A question...

[blufive]

When was the last time you saw a major, A-list, popular music act release a nakedly political single/video right before a major election?

I'm hardly "Mr Pop Trivia UK", but I've been racking my brains for a couple of days, and come up with precisely zero examples in the last two decades. (Yes, this is an invitation to be corrected)

Sure, there have been get-out-the-vote tours, non-election-related "issue" records, and plenty of mid-list politically-active singers/groups, but global-A-list performers (for example) releasing a video slagging off the President of the USA, days before the presidential election? Kinda thin on the ground, in recent history.

So it's quite a surprise to see something like Eminem's "Mosh" come along. (Link to page with low/high bandwidth streaming quicktime)

An extract from the lyrics, that gets right to the point:

let the president answer our high anarchy
Strap him with a AK-47, let him go fight his own war, let him impress daddy that way.
No more blood for oil, we got our own battles to fight on our own soil,
no more psychological warfare to trick us to thinking that we ain't loyal

...and the video (a combination of drawn/rotoscoped animation, CGI and video collage, which is pretty remarkable in purely visual terms) hits a lot harder than the lyrics.

[line-breaks inserted in the lyrics where I reckon they look right, no idea where they belong...]

[edited to include a better video link]

Comments

[odie01.livejournal.com]

I know A Perfect Circle aren't an A list mega music act but their new Album eMOTIVe is highly political (release 2nd Nov in US) They are releasing John Lennon's 'Imagine' as their new single with a very political video which probably won't get aired in the US.

You can watch the video as well as get the full story behind the album and new DVD release on www.aperfectcircle.com

[blufive.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar with APC (though I suspect I ought to at least have a quick look, just to check them out. I'll try to drop by that site and have a look around) but at their sort of level, there's political stuff all over the place - Rage Against The Machine, just off the top of my head. I was more commenting on how surprised I was to even see an artist with that sort of profile doing anything so dramatic.