"Content creator."
It became "a thing" about 25 years ago. First with "blogs" like this one in the late 1990s. Then people began uploading videos to YouTube beginning in about 2005. Content creation really took off.
YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and many other sites provide a platform for talented people to find audiences using music and video. A very typical format is a video of a couple of minutes -- a format that works well for short bits of social and political commentary, including parody songs. Re-worked, re-worded songs make a strong impression. The music and overall "sound" is familiar which makes the replacement words particularly memorable since they fit into the mind-space already established by the original. They can be clever. And funny.
My explorations amid humorous commentary is a continuation of my effort to lighten up my political immersion. (Yesterday it was the GOP debate. Tomorrow, the body language message of Trump's mugshot. I need what the Greek dramatists called "comic relief.") This brings me to Dale Borman Fink's YouTube channel. Fink is a college classmate with a distinguished career in early childhood education.
Take time to sample his links, found below. I think they are fun.
Guest Post by Dale Borman Fink
Animated by other Trump song parodies in the early months of the pandemic, I decided to write one of my own. When I finished my song "Mean Don," based on “Big John," by the great Jimmy Dean. I found out the best way to make it available was to start a YouTube channel. That’s how my channel began.
Now that I was a retired guy with a YouTube channel, I realized it could be a great place to share other songs I had created over several decades. The earliest ones dated from my participation in the Harvard-Radcliffe SDS Radical Arts Troupe in 1969 to 1971. We used to write and perform amusing skits related to the issues of the day. My major contribution to the troupe’s repertoire was to write song parodies. I have now recorded ten songs from those days and am in the process of turning them into videos with my creative collaborator, Shannon Dean, who has done all the video and graphics.
Back in 1991, I had released an audiocassette of “Help Me Saddam,” a song about the first George Bush and the Persian Gulf War. I had also made audio versions of three "latchkey songs" that I wrote and performed when I was on the speaking circuit, working at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, on behalf of after-school programs for school-age kids.
I began writing a poem about my sports-hero, Roberto Clemente, the day after he died on New Years’ Day, 1973. I continued reciting it and revising it for most of my adult life. In 2021 I found the perfect voice actor to record it: Daniel Corretjer played baseball and grew up in Puerto Rico. It is a tribute I had to finish before I leave this earth. (My words here are a deliberate callback to one of Roberto’s great quotations.)
Here is a sample of Fink's work:
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| Click: The Ballad of Big John |
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| Click: I Want to Hold Your Hand |
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| Click: Help me, Rhonda |
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| Click: A Hard Day's Night |
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| Click: King of the Road |
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| Click: The Ballad of Roberto Clemente |
3 comments:
With Republicans so bent on making a racketeer our dictator, the U.S. may need a new music genre, something akin to the “narcocorrido” Mexican songs celebrating the drug cartels.
Here’s a video about Bernie that I did a while ago: Back From The USSR. Apologies to The Beatles.
click
https://youtu.be/xGdghPyEujA?si=kBHaI-aTNxPBf9Qn
Well at least it's not a guest post by MT.
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