Prepared to be required to do things like this:
Via Adam at ALOTT2MO, who somehow thinks the women are being "objectified" in a manner that the men are not.
ADDED: Am I the only one who hears "Blurred Lines" and thinks of "Working in the Coal Mine"? Here it is by Lee Dorsey (doing a strange promo for the Brits):
And here's the later Devo version.
Lee Dorsey is best known for the great oldie "Ya Ya." Here's Petula Clark in 1962 updating the song by singing it in French and dancing the twist:
Everything is always recycling: Those newsfolk in that "Blurred News" promo do the twist at least some of the time.
September 1, 2013
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23 comments:
I was afraid the news crew video would make me feel icky. Instead it made me smile.
That was strange and goes part way to explain why I would never succeed in TV news business.
TV news, like print news, for the most part fails in its essential mission to convey news. The constraints of time, level of detail, and partisan influences ensures the news will be at best "half truth" or "whole lies".
I got through about 20 seconds of the news video. Painful.
Watched all of Lee Dorsey, though.
2 things I learned from the (linked in the post) Wikipedia entry on Lee Dorsey: He was a childhood friend of Fats Domino's and he boxed (in the 1950s) under the name Kid Chocolate.
EDH wrote: "Okay, Miley Cyrus's MTV VMA performance was tacky. But it was totally in line with the themes and lyrics of the song, including the so-called "objectification" of women "in a manner that the men are not"."
Then he printed out all the lyrics to "Blurred Lined."
Too much copied text. People can look up the lyrics. You can quote the parts you want.
Also: The post isn't about the VMA performance and Adam's comment about objectification isn't about that, so... make your point more clearly, please.
We need the Althouse-Meade "Please buy at my Amazon portal" Blurred Lines video, we do! "Badgered Lines", maybe wearing those plastic hats...
and hint there's a NSFB (blog) version....even if there isn't! Promotion,promotion, promotion!
100% lack of dignity and self-respect. No wonder local news "crews" are a laughingstock. Beyond painful.
Hey, a news crew that can dance.
And in Salt Lake City.
Mormons, baby!
Surprised at some of the reactions to the video. It's fun. They all can dance a little and some are quite good. The women are attractive. (It's the news business so that's almost a certainty.) Objectify? How silly. The video does not concentrate on the ladies any more than the men, who are also attractive. Pretty people dancing and having fun. Oh, the horror!
I thought at first this was the same crew that fell for the "Sum Ting Wong" hoax around Asiana 214, but that was KTVU, not KUTV. I'm sure these guys are all professional and stuff.
"100% lack of dignity and self-respect. No wonder local news "crews" are a laughingstock. Beyond painful."
Heaven forbid the person that does the weather or reads the news ... actually lip syncs or dances. Shocking!
If someone can't have fun at their job then they probably aren't very good at it.
Kchiker wrote:
"Heaven forbid the person that does the weather or reads the news ... actually lip syncs or dances. Shocking!
If someone can't have fun at their job then they probably aren't very good at it."
I'm of two minds on this. On one hand, yes, people should have fun at their jobs. The news isn't some order of monks where they live in a monastary and translate bible passages all day.
By the same token though, I was watching the news program with George Stephanopolous the other day and it was nothing but recipes, and cat videos and interviews with celebs. How is that news? When they morph into Entertainment Tonight perhaps we shouldn't call them "The News" anymore, but rather "The Entertainment".
Maybe we need our news division to be old fuddy duddies who are solemn and serious so as to not make the news division come across as frivolous.
Even moreso than Working In Coalmine, Blurred Lines sounds like this:
Marvin Gaye - Got To Give Up
Only, it really doesn't. It has similar elements, the falsetto, the high whoop, a similar base line.A similar groove. But it's a different song.
I hear that Marvin Gaye's family is trying to sue Thicke for sounding too much like Gaye, but it's really a baseless argument.
You can't sue someone for making a song somewhat in the style of another person.
Think about how many songs sound like other songs, or artists that sound like other artists but are different enough to be different.
actualy the news video is cute. I was expecting some twerking by the ladies, but they are in fact pretty respectable. Where is the objectification argument coming from?
Lee Dorsey used to bill himself as "The Best Body & Fender Man In New Orleans!!!! which is what he did when his music career slowed. I saw his last show in the early 80s at the NO Jazz Festival. Lee was great. Another great Dorsey song was "Get Out My Life Woman".
People watching the news, especially local news, want to trust the person giving it to them. And trust is a complicated thing -- some part of it is based on whether or not someone is like you and also whether someone doesn't take himself/herself all that seriously. Like it or not, the dancing probably achieves that for that news crew. Plus it's charming.
And I'm an old fogy.
It was just a shame that in that era Tommy and Jimmy got all the attention and money.......I think the news crew performed the song with restraint and dignity. That was their mistake. If the women had worn revealing outfits with fishnets stockings and the men had worn pimpier clothes, then the semiotics of the news cast would have been made clearer. Still, it's a step forward.
Am I the only person in the universe who wonders if Ya Ya in any way influenced Georgie Fame's hit, Yeh Yeh. In like way, I wonder if Jimi Hendrix's The Wind Cries Mary had been influenced by the Lerner & Lowe song, They Call the Wind Maria. These are worthwhile questions, but Rolling Stone is too far gone investigating Colorado's marijuana laws to take the time to answer them.
I thought the news video was cute and fun. It's local news. Not rocket science. Our local news people are agonizing to watch with the forced banter.
My aunt was a TV anchor for a prominent television station in the midwest for many years. She now views today's media with great contempt.
Having been in television news, I may be able to shed a little light.
With the possible exception of the general manager and, maybe, the sales manager, the TV news personalities are the highest paid people in the station. However, they have little or no power/authority. The management often refers to them as "talent" (a perjorative in that context).
So, you get sent out to a chicken farm at 5am (happened to me, really) for promos that are just insipid but some creative director believes are clever.
I not only felt sorry for them but I cringed because I was doing that three decades ago.
The news has become a place where all of the people on camera are more eye candy than well informed, fitting the term "info-babes" according to Rush Limbaugh, and most don't have an IQ equal to room temperature. That is why I rarely turn on the TV and would much rather read on the Internet.
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