reBlogged from NEWSgrist:
Big props go to Karmagrrrl for both the "almost too perfect" mash-up (dated 9/8/05) and for the NYTimes broadcast:
Critic's Notebook - NYTimes, September 24, 2005:
Art of the Internet: A Protest Song, Reloaded
By SARAH BOXER
Some songs have all the luck. They lead double, even triple lives, meaning everything to everyone, and meaning it passionately.
Last month, Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends" was serving both as a protest song against the war in Iraq and as a patriotic ballad. It was (and still is) one of the most requested music videos on MTV. Now, thanks to the Internet, it is a song about the devastation that followed Katrina.
The song's original music video, made by Samuel Bayer (who also filmed the video of Nirvana's classic "Smells Like Teen Spirit"), is full of pathos and sap. It shows a young couple in love, then quarreling and finally separated by war. As the young man fights in Iraq thinking about sunnier days, the young woman sits home waiting and fretting.
Although the band intended the music video as an antiwar protest, Kelefa Sanneh, a pop music critic for The New York Times, pointed out that it also "works pretty well as a support-our-troops statement." One blogger recently posted the Green Day video with the tag "Great Recruitment Video." Maybe he was being facetious, maybe not.
Today, it's the same old song with a different meaning. Two weeks ago, Karmagrrrl, a blogger also known as Zadi, paired the Green Day ballad with television news coverage of Katrina and posted it at her Web site, smashface.com/vlog. Her video fits the lyrics like a glove.
Karmagrrrl's video begins with a view of green trees out the window of a bus. "Summer has come and passed, the innocent can never last," the song goes. "Wake me up when September ends." On the floor of the bus, you see a pair of red sneakers toeing the headline "HELP US" on a folded copy of The New York Post from Sept. 1. The picture in the newspaper shows a pair of feet in cardboard sandals.
From that point on, "Wake Me Up" is set to images of Katrina seen on MSNBC, CNN and "The Oprah Winfrey Show." As the rain rages on MSNBC, the song swells: "Here comes the rain again, falling from the stars." A streetlight falls onto the wet street: "Drenched in my pain again, becoming who we are." Videotape of corpses carried on stretchers goes with this lyric: "As my memory rests, but never forgets what I lost." It's almost too perfect.
Watch the video (QuickTime)
