Red Army Orchestra + Beat It (3LYT)
August 15, 2010 9:13 AM   Subscribe

Beat It, as performed by the (Chinese) Red Army Orchestra. Or maybe you would prefer 4 Minutes, or a little bit of context.
posted by haltingproblemsolved (10 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- frimble



 
Your "context" link is totally down – maybe we already hit it too hard, maybe it's just down. Anyway, seems like I don't really need context - this seems to make sense. Heh.
posted by koeselitz at 9:26 AM on August 15, 2010




No Waving Flag?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 9:36 AM on August 15, 2010 [1 favorite]


*dead*
posted by liza at 9:47 AM on August 15, 2010


"This video contains content from Sony Music Entertainment, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds." - wth?
posted by dabitch at 9:54 AM on August 15, 2010


I got that same error message, only in German. Here's another copy of the Beat It video, without the regional protection.
posted by _Lasar at 11:07 AM on August 15, 2010


I'd rather party hard in pyonyang.
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 11:35 AM on August 15, 2010 [3 favorites]


I'm sulking because I posted the main video in a MeTa comment ages (OK, days) ago. Well, not really, but I think the Tudou video host link there is still up if folks are interested, though not sure how fast it will be outside the Motherland.
posted by Abiezer at 12:00 PM on August 15, 2010


And a bonus potted bio of one of the 1920s founders of the Red Army, Xiao Ke, who died only two years ago after one hell of a life.
posted by Abiezer at 12:18 PM on August 15, 2010


It's interesting to observe the cycle of memes on the Chinese Internet. The first round of the Red Army one (it uses visuals from the "Long March Suite," 1976 recording, I believe) seems to have begun in early 2009 with a mash-up of Jay Chou's "Ninja," whose effect was not hurt by the watermark of the unlicensed video converter used by the author (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBQvfu0T8Pc ). And even that video has a credit line dating it to sometime in 2007, so the basic idea was around for quite some time before it exploded into the public consciousness. Other mash-ups of varying qualities have been produced since then, Downfall-style.

That was before the meteoric rise of the portal-affiliated microblogs (Sina, Sohu, Netease), and I suspect that the rapid flow of content encouraged by the ease of posting (and reposting) photos and videos on these services is a driving force behind the circulation of the latest memes, and of the revival of earlier ones.
posted by zhwj at 7:46 PM on August 15, 2010


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