Obama's Star-Studded YouTube Music Video

Musicians and celebrities are some of the most popular subjects on YouTube, and a new video is tapping that star power to mobilize young voters for Barack Obama.

On Saturday, YouTuber user "WeCan08" uploaded "Yes We Can," a music video for a new Obama ballad by the Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am and director Jesse Dylan, Bob Dylan's son. The "song" was essentially written by Barack Obama, since the lyrics are adapted from his "Yes We Can" speech after the New Hampshire primary. That speech, of course, was inspired by Cesar Chavez's motto for a United Farm Workers hunger strike in 1972. Excerpts of Obama play throughout the video, with accompaniment from stars like John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Common, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Scarlett Johansson, Tatyana Ali and Nick Cannon. The video was first reported by ABC News, which interviewed the creators.

There's no telling if this video will catch on, but musicians have turned political speeches into popular songs before. The most famous example is Haile Selassie's 1963 address to the UN, which Bob Marley put to music in the song "War."

While the Obama campaign had no role in this video, it has run a sophisticated and effective YouTube strategy. It was the only campaign to record a YouTube address for this week's State of the Union, which has already drawn over 850,000 views and is one of the most popular clips in the world this week. The campaign also promotes a battery of ring tones, which splice one-liners from Obama with riffs of music. Young voters can get the items for free by providing the campaign with their cell phone number -- a life-line for organizing a demographic that is rarely listed in party databases.

The music video is below, followed by a CNN segment picking up on The Nation's prior reporting on Obama's YouTube's records.

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Comments (6)

1. well...looks like obama has indeed parted the red sea...

   he really has got the youth mobilised and voting...

   Posted by ibbleblibble at 02/02/2008 @ 2:25pm

2. it's already spreading like wildfire on facebook.

   Posted by martincaver at 02/02/2008 @ 3:23pm

3. This is what we are talking about. All of us who are supporting Senator Obama. We are not just one group or one label. We are the new generation of voters no matter what our age. We are contributing, registering, phoning, canvassing, caucusing and voting. We are not just hoping. We are working for a better world and a better country. And yes, we can!

   Posted by cycladic at 02/02/2008 @ 3:54pm

4. Mr Melber...have ya not heard of ...

   Posted by ANNAVILLA over/and/over @infinitum?

   here at TN blog????

   Posted by Mask at 02/02/2008 @ 7:23pm

5. Coltrane [youtube.com] wrote the song 'Alabama' in response to the bombing. He patterned his saxophone playing on Martin Luther King's funeral speech. Midway through the song, mirroring the point where King transforms his mourning into a statement of renewed determination for the struggle against racism, Elvin Jones's drumming rises from a whisper to a pounding rage. He wanted this crescendo to signify the rising of the civil rights movement.

   This afternoon we gather in the quiet of this sanctuary to pay our last tribute of respect to these beautiful children of God. They entered the stage of history just a few years ago, and in the brief years that they were privileged to act on this mortal stage, they played their parts exceedingly well. Now the curtain falls; they move through the exit; the drama of their earthly life comes to a close. They are now committed back to that eternity from which they came.

   These children-unoffending, innocent, and beautiful-were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.

   And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows. They have something to say to every politician [Audience:] (Yeah) who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats (Yeah) and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans. (Speak) They have something to say to every Negro (Yeah) who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.

   By Martin Luther King, Jr.

   18 September 1963 - Birmingham, Ala.

   Delivered at funeral service for three of the children - Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, and Cynthia Diane Wesley - killed in the bombing. A separate service was held for the fourth victim, Carole Robertson.

   Posted by frosty zoom at 02/02/2008 @ 8:51pm

6. Dear Frosty Zoom, Thank you for posting a link to that beautiful Coltrane performance. If every post could be as magical (and as simultaneously real) as yours was. It was, I will add, educational for us non-musical clods. Cheers,

   Posted by tortellini at 02/05/2008 @ 02:34am