will.i.am's Emmy Is Evidence of New Politics

The big Emmy news for me this week was Black Eyed Pea will.i.am's Emmy for the first ever Best New Approaches in Daytime Entertainment.

He won it, of course, for the viral YouTube video Yes We Can, a celebrity-packed performance of a song derived from Obama's now-classic speech. You can see it directly above or here.

The title of the new award is a bit ironic, since this is "daytime" entertainment because we all know that people are watching viral videos to waste time at work. It's interesting that a whole industry is developing around a generation of working adults who 1) have been developed as multitaskers, 2) expect their presumably corporate and computer-necessitating jobs to be so dull that they require light, and short, online entertainment to get them through the day, and 3) require not merely that politics be entertaining anymore, but that it be entertainment.

That's the true innovation of this video: that a speech whose political topicality and currency is still fresh should become fodder for remixing. It looks like Obama's campaign is more than just a campaign. It's the first hip hop presidential run: the first campaign that the currently seated rulers of pop culture feel belongs to them enough for them to reach in and mess with.

It also looks like the leading edge of a--possible--movement to reintegrate politics with all the other parts of public life that we all live. For far too long Americans have been treating politics like sports: an interesting pursuit that not everyone needs to follow or understand; a seperate topic category, one that doesn't affect or interest everybody.

If Obama's campaign can bring home to his supporting generations that public policy affects everyone where it most counts; if he can help us to develop a culture in which informed political opinion and politically-derived inspiration are the norm, then he will have changed the world without even having to become president.

Of course, I hope he becomes president, too.