyed to them.