"Mildly 'Sticking It To The Man' " OR "Monday's Fun With Sen. Biden (Mr. RAVE Act)"

First to bring you up to speed...

I got tasked about two weeks ago with creating a "Wing Mission Video" for Dover AFB. Apparently our new Wing Commander was stationed at Charleston AFB before coming here, and they kept one of these videos on file to show to VIP's, newcomers to base, & state/local leaders at briefings.

Since we don't have any real "video" footage from Dover, and they weren't willing to buy me a video camera to run around with for a few weeks (boooo!), I told them that I could do a “glorified PowerPoint presentation”, using Windows Movie Maker and including photos from base spliced together (with pans & zooms) along with some stock video clips of C-5's and Night Vision Goggle stuff.

They said that was what they had in mind anyway, so I went to work gathering photos. At the first meeting I asked if there were any musical requests, but I was just told to make it tasteful (i.e. no gangsta rap or death metal). Other than that, the Wing Commander told me I could essentially use whatever songs I wanted.

Well, after foraging through my music collection (who knew I had so many electronica MP3's?!) I settled on a 6 minute medley of clips from the following songs:

Underworld - Dark & Long
Leftfield - Song of Life
Orbital - Lush
Underworld - Pearl's Girl
Sasha - Xpander
Underworld - Two Months Off
Underworld - Cowgirl

Aside from the fact I'm apparently on a huge Underworld kick this week, it's obviously not your typical background music for military-related events/slideshows/videos/whatever. But I showed our Wing Commander a draft of the video earlier this week, and the only suggestions he had were for photo tweaks & additions. He said the music was fine with him, and rather "upbeat".

At the end of the meeting, he told me that the first official showing of the video would be at a meeting next week downtown in Dover, where all the state & local big shots will be in attendance...to include, that's right, Mr. RAVE Act himself, Senator Joseph Biden. For those of you who may have forgotten, check out this link from EMDEF.

Now I'm not disillusioned: I know the RAVE Act was not legislation proposed out of Sen. Biden's disdain for electronica. But I'm going out a limb here, and I'd say maybe, just maybe, that we're not going to find any Ministry of Sound albums in his car CD changer. And by the witty name of his now-defunct bill, I'd say that in his mind, drug use & raves are inextricably linked.

So maybe it's just a passive-aggressive streak in me, but I'll take some amount of pleasure in pushing the play button in Windows Media Player on Monday morning and treating the most honorable senator from Delaware to 5 minutes and 52 seconds of "RAVE music" set to military photos. :-)