Shiny happy people holding hands

So now that I am done with my series of blog posts about satire and movies, I thought it could be interesting to dedicate one blog post to the topic of satire and music. My favorite satirical song is REM's Shiny Happy People. Allegedly, the chorus of the song ("Shiny happy people holding hands") is taken from a Chinese propaganda poster. The song was released in 1991, two years after the Tiananmen Square  uprising (where the military killed and injured hundreds of students), and it is meant to satirize how the slogan or headline "Shiny happy people" concealed what was really going on in China at the time (and in other parts of the world as well). Another, perhaps more straightforward, example of a satirical song is "Weird Al" Yankovic's Eat It. The song is a parody of Michael Jackson's Beat It, but instead of warning a person of trying to be a bad ass and getting into a fight, Yankovic's version of the song warns people of trying to get away with not eating more food. Yankovic sings "I don't care if you're full / Just eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it / Open up your mouth and feed it / Have some more yogurt, have some more spam / It doesn't matter if it's fresh or canned / Just eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it / Don't you make me repeat it." This, if anything, is satire of our contemporary consumer society, where obesity has even become more common than malnourishment and starvation. This also ties in with what I wrote about in my last blog post, about similar satire in The Hunger Games. 

 

Above you can see the music video for REM's Shiny Happy People, and below "Weird Al" Yankovic's Eat It-video.