Disco Inferno

One of my favorite little bits of information that has come from reading the extended accounts of the post-election was this from Newsweek:

During one of the debate preps, the lights blew, flickering on and off like a strobe light from the 1970s disco craze. Obama stood behind the podium, quietly singing the song "Disco Inferno," last popular in the heyday of "Saturday Night Fever."

It's more than likely Barack Obama was humming, "Burn, Baby, Burn," the famous chorus from that song, itself a reshaping of the term used during the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965, itself stolen from the famous radio call by Magnificent Montague.

So we have an African-American candidate who is making a joke about disco, humming a song that itself has refigured a term twice from its original context in both political and popular culture terms. Perhaps in some deeper context, Barack Obama knew this relationship himself, but regardless it seems a remarkable journey for a phrase--from disc jockey to a future president humming it in a context that at once showed how long a cultural distance the country has traveled and how odd the twists of popular culture are.

--J.S.

Obama and People

The magazine that is. Bonnie Fuller, late of The Star, examines People's coverage of Barack Obama. 

Welcome to SemiObama

Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else.

--Umberto Eco

One of the most striking phenomena in contemporary American culture is the ascendancy of Barack Obama as a symbol. He stands for so much for so many people--hope, possibility, racial equality, vision, youth, energy, and change. In fact, he is, in many regards, no longer just a person; he is an icon. For a great number of people, especially young people, he stands for America's most positive values, while to some, he embodies America's most unattractive fears and anxieties. Regardless of how one feels about Mr. Obama, the junior senator from Illinois and the presumptive Democratic candidate for president of the United States, one cannot ignore his ubiquity. He is everywhere: on t-shirts, on YouTube, across magazine covers, on television, and in nearly every meaningful publication around the world. So saturated is our media with images of Obama, it is now, officially, approaching the level of high camp.

SemiObama is here to do something about that.

With a sense of humor and a sense of history, SemiObama seeks to
offer insightful, innovative, and informative readings of representations of Barack Obama in popular and visual culture. This publication is not concerned with parsing Mr. Obama's politics. Rather, we are interested in unpacking and decoding the visual texts of and about Obama. In other words, SemiObama is dedicated to offering semiotic readings of various Obamian texts as they make thier way into our culture and come to signify ideas, values, and beliefs beyond the candidate himself.

In addition to his observations about semiotics and signs, Umberto Eco also suggests that semiotics is the "discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie," so we will also look closely at visual Obama texts that are used, both by the idealistic and the idiotic, to mislead.

We hope you have as much fun reading SemiObama as we will have have reading (and writing about) the semiotics of Obama.

We can be reached at semiobama@gmail.com. Feel free to contact us with ideas, suggestions, and criticisms.