A question...

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]

And in related news...

The Bush Campaign seems to have decided that those of us outside the USA are unworthy of access to their official website.

Access Denied

You don't have permission to access "http://www.georgewbush.com/" on this server.

Words fail. I mean, what is the point? The BBC Story mentions saving bandwidth - but the vast majority of hits (and hence bandwidth) are likely to come from the US anyhow, so locking the rest of us out isn't going to help much.

I suppose they could theoretically be trying to pre-emptively block DDOS attacks or hack attempts, but my (admittedly not great) internet security instincts tell me that this ain't a great way to do that, either.

Besides, how will the loyal citizens of Airstrip One be able to fact-check the Liberal Media without this fine upstanding web resource?

[via frandowdsofa]

[edit: more on BoingBoing, which reveals that us dirty foreigners can get in using the cunning ruse of swapping to https and dropping the www. Genius.]