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.
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Do you perhaps mean Walter Pater?
Whoops! You got me. The post will be corrected. Thanks so much - i should really learn not to blog before I finish my coffee.
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.
I think the field of neurophysiology is in for some very exciting times in the future! Your post reminded me of an episode of Futurama I saw once where they started beaming commercials into people's brains while they slept! As the human nervous system and awareness are more fully understood it seems almost a certainty that compliance experts will find ways to capitalize on it.
A good thing or a bad thing? I don't know! When you live in such
an ever increasingly complex world where you have so little control sometimes your judgment of good or bad is solely determined by how it effects you specifically.
But good or bad I think it is going to be astoundingly amazing! As the synchronous and synergistic interplay or our senses and reasoning is more understood and manipulated the world certainly isn't going to seem like the same old place!
Dave Briggs :~)
Why does it work? My first reaction to seeing Scarlett is usually, "she's beautiful". I didn't have this reaction during the video. I like John Legend but he sounded as if he was a infused with the vocal power of Pavarotti. It was very manipulative. Why did this work? The last time I can remember seeing a video that 'worked' like this: "Live Aid: Let them know it's christmas time blah blah blah". It had that feeling, "Yes we can". The first one - the british one - not the lame Quincy Jones/Michael Jackson "we are the world". "We are the world" felt too...too...over-sung.
Ok ok. Just explain goose bumps? What's that about?