The Vegetable Orchestra. has to be seen and heard to get the full flavour:
Music
A Big Fat Profitable Meme
It’s serendipitous that this admittedly ‘well duh’ set of research results should pop up this week while the issue of singers’ weight is a big online topic: :
Ubiquitous pop videos may harm girls’ self-image
Ian Sample, science correspondent
Thursday May 31, 2007
The GuardianMusic videos are driving a wave of dissatisfaction among adolescent girls by promoting ultra-thin role models as the epitome of beauty, psychologists warn today.
Watching pop videos featuring thin, scantily clad women for just 10 minutes was enough to drive down girls’ satisfaction with their body shape, according to a study which appears in the journal Body Image.
Researchers fear the damage inflicted on the self-image of girls as they prepare to leave schools and sixth form colleges is widespread, given the near ubiquity of music videos on television and on big screens in clothes shops, cafes and bars.
Viewing figures for MTV have swelled to 342m worldwide, according the channel, and a survey in 1998 found that 12- to 19-year-olds were the most frequent viewers, watching on average for 6.4 hours a week.
But Helga Dittmar, a psychologist at Sussex University and leader of the latest study, said adolescents were likely to spend far more time watching music videos than the survey suggested. “Public places such as stores, bars and clubs increasingly display music videos on large TV screens, making them an inescapable, almost omnipresent form of media,” she said.
Indeed they are omnipresent, even here in Amsterdam, which does at least keep a lid on the more blatant forms of public advertising; though we are forrced to watch ads on the trams, they’re not really of the music video type; more for sore arse ointment or real- estate agents.
But there are few fashion chainstores you can go into without an in your face dose of Christina, Pussycat Dolls or some identikit skeleton with inflated boobs, fake cheekbones, extensions and a spray-on tan gyrating over some German techno-trance monotony and there’s about to be an explosion of it all over, now that the Netherlands premier department store De Bijenkorf is getting in on the act.
“Introducing in-store television is a move towards the store of the future. It can be compared to the Internet 15 years ago, when not many people were exploiting it for commercial use. One of the really attractive features is the ability to develop our own content and programming.
“This means that we can produce content that is very specific to our needs and can be immediately tailored to reflect exactly our central and local marketing priorities.
“In fact, the ability to tailor content to reflect in-store initiatives, trends and promotions is central to the screens’ success.”
If you’re a teenager and want to keep up with your peers you can’t avoid it. I thought it was bad when I was young but the pressure teenagers are under now is horrendous, schoolgirls saving up from Saturday jobs for liposuction and so on.
Despite stating the bleeding obvious it’s still quite a timely report, considering the current furore about the perfectly normal, if tall (but then anyone is tall to me, being barely over five foot in a land of dairy-fed giants) winner of the latest US Pop Idol.
Some publicity-hungry suburban country club nonentity and one-member manufactured ‘pressure group’ that Fox picked up somewhere called Meme Roth called her ‘obese’. Obese. Really. Give me a break and get back to your obsessive jazzercise and mainlining aragula salad and ogling poolboys, you silly, silly woman. And ‘Meme’? What were her parents thinking? Let’s face it, when your name constantly reiterates your existence -‘me,me,me,me,me..’ – you’re bound to turn out a solipsistic narcissist.
But enjoyable cattiness aside, Ms Roth’s just another tool being used to create a sensation and push up Fox’s profile.
It’s Fox pushing this meme and Meme too. Owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International, it’s a company that has much invested in media worldwide, not just the US. It promotes music videos, it makes money from them. Of course they want to influence them. To think otheriwse is to mistake the purpose of a corporation, which is to make money.
To us it’s about more than mere vanity and fashion; it’s about whether we can look in the mirror and loathe or accept ourselves for what we are.
To them it’s just about making a market. Handily it also gives a nice lot of traffic to other mass media outlets too, who profess outrage but who are still happily counting the hits. Their ad revenue goes up as well and everyone’s happy, excpet the girls and women who are left wondering why it is they don’t look ‘normal’.
Weight is a hot-button issue for almost all westernised women and there’s lots of ways to make money from that. Again we’ve fallen into the corporate trap and they’ve created a controversy to frame the discussion andmake money out of it. They got us going and coming. No wonder we hate ourselves.
Comedy Double
Although I can’t stand Gordon Brown I wish Tony ‘legacy’ Blair would either just sod off now or be arrested, preferably the latter.
This first clip, “Go Now!” from the much-loved and lamented Spitting Image, refers to a previous, equally-loathed (discuss) PM, Maggie Thatcher, but it serves equally well for Mr.Tony.
Sums up Blair’s whole premiership, really, doesn’t it?
This next is also from Spitting Image and isn’t political, though you could argue that it puts people off holidays abroad and helps fight climate change….
Naaah. That would be silly.
I included it mainly because I’m evil and I like earworming people. Yup, it’s The Chicken Song… “throw a chicken in the air, stick a deckchair up your nose…” See, you’re already singing it and if you’re not, you will.
Or maybe I’m wrong; maybe the force is strong in you. But I have a secet weapon mwahahahah. If the Chicken Song didn’t get you, this will. Here’s Mitch Benn‘s ode to IKEA, from The Now Show, set to an oddly appropriate video of World of Warcraft dwarves. IKEA!!!!
For the bonus clips I’m staying with the WoW theme: here’s a preview of Make Love Not Warcraft, South Park in a WoW stylee:
Parts two and three can be found in this general vicinity.
Once I started looking at WoW comedy videos, I quickly realised just how wide a vein of fanart I’d struck. Here’s Weird Al Yankovich‘s Amish Warcraft Paradise:
WoW people are seriouslly obsessed – that machinima animation must take hours to do. In between that, and playing the game, and talking about the game on IRC or IM or whatever, I don’t suppose there’s a lot of actual time left. Now we know where all those cheeto-eating chiickenhawks went.*
Speaking of chickenhawks – it’s back to Spitting Image again for the final clip. They had as little mercy for US politicians as they did for British: here’s the utterly addled Ronald Reagan’s morning routine. Hmm, an idiot Republican president. I’m sensing a pattern here.
[*Asscovering disclaimer: Yes I am aware of the geographic, political and ethnic diversity of Warcraft players. I also know there’re lots of players. A community that large can accommodate a lot of wingnuts. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing – I for one am thankful for it. Let them fight their wars virtually. It keeps the buggers out of RL politics.]
For Make Glorious Fun Of Eurovision Song Contest
I hadn’t bothered writing about Eurovision (this year’s winner was Serbia, watch here), a] because it’s been and gone and b] because Martin’s already done the political aspects But via Go Fug Yourself comes the news that the people behind Sasha Baron Cohen’s Borat film are to make Eurovision, The Movie:
“Borat” screenwriter Dan Mazer and History Boys producer Damian Jones have struck a deal with Working Title Films to make a comedy movie about the Eurovision Song Contest. Variety says the idea for Eurovision: The Movie was originated by Mazer and Jones, who will produce with Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner for Working Title.
OMFG, that I have to see.
Or do I? Do we really want to share Eurovision with the world, by which I mean America?
At the moment Eurovision has cult status in the US. GFY is American and Eurovision-crazy, and really, I sympathise; where else would you find such a glorious admixture of extreme camp, nationalistic fervour and political bloc voting? But I hope their campaign to bring Eurovision to US tv doesn’t gain any traction:
[…]
Just because we’re not invited to the party — just because we’re cursed with geographic undesirability — doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be allowed to press our flushed, thrilled faces against the window and gawk at the delicious theatrical, colorful, cross-dressing antics happening inside. Why, this year alone, the semi-finals featured sword-wielding backup dancers, male nudity, a rock opera called “Vampires are Alive,” and a man who started chucking his own underpants around the stage. And while many of us simply call that “Tuesday,” there are still loads of people for whom this is a glorious, intriguing novelty.
[…]
Clearly, we are missing out on this batshit marvel. CLEARLY, I need to be tireless with my campaign to bring Eurovision to our cable airwaves. It’s a giant, boozy orgy of camp — not to be confused with Orgy Camp, which is an entirely different kind of mischief — and I feel deprived that I can’t do more than view pictures or study grainy, stilted Internet video on my laptop.
So join me in my crusade, which so far consists entirely of wishing really, really hard that somebody in a position to make this dream come true would read either my blog or my mind.
While I understand the yearning of some USAnians to be allowed to view this annual sequined extravaganza, this war by other means, I hope US tv doesn’t pick it up, because that means they’ll want to join in. Please, please, please don’t let them ever join in. The bloc voting’s bad enough already.
Here’s a graphic from Waffle explaining how the Eurovision voting works:
If the USAnians joined in, we’d lose Terry Wogan and his increasingly pissed snark and gain, I dunno, Paula Abdul or someone equally vile. It would be dismal. Not only that, I think they’d misinterpret the spirit of the thing and enter a decent song, which would rather miss the point and worse still might even win.
So reluctantly, although I’d love to see what the Borat people make of Eurovision, I hope the movie doesn’t get made, or if it does it only gets an .eu release (using ‘Europe’ in its widest, most Eurovisual sense, as including Israel and Turkey).
Let USAnians boggle from afar at Europe’s greatest-ever cultural achievement and gnash their teeth in impotent envy. Eurovision is ours!
Thou shall not question Stephen Fry
Indubitably