By Any Media Necessary: Mapping Youth and Participatory Politics

Music Videos

Music videos are a particularly powerful and complicated maker practice. They combine the complexities of both clever song writing techniques with often fast-paced video editing, that tells a story or provides a visually stimulating counterpoint to the music. But for millennials and those growing up after the launch of MTV in 1981, the format has become part-and-parcel to media consumptions habits. 

What music videos, particularly pop and hip-hop, offer though as a pedagogical tool is their catchy, repetitive song structure that repeats choruses and act as a mnemonic device. Moreover the lyrical rhyme system of storytelling information or rhetorical statements provide an emotionally engaging and easy-to-follow logical structure.

Amongst the organizations, they're both examples of completely original songs as well as parody songs, that use pre-existing songs as a base to change the lyrical content or original meaning. For example, the music video Fear the Boom and Bust is an original song that uses hip-hop tropes to analyze opposing economic philosophies of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keyes. The playful song helps to make the dry subject more fun while the simple storyline of the video helps to illustrate their opposing arguments and lifestyles. 


Black and Yellow - AnCap Remix on the other hand uses a pre-existing popular song by Wiz Khalifa to give it new meaning. While the original song referred to the "Black and Yellow" of Pittsburg Steelers, in the remix it's used to refer to the colors of the Anarcho-Capitalist flag. So the remix reappropriates the rallying spirit of the original and directs that energy towards defining an ingroup identity of what it means to be an Anarcho-Capitalist.

Libertarians

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