I want to like it, but I'm having a hard time doing so.
I want to like it, but I'm having a hard time doing so.
A few years ago Wyclef Jean released a song called "If I was President."
Today, I learned he's going to run for President of Haiti.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Haitian-American music star Wyclef Jean will announce his bid for president of earthquake-ravaged Haiti this week, Time magazine reported on Tuesday.
Haiti, which was hit January 12 by a deadly 7.0-magnitude earthquake, is scheduled to vote on November 28 to elect a new leader to replace President Rene Preval, whose term ends in February.
"If I can't take five years out to serve my country as president, then everything I've been singing about, like equal rights, doesn't mean anything," Jean said in an interview with Time.
I wonder if he's the first pop star to make a run for president?
Katie Perry does not approve of mixing religion and spirituality.
She also talks about her religious upbringing and her 'blasphemy' comment about Lady Gaga. "I am sensitive to Russell taking the Lord’s name in vain and to Lady Gaga putting a rosary in her mouth. I think when you put sex and spirituality in the same bottle and shake it up, bad things happen. Yes, I said I kissed a girl. But I didn’t say I kissed a girl while f-ing a crucifix.”
Did she know that they were taking pictures and writing down what she said?
Not too long ago I wrote a post about whether Lady Gaga is an example of sexual liberation or the epitome of capitalist consumerism, which I take to be a prominent form of self-subjugation. Today, over at the NYT's philosophy blog, Nancy Bauer writes the following about Lady Gaga:
The tension in Gaga’s self-presentation, far from being idiosyncratic or self-contradictory, epitomizes the situation of a certain class of comfortably affluent young women today. There’s a reason they love Gaga. On the one hand, they have been raised to understand themselves according to the old American dream, one that used to be beyond women’s grasp: the world is basically your oyster, and if you just believe in yourself, stay faithful to who you are, and work hard and cannily enough, you’ll get the pearl. On the other hand, there is more pressure on them than ever to care about being sexually attractive according to the reigning norms. The genius of Gaga is to make it seem obvious — more so than even Madonna once did — that feminine sexuality is the perfect shucking knife. And Gaga is explicit in her insistence that, since feminine sexuality is a social construct, anyone, even a man who’s willing to buck gender norms, can wield it.
Gaga wants us to understand her self-presentation as a kind of deconstruction of femininity, not to mention celebrity. As she told Ann Powers, “Me embodying the position that I’m analyzing is the very thing that makes it so powerful.” Of course, the more successful the embodiment, the less obvious the analytic part is. And since Gaga herself literally embodies the norms that she claims to be putting pressure on (she’s pretty, she’s thin, she’s well-proportioned), the message, even when it comes through, is not exactly stable. It’s easy to construe Gaga as suggesting that frank self-objectification is a form of real power.
The rest of the post goes on to discuss the legacy of feminism with a generation of Gaga-aware young women. She concludes that it's not so easy to tell the difference between practices of freedom and self-expression and practices of self-objectification or self-instrumentalization.
Recent Comments