This video is shamefully manipulative. It's just a bunch of celebrities, from Scarlett to John Legend, harmonizing over a particularly eloquent Obama speech. The rhetoric is beautiful, poetic and vapid. The camera work is a little too artful. The crescendo at the end is a little too obvious.
And yet, it works. The short video manipulates you even though you know you're being manipulated. I'm not a big fan of celebrities mixing with progressive politics, but I still got shivers at the end of the song, right when the "Yes we can!" chorus picks up speed.
Those shivers are the sole message of the video. To paraphrase Walter Pater, every political speech aspires to the condition of music, and this short video fulfills that aspiration. No ideas or policy proposals interfere with its emotions: it works on our feelings directly. But what interests me most about the video is that it reveals the strong element of music existing just below the surface of the best speeches. It makes the implicit melody of the words explicit. I hope this is the start of a new mash-up genre.
Politics
Comments (4)
Do you perhaps mean Walter Pater?
Posted by: John Ratliff | February 4, 2008 11:29 AM