Random thoughts on "Obsessed"

Ok, it's another Mariah Carey "what the?" moment. In her latest video (which I'm not going to embed as I can't find a decent embeddable version at the moment, but here's the link to her official site where it plays within a little widget on the left), Mariah Carey not only dresses up as a man and plays her own stalker (a nice way to get double the screen time for MC, as opposed to say, what would happen if she brought in David Boreanaz to play the part, and also giving the whole video an Austin Powers/Dr Evil vibe), but we then see him/her get run over by a bus. Now that's a surprisingly violent climax for a Mariah Carey video, no?

Incidentally, I've always been fascinated by the presentation of Mariah Carey's race in all of the media pertaining to her. Mariah Carey is mixed race, with Irish-Caucasian on the one side and Black-South-American on the other, yet was famously made to "play down" her "blackness" (as well as any explicit portrayals of adult sexuality) whilst working under husband/manager Tommy Mottola. Upon her separation - personally and professionally - from Mottola, you suddenly see a massive upswing in the amount of cultural signifiers of "blackness" in Mariah Carey media, including a great deal of collaborations with rap/hip-hop/r&b artists (and hey, Spike Lee too). I also find it telling that Mariah's "evil alter ego" - appearing in the videos for "Heartbreaker" and "Boy" - is called "Bianca", although maybe that's a bit of a stretch.

The reason I'm thinking about all of this? Simple. When watching the video for "Obsessed" I couldn't help but wonder, Mariah Carey can certainly get away with playing a white man, it seems, but if she'd been playing a black man, would she have been accused of 'blacking up', despite her own black heritage? It's all a moot point, obviously, as she's not done so, but still, it makes me wonder.

And in case you're wondering why she gets hit by a bus in the new video, well, it's all a big "fuck you and I hope you die" to Eminem, apparently.

Too angry to blog properly (probably #1 in a whole series)

God, I go away for a weekend and when I return all hell breaks loose. I'm too angry/tired for a real blog post but here are the headlines.

Texan politician says that Asian Americans should change their legal names to more Westernised ones in order to make things "easier for Americans to deal with." (I'm pretty sure that the Americans who are Asian American deal with it just fine, thanks).

Stupid films still think that rape jokes are ok.

And oh yeah, amazon.com have completely fucked up by basically lumping in books by gay authors (such as Jeanette Winterson and Stephen Fry) in with erotica and pornography and tried to make the whole lot invisible to users. This reeks of censorship and homophobia. I've been meaning to write a full-scale post on this, but things are developing too quickly for me to really dedicate a whole lot to what I think without some new detail cropping up. All I know is that amazon aren't going to be getting any medals for the piss-poor way they're handling this, either.

Politicomics

Pro-Obama merchandise is the new anti-Bush merchandise. Anything that can have his face on it is now getting his face on it. Check out this series of "Barack-sploitation" videos (nice title there. It may be an obvious pun, but it also serves as a reminder of how Obama is frequently tied to mainstream concepts of blackness). Still, comic books are really exploiting Obama-mania. This is partly because comic book companies are usually quick to try and exploit popular fads anyway, and secondly because of the fact that it's made just oh so much juicier by the fact that Barack Obama is actually a self-confessed comic book fan. Check out this wikipedia page listing (some of) the comic books that feature Obama.

Supposedly, Obama's favourite comic book characters are Spider-Man and Conan. The Spider-Man connection has already been somewhat exploited to death. If you can (it doesn't work in Britain, the country that I live in), check out this clip from the Colbert Report where Stephen leaves out a copy of the Spider-Man/Barack Obama Marvel comic book, signed by both Colbert and current Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada as "Obama bait". Still, the Conan the barbarian connection has been somewhat less utilised...

...Until now, that is.

Yes, that's Devil's Due Press' solicitation for some Barack comics that include Barack the Barbarian. I could spend hours unpacking all the ideas about black masculinity that the cover image presents (an unavoibale side-effect of combining the popular image of the president with the world's most famous Cimmerian, perhaps?), but I also want to point out that DDP have proved unable to resist the temptation to create a "Red Sarah" (a take on Red Sonja) variant cover that ties into all of the sexist "sexy Sarah Palin" nonsense that has surrounded Palin ever since she first stepped out onto the world stage. *Sigh*.


Does anyone else find her somewhat static and lifeless face in this image absolutely terrifying? That is some seriously not great comic art right there.

Still, on the positive side, it's good to be reminded that a certain other Sarah is still about.

Going back to the subject of Barack Obama and comics though, I just want to remind everyone about this Sinfest comic strip from November last year that posits Obama as the latest chapter in a history of black super-heroes (Black Lightning, Green Lantern and Steel). There's a nice pun on Washington DC/DC comics (no Marvel or other super-heroes are represented) and I like the fact that here, Obama isn't just standing in for some black superhero (honestly, non-comics fans, had you even heard of Black Lightning or Steel before just now?) but has in fact stepped into the role of the new Superman, a clear metaphor for a black man finally gaining the highest political office in the U.S. A black man is now finally a leader of heroes, not an also-ran.


I'm not a huge fan of the common Barack-Obama-as-a-superhero conceit, though. Like a lot of his fans, I'm worried about the man becoming lionised to some ridiculous extreme, which only feeds right wing concerns about Obama as some kind of vacuous celebrity/false prophet (Sinfest also dealt with the image of Barack as a rockstar ("Barackstar") here, amongst other instances). It's great to have a charismatic, popular individual in such an important political role, but still, a lot of the popular imagery surrounding Obama has that same aura of incredulity that those "Bush/Hitler: same old shit" t-shirts had. Cashing in on Obamania may just have the unfortunate side-effect of turning Obama merchandise into the twenty-first century equivalent of the Che Guevara t-shirt; which'd be a real shame.

Now, just so I don't end on too dour a note, let's remind ourselves of what would be on t-shirts everywhere had a certain other individual won the U.S. Preseidential election:

Buchanan angrifies up the blood

Shorter Pat Buchanan: "Hey, I heard somewhere that some black people live in ghettos and then shoot at each other. That means they're racist and pro-segregation, as they're separating themselves off from us blameless white folks, who have only ever tried to help them!"

Nobody puts themselves in a situation like that, dumbass! Black communities like that aren't like those gated, white-only communities you've heard about, they were formed under circumstances so entirely different that I'm genuinely shocked that I'm even having to type this sentence in order to try and explain something so patently obvious.

To me, Buchanan's way of thinking ultimately traces back to a very common conservative fallacy: the idea that people's social status is informed by their nature, not the other way around. Put in the very simplest terms possible: people are poor because they are bad, not bad because they are poor. In his worldview, the state of black people in America today is entirely the fault of black people not pulling themselves together and trying harder. This is such a completely myopic worldview that I barely know where to begin, and yet I see it everywhere. I talk to (totally abhorent) anti-feminist women who insist that sexism doesn't really exist and in actuality is just a complaint thrown out there by whinging women who don't try hard enough to be successful (they owe nothing to women's lib, I suppose). The very idea that there aren't innumerable social barriers to success is one based on total naivety.

People don't just wake up one day and decide to start a revolution (whether that be overthrowing Batista or busting up Sal's). Circumstances beyond these people's control squeeze them to the point where they explode and simply have to act out upon the system that's put them in the godawful position that they're in. Crime in the black community of contemporary America is so clearly a result, not a cause, of a legacy of second-class citizenship that is not even close to coming to an end (you know they're only just phasing out segregated prom nights in some Southern schools? Way to keep the rest of your country behind, South!).

Shaftin' Africa

Christ on a bike! Have you seen the new Pirelli calendar? Jeez!!