Mashup Candidate

My wife found another one. A piece of viral weirdness out there in the Netiverse about Obama. I have no idea where it came from but it's jaw-droppingly weird, and strangely uplifting at the same time. Take a look.


On one level, it's really not much more than your standard web artifact. It could be any DJ playing around with Garage Band and Final Cut Pro, sharing via the newest app for sharing, and getting some feedback. The pallette is pretty familiar.

Of course, we'd seen another mashup not more than a week or two ago, this one from Will. I. Am. It was such a strong web meme that it spawned a sharp satire of the McCain candidacy by a poster called John. He. Is.


There're other images out there, too. For instance, the one done up by the OBEY GIANT people:





Here's a poster that I saw several times in Chicago, one that I've started to mentally call "The African School Teacher."





More cribbed from around the web:




There's even ObamaofDreams.com which has come up with some compelling sportswear for the Obama-supporting baseball fan.



Of course, it's a Presidential election. Image controls the country at this point, and it's certainly no surprise that Team Obama has piles and piles of media out there for consumption. Hillary and McCain are also undoubtedly right there with him, their own printing presses going full steam to churn out the message, minute by minute.

What's becoming apparent, though, is that Obama has achieved meme-hood. He's a presidential candidate, of course, and the reality of his candidacy is its own thing and exists in its own political world. But his branding is so strong and his core message is so solid, that he's now not simply political, he's societal. He and his candidacy are a thing in themselves within our culture, separate from the race for the White House.

What this means is that his image is free to be mashed up. He's deconstructable, reinterpretable. Illustrate him as Che Guevara, illustrate him as Steven Biko; illustrate him as FDR, illustrate him as Malcom X. Do a little spoken word song with his speech in North Carolina. Put him in his own Bollywood video and chop up videos of his speech so he's singing in Hindi.

While there's no straight political line from Bollywood to FDR, the conclusion might be that Obama is already so deeply embedded in our culture that he signifies something else as well besides the next 4 or 8 years. That there's a Platonic ideal forming out there, The Candidate Obama, that we can refer to going forward, and to which the actual real life individual, Senator Barack Obama, and his historical trajectory might not always compare favorably to.

A stretch? Perhaps so. He's not been around long -- I know, I know, no need to remind me -- and on a cultural scale, not to say political scale, he's been around even less. He's got "phenomenon" written all over him, and we all know that that can lead to nowhere but eventual disappointment (cf. Bill Clinton). But looking at the things that people are creating around him -- and because of him -- makes me really wonder whether he's hitting a vein of something for which he alone among the candidates seems to have the correct shovel.