Faro de Estrellas - Dec 22, 2015 Song: Faro de Estrellas Author: Jalisse Lyrics: Sandra von Borries Music: Fabio Ricci Song produced with the winning lyrics to the IYL Light Song Contest E8 Records ( IT44 N1500030) - ( Sandra Von Borries/ Fabio Ricci) Direction, editing and post production: Mattia Candian per Zero Studio ℗ a portrait of innocent, child-like joy. Happy choreography! Bright smiles! True unity and camaraderie! If you haven’t seen it yet, prepare to be enlightened: the official anthem for IMF’s Women’s World Handball Championship—happening in Denmark in December 2015—is out. Brace your eyeballs and watch it now: Unfortunately, it kind of seems like somebody did a quick Google search of every PG-rated inspirational stereotype, dumped ‘em all into a Google Doc, schlepped ‘em haphazardly together and decided to call the whole mess a ‘song’. Combined with the video, it makes for a hefty dose of cringe-worthy commercialization. On the one hand, you’ve got the lead singer/songwriter, Zindy, who (bless her) looks like she's fighting through sheer exhaustion just to yell at us about handball for three minutes. Her botoxed face is in a pained smile as she squeezes phrases like ‘celebration for every nation’ through her teeth, and a tube top (what is this, 2002?) printed with the Danish flag suffocates her poor torso as she feebly pumps her arms. You’ve also got the Danish Women’s Handball team acting as dancers, and you can just imagine how the conversation went down before that: ‘ Now, ladies, we know you don’t dance, but c’mon on now, just this once. Just try it. Do the worm, for goddsakes. Smile, dammit, smile!’ Props to the ladies for trying their best to look cheerful, but the result is kind of disheartening. Do genuine handball fans really need to be force-fed something this white-washed and over-the-top to get their stoke on? Is this really the state of handball in 2015—reduced to a bleak sport powered by nothing but commercial songwriting and poor excuses for excitement? We could rip into the video further, but that’s too easy. Instead.
Trigger warning: Graphic descriptions of sexual assault. Note: The opinions expressed in this post belong to Sezin Koehler alone and should not be attributed to anyone involved with Project Unbreakable. Robin Thicke’s summer hit Blurred Lines addresses what he considers to be sounds like a grey area between consensual sex and assault. The images in this post place the song into a real-life context. They are from Project Unbreakable, an online photo essay exhibit, and feature images of women and men holding signs with sentences that their rapist said before, during, or after their assault. Let’s begin. I know you want it. Thicke sings “ I know you want it,” a phrase that many sexual assault survivors report their rapists saying to justify their actions, as demonstrated over and over in the Project Unbreakable testimonials. You’re a good girl. Thicke further sings “ You’re a good girl,” suggesting that a good girl won’t show her reciprocal desire (if it exists). This becomes further proof in his mind that she wants sex: for good girls, silence is consent and “no” really means “yes.” Calling an adult a “good girl” in this context resonates with the the virgin/whore dichotomy. The implication in Blurred Lines is that because the woman is not responding to a man’s sexual advances, which of course are irresistible, she’s hiding her true sexual desire under a facade of disinterest. Thicke is singing about forcing a woman to perform both the good girl and bad girl roles in order to satisfy the man’s desires. Thicke and company, as all-knowing patriarchs, will give her what he knows she wants (sex even though she’s not actively consenting, and she may well be rejecting the man outright. Do it like it hurt, do it like it hurt, what you don’t like work? This lyric suggests that women are supposed to enjoy pain during sex or that pain is part of sex: The woman’s desires play.
Download Now