Blogswarm - Online Political News Magazine

Google "scared shitless" - Kos's post on the National Republican Congressional Committee is the second website to show up.

Google "Lisa Murkowski" and a despair.com poster is the third site behind her campaign and Senate sites. The site doesn't mention her name or have anything to do with politics, but it has been google bombed to where it is a top entry. The poster reads:

Nepotism

WE PROMOTE FAMILY VALUES HERE -
ALMOST AS OFTEN AS WE PROMOTE FAMILY MEMBERS

Can you say, Nepotism Poster Kid? Google loves the Murkowski Monarchy

So much it made the Anchorage Press: Who's Your Daddy:

Lisa loyalists might be annoyed if they check out www.cafepress.com. Type in "Murkowski" and they'll find T-shirts, camisoles, thongs, lunch boxes and other products that say "Nepotism Poster Kid." There are two other anti-Lisa logos and slogans to choose from. Of course, the nepotism refers to Governor Frank Murkowski's bold decision to appoint his daughter, Lisa, to finish his term as U.S. Senator. Now Lisa is running for (re)election against former Governor Tony Knowles, a Democrat.

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Josh Koenig

Eminem has dropped his latest video, with visuals by Guerilla News Network's Ian Inaba. It's a stunning piece of work. Eminem is making a play for the times, to be a cultural leader of a revolutionary generation. I don't know how that will work out in the long run, but it makes for a great driving piece of music and a very aggressive video.

While it's very unlikely in my mind that this video will ever get airplay, maybe if we all write it in on TRL they'll get up the bottle to put it on. In the meantime, pass the word and get people to watch it online. You can see it here (click the image at left) or on the GNN website. Pass it on.

Marshal Mathers is a man with mass appeal. Mosh uses that appeal for unity, for a focus in the fighting spirit of the hip hop nation; focus to organize, gather, and achieve some great ends:

Don't matter what color, all that matters is we gathered together
To celebrate for the same cause, no matter the weather
If it rains let it rain, yea the wetter the better
They ain't gonna stop us, they can't, we're stronger now more then ever,
They tell us no we say yea, they tell us stop we say go,
Rebel with a rebel yell, raise hell we gonna let em know
Stomp, push up, mush, fuck Bush, until they bring our troops home

The video is a grand and moving suplement to the lyrics and music. All told, it's definitely hot. Gave me goosebumps to be honest.

And as we proceed, to mosh through this desert storm, in these closing statements, if they should argue, let us beg to differ, as we set aside our differences, and assemble our own army, to disarm this weapon of mass destruction that we call our president, for the present, and mosh for the future of our next generation, to speak and be heard, Mr. President, Mr. Senator, (can you hear us?)

I've seen enough data to be convinced: if our generation turns out -- from the indy kids to the neo-hippies, the hip hoppers, punk rockers and metalheads -- we will own this election, and won't nobody be able to spin that away from us.

If we do our thing on Nov 2nd, they'll have to hear us. There won't be any choice about it.

I'm not going to try to quote it because I wouldn't know what to cut. From Kid Oakland:



Wed Oct 27th, 2004 at 05:47:03 GMT

What is there really to say?

Other than to straight up hand it to Eminem, Dr. Dre, Ian Inaba, Anson Vogt, Kevin Elam and Thomas Brohdal and everyone else who had a hand in the making of this video?

Watching this video is one of those experiences that just changes you. Mosh has a transformative power. Like, before I clicked on my computer this morning and downloaded the thing....well, I thought and felt one way...about Eminem, the youth vote, our troops, the state of oppositional culture in America, the meaning of this election, what George Bush means to young Americans...and afterwards, I just had huge fucking scales fall from my eyes....

I felt this powerful sense that I had just seen something calibrated exactly for this moment, something hopeful and disturbing and honest...something spoken from the crux of this hour in our history and yet resolutely looking forward.  Mosh is political art that, at the same time, speaks in an authentic and specific voice.  It is art that seems to bear a power to unleash something new.

This diary is attempt to get at why that is...what Mosh says and what it means.....right now...

Diaries :: kid oakland's diary ::

i. Private Kelly: thinking about your rage

There is a pivot moment in Mosh that defines the entire video for  me....it comes about one third of the way in, cartoon Eminem is rapping to a huge audience of men...and as the camera pulls back we see that they are soldiers in desert fatigues...

All you can see is a sea of people, some white and some black
Don't matter what color, all that matters is we gathered together
To celebrate for the same cause, no matter the weather

the camera zooms in on one soldier who is not nodding his head like the others.  He is morose, angry, he is thinking as he listens to the music.  This is our introduction to Private Kelly.  And, as strong as the other depictions are....of Eminem himself, of Swift, of Tenant 508...I think that Private Kelly at this moment is the core of the video.  

Mosh is a polemic that is intended to make you think about strong feelings; strong feelings that you have because of the political situation you find yourself living in. Quite specifically, Mosh is intended to allow you to internalize the anger, the hate, and the rage that the videos' young protagonists feel...and yet, Mosh gets you to channel it, gets you to think about what you and they might do with that anger and hate and rage, to think about why you and they feel that anger and hate and rage.

Private Kelly's sunken-cheeked, grimaced face, angrily meditating on the music, alone in the crowd, is at the core of the politics of this video.

ii. the structure

Mosh works inside of multiple frames.

The first frame is a public school classroom and 9/11.  The two are joined.  One is utopian and appeals to our sense of community and shared civic responsibility.  The other is dystopic and represents the use of the machinery of that utopia against itself.  We don't get one without the other.  That's the start point and world view of Mosh.

The second frame is Eminem/Bush.....and here we get Eminem taking on the "persona" of Bush in order to explode it and play with it.  In this case, in portraying himself as GWB reading "My Pet Goat" in a school directly underneath the Trade Towers on 9/11....Eminem is laying out for us that this entire video is going to be a kind of battle between these two personas, the one exploding what we think of the other.  Eminem, however, will both play a critic of Bush and, eventually put himself forward as a substitute citizen leader for us.  That's important, and is implied in the humorous glimpse we get of Eminem as GWB.

The third frame is the Wall.  The Wall is critical to establishing the political context of the video.  The wall is where the "person" of Eminem...Marshall Mathers...is sorting out for himself what to think of the news of the day.  It's personal.  He's got himself up there in the form of photos from his life...and Bush is there as well.  (Fwiw, the visual is also a quote of Picasso's  Guernica...a blank wall, a bare light bulb, an artist depicting what he thinks about a War.)   The wall is important because it implies that Marshall Mathers has been trying to think this through for a long time.   That he has made it a personal project to put up what he thinks and feels about our times, with evidence from newspapers and hand-written commentary.  And we see him, in stop-time animation, go through this.

The fourth frame are the protagonists:  Swift, Private Kelly and Tenant 508. This frame is the story of the three protagonists whose course we will follow through the video, as they reflect on what they see and what happens to them...and then "hood up" and join the mosh mob.  Swift, (or at least a cartoon version of Swift, a member of Eminem's group D12), who gets racially profiled on his way home to see his dad.  Private Kelly....an alter ego for Marshall Mathers, a soldier about to be reassigend to Iraq and away from his family.  And Tenant 508, a single mom about to be evicted with her children...who finds herself watching the news about the War at the same time as she finds out she's been evicted.

iii. playing with fire

On a simple and emotive level...Mosh spends much of its time using massed and hooded "mosh mobs" moving through rainy urban streets to convey a kind of "Fight Club meets Election 2004" vibe.  The animations look similar to the video games Grand Theft Auto and State of Emergency....anarchic, anti-authoritarian, juvenile fantasies written as over-the-top games where violence actually becomes a funny and meaningless digital language, the equivalent of bumper cars.

Instead of getting fixed on what might be dangerous and wrong in that....it occurs to me that Eminem is simply being honest and meeting his intended audience where they are at.  These fantasies are part and parcel of the mental world of young folks today.  Indeed, as we speak, the vast majority of those who've seen this video right now are much more likely to live next to a Suburban Mall with a Starbucks...than down the block from Eight Mile.  But this fantasy space....the urban poverty fantasy...is how Eminem gets his audience to internalize the political content of the video.

And it is critical that the video, even when it is depicting the hooded "mosh mobs"...is very clearly about something other than violence and acting out rage.  Just because it uses that vocabulary and visual palette, does not mean its audience will not fully understand that it is not about that.  In fact, I'd argue that that is part of the point of Mosh.....to take its audience from a world of  juvenile fantasy that plays off their dystopic feelings...to a more thoughtful and programatic response to what they are experiencing in the real world.   In effect, Eminem is using Grand Theft Auto and Fight Club to bring his viewers out of inchoate rage and anger, and showing them how to create a more thoughtful, strategic, coordinated response.  A political response.

iv eminem's politics

There is a brilliant line in this video that just keeps bouncing around in my head:

Let me be the voice, and your strength, and your choice
Let me simplify the rhyme, just to amplify the noise
Try to amplify the times it, and multiply it by six
Teen million people are equal of this high pitch
Maybe we can reach Al Quaida through my speech....

at which point we see Tenant 508 turning a radio dish from the top of a building.  

On top of advocating a thought-out, political, pragmatic way out for his audience's rage and anger....voting on November 2nd....Eminem, in this passage expresses something that goes beyond that.  In essence, Eminem is positing a world in which thoughtful citizens who are victims of the powers that be, might actually be able to communicate with one another more effectively than those powers.  It is a decentered, free speech, ground-up democracy that Eminem is preaching here.

This is powerful stuff.  And there are more hints of this in other parts of the video.  November 2nd is not depicted as an end point for the political struggle Eminem describes...it is just a beginning.  It's not an answer, it's just a necessary first step.  Part of which is a rebirth of oppositional culture and informed participatory democracy...and part of which is a recentering of the political process on the voices of those who have not been listened to.

We mosh for the future of our next generation, to speak and be heard, Mr. President, Mr. Senator

Can you hear us?.......

v there's so much more here

From the amazing content of the wall...Bush knew...Sick wounded troops held in squalor...Senate upholds ban on Coffin photos...Bush Tax Cuts help Rich...

to the brilliant depiction of Bin Laden as cardboard cutout in a news studio, hiding Powell and Rumsfeld cheefully chatting away  (a move which both highlights how he's been used as a bogeyman and let's us SEE that and be less scared of him.)

to the personalization of Eminem's battle with Bush along the lines of one's relationship with one's father

to Swift's relationship with his own father, and how they both vote

the amazing scene with Private Kelly on the steps with his wife and kids

and how Swift and Private Kelly use the fire hose to defuse the Police Officers and riot police blocking the mosh mob's path to vote....

And, finally, these two quotes which are destined to reverberate this election season and forward:

And as we proceed, to mosh through this desert storm, in these closing statements, if they should argue, let us beg to differ, as we set aside our differences, and assemble our own army, to disarm this weapon of mass destruction that we call our president, for the present

and this:

If it rains let it rain, yea the wetter the better
They ain't gonna stop us, they can't, we're stronger now more then ever,
They tell us no we say yea, they tell us stop we say go,
Rebel with a rebel yell, raise hell we gonna let em know
Stomp, push up, mush, fuck Bush, until they bring our troops home

vi. mosh the vote

For me, I think the honestly and directness of this video are startling and add to its power.

The fact that it begins and ends with the public school kids.  The fact that Eminem does not sugar coat the situation we are in right now.  A dystopic utopia....that we need to struggle to find our way out of only makes me respect it more.

In some ways..as confused a metaphor as Moshing is...it is perfect for our time.  We have to muddle through the fog of this moment...and see that the "clear eyed" leader we've been following has been anything but:

Look in his eyes, it's all lies, the stars and stripes
They've been swiped, washed out and wiped,
And Replaced with his own face, mosh now or die

Which both plays off of rap's fatalism...and plays into the quite American sentiment:

Live free or die.

I think the most brilliant aspect of Mosh is simply its imperative to think about one's rage and to channel it.  I keep coming back to Private Kelly in that crowd.

And I wonder, if today, in Iraq, some real Private Kelly is getting a chance to see this video for the first time...and what he or she thinks...good or bad....and what rage he or she must feel face to face with the very real, very troubling dystopia that is the United States occupation of Iraq.

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[Intro]

[I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America
And to the Republic for which it stands
One nation under God
Indivisible�E
people�cthis is it�cIt feels so good to be back..]

[Verse1]

Scrutinize every word, memorize every line
I spit it once, refuel, reenergize, and rewind
I give sight to the blind, mind sight through the mind
I ostracize my right to express when I feel it's time
It's just all in your mind, what you interpret it as
I say to fight you take it as I�fm gonna whip someone's ass
If you don't understand don't even bother to ask
A father who has grown up with a fatherless past
Who has blown up now to rap phenomenon that has
Or at least shows no difficulty multi task
And juggling both, perhaps mastered his craft slash
Entrepreneur who has held long too few more rap acts
Who has had a few obstacles thrown his way through the last half
Of his career typical manure moving past that
Mister kiss his ass crack, he's a class act
Rubber band man, yea he just snaps back

[Chorus]

Come along, follow me as I lead through the darkness
As I provide just enough spark, that we need to proceed
Carry on, give me hope, give me strength,
Come with me, and I won't stear you wrong
Put your faith and your trust as I guide us through the fog
Till the light, at the end, of the tunnel, we gonna fight,
We gonna charge, we gonna stomp, we gonna march through the swamp
We gonna mosh through the marsh, take us right through the doors..cum
on.

[Verse2]

To the people up top, on the side and the middle,
Come together, let's all bomb and swamp just a little
Just let it gradually build, from the front to the back
All you can see is a sea of people, some white and some black
Don't matter what color, all that matters is we gathered together
To celebrate for the same cause, no matter the weather
If it rains let it rain, yea the wetter the better
They ain't gonna stop us, they can't, we're stronger now more then ever,
They tell us no we say yea, they tell us stop we say go,
Rebel with a rebel yell, raise hell we gonna let em know
Stomp, push up, mush, fuck Bush, until they bring our troops home come
on just . . .

[Chorus]

Come along, follow me as I lead through the darkness
As I provide just enough spark, that we need to proceed
Carry on, give me hope, give me strength,
Come with me, and I won't stear you wrong
Put your faith and your trust as I guide us through the fog
Till the light, at the end, of the tunnel, we gonna fight,
We gonna charge, we gonna stomp, we gonna march through the swamp
We gonna mosh through the marsh, take us right through the doors, come
on

[Verse3]

Imagine it pouring, it's raining down on us,
Mosh pits outside the oval office
Someone's trying to tell us something, maybe this is God just saying
we're responsible for this monster, this coward, that we have empowered
This is Bin Laden, look at his head nodding,
How could we allow something like this, Without pumping our fist
Now this is our, final hour
Let me be the voice, and your strength, and your choice
Let me simplify the rhyme, just to amplify the noise
Try to amplify the times it, and multiply it by six
Teen million people are equal of this high pitch
Maybe we can reach Al Quaida through my speech
Let the President answer on high anarchy
Strap him with 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 soil
No more psychological warfare to trick us to think that we ain't loyal
If we don't serve our own country we're patronizing a hero
Look in his eyes, it's all lies, the stars and stripes
They've been swiped, washed out and wiped,
And Replaced with his own face, mosh now or die
If I get sniped tonight you'll know why, because I told you to fight

[Chorus]

So come along, follow me as I lead through the darkness
As I provide just enough spark, that we need to proceed
Carry on, give me hope, give me strength,
Come with me, and I won't stear you wrong
Put your faith and your trust as I guide us through the fog
Till the light, at the end, of the tunnel, we gonna fight,
We gonna charge, we gonna stomp, we gonna march through the swamp
We gonna mosh through the marsh, take us right through the doors

[Outro]

[Eminem speaking angrily]
And as we proceed, to mosh through this desert storm, in these closing statements, if they should argue, let us beg to differ, as we set aside our differences, and assemble our own army, to disarm this weapon of mass destruction that we call our president, for the present, and mosh for the future of our next generation, to speak and be heard, Mr. President, Mr. Senator

[End]

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BUSH’S FAILURE TO SECURE IRAQI EXPLOSIVES HAS MADE THE WORLD LESS SAFE