American rebel vs American al-Qaeda (Eminem's protest video)

[donsu]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FJ30Aa01.html

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Unleashed only one week before the US presidential election and already the No 1 video on MTV, Eminem's "Mosh" is a stunning piece of political hip-hop. When a millionaire white-trash rapper and his posse hit the polls calling for regime change in the White House, America can't help but listen.

The video was produced, directed and edited by Ian Inaba of the Guerrilla News Network (see the video at www.gnn.tv/content/viewer.html ). Inaba and a crack team in animation, illustration, 3-D and motion graphics had just five weeks to dress up the song. The lyrical Jesse James power is Eminem's, but the video concept is totally Inaba's.

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Get out the vote
"Mosh" may have tremendous cultural and political impact on the youth vote before the US presidential election and beyond. There are more than 55 million people in the United States between the ages of 18 and 35 - they make up 36% of the total of eligible voters.

On the surface, Eminem's political move is inscribed in a larger battle between a Hobbesian world view - the predominantly urban black, disfranchised, fight-for-your-rights crowd - and the Rousseau contingent - the more hipped-out, peace-and-love, environmentally conscious dance/trance/chill-out crowd. But Eminem transcends it by channeling the feelings of disorientation of trailer-park America, suburban-mall America and, especially, urban black America - which is anti-Bush with a vengeance, as this correspondent recently attested in Memphis, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles (see Free at last? May 28). The urban black vote might always have been Democrat: but the key point of Eminem's video is to force the desperate masses, all kinds of desperate masses, not to urban guerrillahood, but to the polls, "to disarm this weapon of mass destruction that we call our president".
For an 18-year-old voting for the first time, "Mosh" provokes the same impact that the barricades of May 1968 in Paris did on the "children of Mao and Coca-Cola", as film genius Jean-Luc Godard put it. The esthetic of the video may be cartoon teenage wasteland - a code easily identified by Eminem's core audience - but hardly could there be a better metaphor for the current US political nightmare than "moshing". The thing is, Eminem and director Inaba use "moshing" to organize a strategic, political response to alienation and dystopia. Voting, in this case, is only the first, necessary step toward a society of real free speech and informed, participatory democracy.

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Compare Eminem's get-out-the-vote message with the man with his face covered by a keffiah and sunglasses saying, in English, "The streets will run with blood." The man, Azzam al-Amriki (Azzam the American), is the alleged new face of al-Qaeda, revealed on a tape delivered to the ABC News office in Islamabad last Sunday by a courier who got paid US$500. The courier said he collected the tape in Peshawar the day before, and assured that the video was filmed in the Pakistani tribal areas.
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