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SUMMARY:“My humping” the Prime Minister: sound-image power play in pod
 cast politics of Singapore - Dr Shzr Ee Tan (Royal Holloway)
DTSTART:20081127T170000Z
DTEND:20081127T190000Z
UID:TALK15435@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:M Zhou
DESCRIPTION:At the height of general elections fervour in Singapore\, 2006
 \, the republic’s prime minister Lee Hsien-Loong became the unlikely sub
 ject of a music video re-mix featuring hiphop group Black Eyed Peas’ hit
 \, My\nHumps. The remix was uploaded onto the internet as a podcast\, firs
 t appearing as a streaming sound file on an independent blog – and later
  on YouTube. It was a  defiant response to government criticism of politic
 al podcasts in Singapore. This paper makes a case study of the local and v
 irtual controversies which erupted in the wake of the said podcast. In par
 ticular\, I will investigate the amphibian as well as literal relationship
 s between music\, image and text manipulated within the podcast and in its
  thriving aftermath. How are the semiotics involved unpacked in relation t
 o each other\, and how do political commentators in Singapore make use of 
 ambiguities in such relationships to camouflage direct criticism of the go
 vernment as a celebration  of kitsch performance\, or as deliberately mist
 ranslated music/image codes? Power play in this game is further complicate
 d by the encoding and dissemination of the above processes and products on
  the Internet\, in a virtual environment where – in spite of its false s
 ense of democracy - parallel-world identities and anonymous (and therefore
  illusorily non-culpable) communities can be created as fast as YouTube fi
 les are downloaded and spread through viral mails.\n\n
LOCATION:CRASSH
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