Cassetteboy review Nick Clegg's video mashup: 'It's the political equivalent of dad dancing'
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Version 0 of 1. It’s very flattering when someone releases something like the Liberal Democrat (unofficial) election anthem and people immediately think of Cassetteboy. It’s really nice – we’re not the only people who do mashups, nor are we the first. So it’s flattering. But the video itself is awful. It looks as if it is a woeful attempt to woo the youth vote. I can’t see it’s anything other than that. It’s the political equivalent of dad dancing, isn’t it? Young people are very poorly served by the current government, so it would be nice if political parties tried to court the youth vote by coming up with policies to help them. It would be a lot a less patronising than doing this kind of thing. Also, whoever edited the video has made a few mistakes. They haven’t used enough material for a start. Our video for Cameron’s Conference Rap uses five different conference speeches by David Cameron – that’s almost five hours of material. They’ve only used one speech of Nick Clegg’s – I don’t know how long that was, but it wasn’t enough, and they’ve had to use certain words that were delivered in a very mumbly or unclear fashion, so some of it is really quite hard to understand. If they had taken a bit more time on it or made a bit more effort, they would have been able to do it a lot more cleanly. One of the other problems is that when you stick to an existing song and try to recreate the lyrics, some of the words you’ll need will be hard to find, and it takes time or skill to get around that. Related: Cassetteboy: 'David Cameron won't be pleased by our video' I think these mashup videos work better when they are attacking their target rather than promoting them. If we’d done Cameron’s Conference Rap and it was just restating the politics of the Tory party then it wouldn’t be any fun at all – and that’s what they’ve done here. I don’t see the point of it. If Clegg wants to get his policies and messages out then he can do that more effectively by just delivering a speech full of interesting and engaging policy ideas, instead of getting someone to mangle his words and set it to the tune of a song we were all bored of a few months ago. Ahead of the election, we are not working on any parody videos about the Lib Dems. It seems like there’s no point in attacking them when they’ve already shot themselves in the foot with their own video. I’m not interested in politicians trying to be down with the kids and I don’t think the kids are either. I want my politicians to have a bit of dignity – running the country is a serious business and they should leave the jokes to the satirists. If any Lib Dems want to re-train as mashup artists, they should wait until after the election, when they might have a bit more time on their hands. Interview by Harriet Gibsone |