Well, I was all set to blog this morning about having my faith in international institutions renewed by the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, but then I discovered I’d been “tagged” by Dan Drezner to blog about my favorite “guilty pleasure” songs. I have explained to Dan I have a committed relationship with pleasure but only an occassional flirtation with guilt, so the five songs he requested will be hard to come by.
Still, there are those that combine lyrics I want to oppose for political reasons with music that is breathtakingly irresistible… like, Leona Lewis, “Bleeding in Love.” It should be a crime to use a voice like that to whine about not wanting to leave a destructive, violent relationship. C’mon, Hollywood, don’t you realize that 12-year-old girls model their emotional worlds after the songs they hear day after day on the radio? (Don’t tell my daughter that I secretly listen to this song at my office, trusting my subconscious to ignore the words… I just like the music.)
Then there’s the converse: lyrics you could die for to music/images that make you want to barf/boycott the industry. For example, I publicly loathe booty-shakin’ songs with brazenly sexual videos, but it must be said I have a funny soft spot for “Umbrella” by Rhianna. In such situations, one hopes for a remake of some quality: a noble effort is made by Plain White T’s; a superior one by Mandy Moore.
Oh, and there’s the music of Klaus Badelt, which gives me flashbacks somethin’ fierce to my former ill-begotten life as a scallywag…
Oh, oh, and… ok, back to work.
*Robert Farley sums it up pretty well anyhow.
Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.
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