AUTHOR'S OTHER TITLES (1) Media (Essays) Don't comment, I just need this [478 words] [Movies]
Media Coursework, Don't Bother M Hanson
'Counting Bodies' is clearly mocking the President through this animated form, a technique also used by Detroit rapper Eminem in his October 2004 video for 'Mosh'. The purpose of the video was to get the American public to vote against George W. Bush in the presidential election. References to Bush's blunders are made throughout the video, the vital one being at the start of the video where children are heard reciting the Pledge Of Alliegience whilst a plane soars overhead and then can be heard crashing off screen, followed by an animated Eminem in the role of Bush reading a children's book the wrong way up. This is a reference to the 9/11 attacks where George W. Bush was reading with a school class in Florida when the attacks happened, and then preceded to read on instead of leaving the classroom and heading back to the White House. To show the severity of what Eminem was looking for in the public voting, and the ways that the Republicans were trying to stop any Democratic voters from voting, we see shots of a live-action Eminem leading an animated crowd, who are all wearing black hoodies like Eminem's (perhaps a symbol of today's youth culture and hoody wearers), to the White House. The crowd are all protesters against Bush's regime, as noted by earlier scenes of a couple of the marchers being 'screwed over' by Bush's decision making, e.g. a soldier who has just returned from Iraq and about to be reunited with his family getting orders to return there.
Both of these contemporary texts are 'aiming to mock in a criticial way' towards Bush, but do they follow Dan Harries' 'Four Conventions Of Parody'- Recognition (where the audience sees a reference to something else and sees how it has been altered), Parodic Exaggeration (where something from the generic convention is greatly exaggerated), Inversion (where a usual scenario is 'turned upside down') and Parodic Misdirection (where the viewer is thrown off course from the generic convention)? Although both 'Counting Bodies' and 'Mosh' are highly exaggerated in their ways of negatively portraying the United States President, we don't see any recognition from any other animated text, in fact the only real Recognition we see is in Bush himself. Inversion isn't seen in either texts either, but we do see a little bit of Misdirection in the 'Counting Bodies' video where we see the horse that excretes the television. The exaggeration of these two texts are made this way due to the fact that these are animations, meaning that the director has a much more open range to put across stronger and more impactful media.
The reason that these musical minds make these videos to ridicule certain politicians, in these cases George W. Bush, is not just to show the world their own views, but to bring out the active audience to make a difference, go with the video makers and vote for the candidate that isn't being ridiculed, for example John Kerry in the 2004 elections. These music video directors, some who are the actual musicians themselves, believe that they are such important celebrity figures that they would draw in the aspiring audience to believe in the same political beliefs that they had. Musicians before have tried to have a big impact on politics, most notably through big live events such as Rock The Vote, which increased youth participation in electorial voting for the first time in 20 years, Live 8, a follow-up to Live Aid which was put on to pressure the world's leaders to drop the debt of third world countries, and the less successful 'Vote Or Die' campaign, part of the Citizen Change group, set up by P. Diddy to encourage more of America's youth to get out and vote, but was seen as unnecessarily violent and overly useless.
Of course, 'Counting Bodies' and 'Mosh' are not the first music videos to
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