Once upon a time in America, a state-sponsored healthcare exchange used a multi-hour Richard Simmons dance party to promote insurance coverage to young people. Somehow this is not the worst marketing ploy to youth a government has used in the last three years.
I’m not saying China’s recent plug of a rap song about Karl Marx takes the cake, though if we’re being true to the philosophy, it’d take all of it. It’s just that a nation really must be hard-up for ideas when its state media attempts to convince millennials that serendipity is what happens when you come across a copy of Das Kapital.
Life is full of little accidents / Then one day I discovered how awesome he was is an actual lyric from the actual tune “Marx is a post-90”, a “post-90” being the equivalent of a millennial. Chinese Communist Party media is pointing to the track as proof that Marx will “never completely go out of style,” the AP reports.
Maybe they’re just taking the song’s word for it. Another line from “Marx is a post-90” is … this song will never die, which, if true, would be terrible news. Immortality is a designation I would attach to “Tangled Up in Blue”, “Juicy”, or “Blue (Da Ba Dee)”, not propagandist hip-hop.
“Marx is a post-90” is by the group Perfume Band, according to MailOnline’s China News Editor Tracy You. She translated the most lyrics of English-speaking reporters writing about this topic, including Others read magazines while I read about Marxism.
Might I suggest the latest issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, instead.
