This space is not usually reserved for confession, but I have a secret vice to reveal: I close my office door here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, direct my computer to the YouTube site, and bathe in the sights and sounds of Barack Obama music. Specifically, I have found myself addicted to four videos in particular. The first, which was produced by rapper will.i.am during the primary season, is called “Yes, We Can” and features Mr. am’s fellow celebrities–John Legend, Scarlett Johanssen, and others–lip-synching to Obama boilerplate about the magical phrase “Yes, we can,” which (according to Senator Obama) seems to have circulated throughout the populace at choice moments in history. Then there is a second video, also produced by will.i.am, called “We Are the Ones“–taken from the famous Obamian formula that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for”–which also features selected celebrities (Jessica Alba, among others) describing the kind of world they would like to inhabit once Obama is elected. The third video is the brainchild of a rocker named Dave Stewart and is called “My American Prayer“–although, as the singer renders the phrase, it sounds more like “my ‘merican prayer.” This, too, is a vehicle for familiar faces (Forrest Whittaker, Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander) to move their lips in harmony with Mr. Stewart’s lyrics or Senator Obama’s oratory. The final video is not a video per se, but a performance by Little Stevie Wonder at a rally for Obama at UCLA where he exhorts the audience to “remember this melody” and then, singing up and down the scale, repeats “Barack Obama” in a slow rhythmic chant, clapping with the audience, and invoking “Barack Obama” over and over again. I confess that Little Stevie Wonder’s performance has something like a hypnotic effect on me. His grating, high-pitched voice, which was never particularly comfortable to listen to, has a kind of screeching quality which, combined with the endless incantation of “Barack Obama,” is very difficult to dislodge from memory. I also admit that the other three videos appeal to me largely for their considerable quotient of kitsch: There is slow-motion imagery of pregnant women, blissful Gray Panthers, solemn dreadlocked hipsters, earnest Young Hollywood, and multitudes of the sort of people you would expect to see shopping at Whole Fields in, say, Cambridge, Massachusetts or Ann Arbor, Michigan. Yet what is most striking about these sounds and images is their extraordinary solemnity. There is an overarching theme of sadness, melancholy, misfortune, loss, even reproachfulness: The beautiful young things gaze balefully into the cameras, warbling in slow, mournful tempos, swaying and staggering instead of dancing; they appear at times to be on the verge of tears. It is as if they are moaning their way out of Stalingrad, or expect the viewer to crush the dreams they describe. This is as far from ‘Happy Days are Here Again’ or ‘hope’ as one could imagine. Even the Obama musical video–“Choose to Unite“–is suffused with candlelight vigils and progressives in pain. What does this mean? Perhaps the inference is that the United States, after eight years of George W. Bush, is so far down the road to perdition that even the dying words of Martin Luther King (featured in ‘My American Prayer’) cannot redeem it. Or maybe these long, self-indulgent eulogies are largely a reflection of the copious piety, insufferable self-absorption, and mutual admiration of Senator Obama and his acolytes? Either way, they generate bouts of helpless laughter and genuine astonishment in one viewer, at least.
