Phil Dellio's Homepage
215 George St., Box 3330 St. Marys, Ont. N4X 0A6
sayhey@rocketmail.com
The Internet Is Not a Good Place to Argue with People, Part 53. Actually, this isn’t really about
an argument, so call it The Internet Is Not a Good Place to Do Anything, Part 1. Except maybe buy
stuff; I’m on there buying stuff all the time.
I have a friend who, every time we get together (only three or four times a year since I left To-
ronto), gives me a mix-CD. I used to burn CDs all the time for myself, and if I ever get ambitious,
I could spend a whole summer burning all the unheard music I still keep on my hard drive from when
I went on a downloading binge 20 years ago. I’ll likely die before I ever do--for now, a few days
in the car with Steve’s mix-CDs each year is enough.
One of the two he gave me a few weeks ago had the Bobby Fuller Four’s “Let Her Dance,” one of
their follow-ups to “I Fought the Law.” It’s an incredible song, one of my mid-‘60s favourites.
Don’t think I’ve ever put it on a Top 100, which is an oversight--gives you a good idea of what
Buddy Holly might have been doing in 1965 had he lived. (Just found out it’s used in Wes Anderson’s
The Fantastic Mr. Fox, which I now may make an effort to see.) Not sure if Steve thought this would
be a song I didn’t already have--I do, on a Rhino compilation--or if he just thought it fit in well
with the other songs he included. It was followed by a good cover of Dylan’s “She Belongs to Me” by
Augie Myers that I’d never heard.
In one of those intuitive connections that sometimes seize you out of the blue, I immediately
thought of the Kamala Harris campaign; it was a song that somehow, to me, seemed to speak to the
runaway excitement that had taken hold of one side in the election the past week or two. I started
thinking of the kind of ad you could create if you had Harris’s cooperation and legal rights to
the song. I then looked up the phone number of the White House and...not true; the fantasy stopped
there. But I did think of the one ad Harris had already done (pre-Walz), the one that uses Beyonce’s
“Freedom,” and how maybe, with the help of my friend Scott, we could use images from that one and
swap out Beyonce for Bobby Fuller.
I liked the original ad, and I certainly get the immense cultural reach of Beyonce--who, seemingly
hours after Biden stepped aside, had handed the song to Harris to use as her campaign theme. If
you want to make a clean break from Biden (symbolically clean; the handover of course had to be
handled gingerly by Harris), and you want to get the attention of younger voters, the song was a
good choice for the first ad.
But I’m approaching this as a music guy, and a more detailed account of my reaction went something
like this: “Good ad, does what it’s supposed to do, but I wonder what it would feel like if you
used a better song.” Because “Freedom” is not, to put it charitably, very good; it’s bombastic,
didactic, like having somebody stand there at a blackboard and announce “Today, class, we’re going
to talk about freedom.” I know the ad wasn’t meant for a retired, 62-year-old Canadian grade-school
teacher, and that’s why I’m responding to it two different ways: objectively, as to how well it does
what it’s supposed to do, but also subjectively, which in my case means aesthetically. And if there’s
one thing I’ve paid a great deal of attention to the past few decades, it’s the melding of pop music
to images in a variety of contexts: in films and on TV (subject of a book I published in 2020), in
music videos (subject of a book I expect to publish later this year), in commercials, and even in
political ads--I loved the Bernie Sanders ad in 2016 that used Simon & Garfunkel’s “America.” I
think, perhaps arrogantly, that I actually have a good feel for that sort of thing.
So that’s what Scott did: took the original ad, removed Beyonce and Harris’s voiceover (also images
of Trump), replaced them with “Let Her Dance,” but otherwise left it mostly untouched. It was a
heartfelt expression of our own runaway enthusiasm for the switchover from Biden, and, for me, it
perfectly captured the moment.
The next thing I did was, based on 15 years that should have told every instinct I have otherwise,
absolutely stupid: I posted the video in the dedicated political thread on the same message board
that I’ve whined about before. I wanted to share it--think I posted within an hour of Scott finish-
ing up--and was a little hesitant about Facebook because of copyright. I didn’t equivocate or hedge;
it was obvious I was happy with what we’d done.
As much as it nauseates me to go back to the thread to check details, I will. The first response
came five minutes after I posted. If the person actually watched the video, that’s less than four
minutes after I posted--a lot of thought there, clearly. The post came from a longtime (going back
to the board’s inception, I believe) poster, the reverence for whom completely mystifies me--most of
the time, he’s like a human conduit for other people’s tweets, I think because, to paraphrase Frances
McDormand in Fargo, he wants to let us know how, you know, connected he is. His complaint was that
I replaced a song by a Black pop icon and Harris supporter with the work of “an old dead white guy.”
(Probably just “dead white guy” would have sufficed--hard to be old and dead at the same time.)
Without dwelling too much on it, three quick points:
1) This is not an actual ad; it’s a DIY show of support from a couple of guys in Canada, guaranteed
to be seen by a few dozen people, maybe. Cue Allen Iverson: we’re not talking about the game, we’re
talking about practice.
2) The Pavlovian regurgitation of a phrase like “old dead white guy." I can't tell you how much
bottomless contempt I have for clichés. (Good teacher that I am, I'll assign my contempt to the
clichés, rather than to the people who recycle them. Focus on the behaviour, not the student:
"You're not an idiot, you're just behaving like one.")
3) Again, we’re approaching the ad from a musical standpoint above all else. Beyonce’s “Freedom,” as
a piece of music, is the exact antithesis of what it purports to be about: “Let Her Dance,” a work of
lightness and grace and beauty, is the thing itself. It all makes me think of the Mad Men episode where
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The assassination--news of the assassination (relayed by Paul
Newman)--happened early in the episode, I think, when Don and some others were attending an awards
ceremony. At the end, a signature Mad Men ritual by that point, Matthew Weiner had to choose exactly
the right piece of music--and I mean exactly, as this was truly one of the monumental events of the
decade. The obvious choice for the spring of 1968, a year dominated on the pop charts by soul from
Atlantic, Stax, Motown, and elsewhere, would have been Aretha, the Temptations, Sly, Stevie Wonder,
or Otis Redding; “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay,” right in the middle of a chart run that saw it
spend four weeks at #1 when King was killed, would have been made to order every which way, one fal-
len African American icon to commemorate the life of another. Weiner did something completely counter-
intuitive, though: he went back to the previous #1, Paul Mauriat’s “Love Is Blue,” a MOR confection
that, other than historical proximity, would seem to have about as much to do with MLK’s death as Go-
mer Pyle, 1968’s #2 TV show after Laugh-In. But it worked brilliantly--you felt the full weight of the
event in a way above and beyond what “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay”--too familiar, too canonical,
too peaceful-- would have provided. It’s like the old saying about being able to hold two contradictory
thoughts in your mind at once. That’s a lot to process in four minutes--much easier just to spew rote
nonsense that you know will get on-the-marks and approving thumbs from your audience.
I dwelled a little longer than intended.
There were another 10 or so posts in the next couple of hours, all of them, I think, expressing varying
degrees of approbation. How much each post bothered me depended mostly on who was doing the posting; a
couple of the comments were from posters I like, so those disappointed me the most. One complaint wild-
ly misread the song choice, suggesting that Harris didn’t need anyone’s permission to run for president.
God, no: as I wrote on Facebook (where I did, a few days later, post the video), “let her dance” = get
out of her way, with no implication whatsoever of permission being granted. (Go forth, Kamala: two guys
from Canada are okay with you running.) I was hoping that maybe one or two people would post something
nice--surely somebody liked what we’d done, right?--but either nobody felt that way or, my guess, any-
body who did was reluctant to find themselves on the wrong side of someone else’s pile-on. I’ve been
in that situation myself as an onlooker, many times--better just to absent yourself.
There were a couple more posts referring to the “Let Her Dance” clip in the next week or two. The first,
I think, was meant to push a button and fish me into defending it all over again; I responded, but
instead of revisiting the “Let Her Dance” video, it gave me a chance to post a second one, which Scott
and I made (again, thanks to Scott’s technical expertise; I’m more...the conceptual end of things) right
after the Walz VP pick. No complaints this time: two old white guys celebrating an old white guy with
music made by old (dead, even) white guys landed us squarely on the right side of a rose is a rose is
a rose. (Not that that’s always an easy line to identify. Just before our handiwork, there was a video
all over the internet of Harris leaving a record store with albums by Charles Mingus, Roy Ayers, and
Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald that she’d just purchased; the video became a meme where her albums
were replaced by work from the Pixies, Guided by Voices, Pavement, and others. I didn’t see any com-
plaints there; that was acceptable.)
In the end, I actually did try to get the videos to the Harris campaign; I sent a short message with
YouTube links for both (I uploaded them using an unlisted setting; I’ve since made them public) via
the contact page on the VP’s website. I had to use a fake Zip Code--you aren’t able to enter a Cana-
dian postal code. If Harris loses, her failure to hire Scott and me to head her YouTube Outreach
Division will probably be the difference.
other pieces
'08 election
records
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