About the video's soundtrack
Sometimes I shoot videos for the newspaper's Website. If I can, I like to set some of the images to background music. It must be all that time I wasted watching Mtv as a kid.
One of my requirements, though, is that it has to be music that's actually playing at the scene I'm recording. My background as a journalist just makes me wary of anything that smacks of creating conditions, rather than simply conveying them..
The reason I mention this is because I wanted to make sure nobody construes the background music in that video of the Hillary Clinton rally as some kind of editorial comment on my part.
Here's what happened. I was outside The Forum in Harrisburg, where the Hillary Clinton rally was taking place, watching as local Democratic Chairman Mike Johnson and his wife, Ellen, tried to get in. (More on that presently.)
Speakers outside the building were playing the theme from "Rocky" -- perhaps inevitable for a political campaign, but agonizingly cheesy nevertheless.
As I was walking past one of the speakers, it started playing the song "Salt of the Earth" by the Rolling Stones. I love that song! It seemed really appropriate for the rally, too. I was impressed.
I got out my camera, stood next to one of the speakers and recorded some of the song. When I was editing the video, I used it as a backdrop for some general footage of the rally. Later, I realized I had used a rather interesting portion of the song. It's when the lyrics are as follows:
Spare a thought for the stay-at-home voter
His empty eyes gaze at strange beauty shows
And a parade of the gray suited grafters
A choice of cancer or polio
And when I look in the faceless crowd
A swirling mass of grays and
Black and white
They don't look real to me
Or don't they look so strange
By the "choice of cancer or polio," I guess we can assume the Clinton people are referring to the McCain and Obama campaigns.
