Pussy Riot Dedicates Its New Music Video About Female Private Parts to Trump. By Ishaan Tharoor.

Pussy Riot dedicates its new music video about female private parts to Trump. By Ishaan Tharoor. Washington Post, October 26, 2016.

Pussy Riot celebrate the vagina in lyrical riposte to Trump. By Luke Harding. The Guardian, October 25, 2016.





Tharoor:

Russian punk band Pussy Riot has come a long way since it first entered the global imagination four years ago. In February 2012, five of its members performed a rebellious stunt at Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior that eventually landed two of them in prison and turned the group into the unlikely poster child for dissent in President Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Now, its most recognizable members are global celebrities. Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina appeared on an episode of Netflix’s “House of Cards” last year. Alyokhina is touring the world with a theater company. And Tolokonnikova just put out a music video that’s being framed as an intervention into the U.S. presidential election campaign.

“Straight Outta Vagina,” which you can watch above, was shot earlier this year in Los Angeles. It stars Tolokonnikova in white clerical robes and trademark pastel ski mask singing in English about the power of the vagina.

The lyrics can get confusing — “Vagina is gonna win the race,” Tolokonnikova sings. “Vagina gonna play in space.” — including the chorus: “Don’t play stupid, don’t play dumb, vagina’s where you’re really from.” There's also a scene in which a young girl in a Pussy Riot mask lip-syncs a rap verse in a men’s bathroom.

In an interview with the Guardian, Tolokonnikova explained that she wanted to “write a song that celebrates” the female anatomy. She also considered it a riposte to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, whose comments about women — notably a remark that he “grabs them by the p----” — have shadowed the election campaign.

“This song could be considered an answer to Trump,” she told the Guardian. “But I believe the idea of powerful female sexuality is much bigger than any populist megalomaniac man … Vagina is bigger than Trump.”

She went on to denounce Trump’s reportedly sympathetic relationship with Putin and his embrace of an avowedly tough, perhaps chauvinistic, political style. “Politicians are praising ‘strong leadership,’” she said. “Trump openly supports the authoritarian methods of Vladimir Putin. And it’s scary. It’s not the world in which I want to live.”

Michael Moore: A Trump Victory Would Be “the Biggest ‘F**k You’ Recorded In Human History.”

Michael Moore: A Trump Victory Would Be “the Biggest ‘F**k You’ Recorded In Human History.” By Tim Haines. Video and transcript. Real Clear Politics, October 26, 2016. YouTube.

See also: Salon.

RCP Transcript:

MICHAEL MOORE: I know a lot of people in Michigan that are planning to vote for Trump and they don’t necessarily like him that much, and they don’t necessarily agree with him. They’re not racist or rednecks, they’re actually pretty decent people, and so after talking to a number of them I wanted to write this:

Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of Ford Motor executives and said, “if you close these factories as you're planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico, I’m going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody's going to buy them.”

It was an amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything like that to these executives, and it was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – the “Brexit” states.

You live here in Ohio, you know what I’m talking about. Whether Trump means it or not, is kind of irrelevant because he’s saying the things to people who are hurting, and that’s why every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves Trump. He is the human Molotov cocktail that they’ve been waiting for. The human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.

And on November 8, Election Day, although they lost their jobs, although they’ve been foreclosed on by the bank, and next came the divorce and now the wife and kids are gone, the car’s been repoed, they haven’t had a real vacation in years, they’re stuck with the shitty Obamacare Bronze Plan where you can’t even get a fucking Percocet. They’ve essentially lost everything they had, except one thing – the one thing that doesn’t cost them a cent, and is guaranteed to them by the American Constitution: the right to vote.

They might be penniless, they might be homeless, they might be f**ked over and f**ked up, it doesn’t matter, because it’s equalized on that day – a millionaire has the same number of votes as the person without a job: one.

And there’s more of the former middle class than there are in the millionaire class.

So on November 8, the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot, close the curtain, and take that lever or felt pen or touchscreen and put a big fucking X in the box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined their lives: Donald J. Trump.

They see that the elite who ruined their lives hate Trump. Corporate America hates Trump. Wall Street hates Trump. The career politicians hate Trump. The media hates Trump, after they loved him and created him, and now hate.

Thank you media: the enemy of my enemy is who I’m voting for on November 8.

Yes, on November 8, you Joe Blow, Steve Blow, Bob Blow, Billy Blow, all the Blows get to go and blow up the whole goddamn system because it’s your right. Trump’s election is going to be the biggest f**k ever recorded in human history and it will feel good.