Election season is ramping up and many commentators are pointing to 2010 as a pivotal year for women in politics, what with Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann and Sharron Angle and Carly Fiorina, and that one from South Carolina that was accused of having an affair but couldn’t possibly have had an affair because she’s, like, totally married and stuff and her husband is totally hot. Haters just be jealous. Miranda Lambert is taking notice with the fourth single off her latest album Revolution. As a former Nashville Star finalist (she placed third in the show’s debut season), Lambert has certainly experienced her fair share of the vicissitudes of the Amer’can voting public. “Only Prettier” is a gloriously old-school country rocker, a stomping celebration of catty girl politics loaded up with adorably venomous one-liners and winking, semi-sincere appeals to hatchet burial, echoing the same promises politicians trot out every election season – “oh, let’s shake hands and reach across those party lines.” Oh yes, let’s do. And let’s spike the punch while we’re at it. The song’s perfectly complimentary video finds Lambert and her band on stage playing at a 50s era high school prom where two rival cliques – the debutantes and the bad girls, both played by the same quartet of actresses led by Lambert herself – go head to head (under a gymnasium arc d’ballon) in a battle for social supremacy. And as it turns out, they’re all just two sides of the same coin.
Tag: video
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The Sunday Morning Awesome: Haddaway “Life” (1993)
As VH-1 has proven time and again, there is life after one-hit-wonder-dom. In the case of the Carribean-born 90s Eurodisco titan Haddaway, there was “Life” after his one hit “What Is Love”. “Life (Everybody Needs Somebody To Love)” was Haddaway’s follow-up single but it stopped just short of the Top 40, and like everything else Haddaway’s put out since, it has since been completely obscured by the afterlife of its predecessor, immortalized in the head-bobbing of Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan. The video is a hilarious 80s-looking thing with Haddaway playing a sort of disco Dr. Frankenstein.
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Big in France: “Allez! Ola! Olé!” by Jessy Matador (On a Boat)
So, in a previous “Big In…” episode, I posted a video by Germany’s currently reigning Idol-equivalent champion Mehrzad Marashi and the same show’s most successful alumnus Mark Medlock, doing a pretty horrible dance song together… on a boat. Not to be outdone is one Jessy Matador, the 27-year-old Zairian-French singer-and-dancer who represented France in this year’s Eurovision song competition with “Allez! Ola! Olé!” and gave the country its best showing in years. (France last won the competition in 1977. The last time it placed as a runner-up was in 1991.) The song may only have placed 12th in the Eurovision competition but it’s currently shaking its ass at the top of the French pop chart, and it’s formed a gigantic conga line all over Europe going Top 20 in Germany, and Top 10 in Belgium, Norway (who as 2009’s Eurovision winners hosted this year’s competition) and Finland (suck on that, Dark Metal). It even nicked the U.S. club charts.
And why not? Its infectious Afro-Carribean beats feel both instantly familiar and alluringly exotic – it’s a song in search of a Bacardi ad campaign, basically. When Jessy Matador calls out “Tout le monde!”, he means, “Everybody!”. But the literal translation of the French is “All the world!” and that applies here too. The song’s got a chorus that blithely defies language barriers by defying language itself. Allez Ola Ole? A two-year-old from Mongolia could sing along to it! The first time I heard this, I just thought it was a goofy song (the video doesn’t help that impression – see about 3:08 in the video for the dorkiest temper tantrum ever) that I figured I’d forget before I had time to close the internet browser. But its infuriatingly simple hooks have proven as relentless as Jaws, and I’ll be damned if I’ve gone a day the last couple weeks without going back to it at least once before heading out on my morning commute.