Every year the Army puts on a U.S. Army Soldier Show where they get regular soldiers to sing and dance to familiar songs most of us know (not original songs), and they tour the country putting on this show. It’s sort of what I imagine the American Idol tour is like.
About six or eight years ago, the US Army Soldier Show was awesome and we loved it. We left still singing the songs and wishing they sold CDs so we could continue to listen to them. It was really, really good.
It’s gone down since then and we still attend (it’s free) but it just hasn’t been very good for several years. This year I think was the worst ever. There was no cohesive theme, and most of the songs they sang were at least twenty years old. In other years, they would sing a lot of current top 40 songs and so it was fun and felt contemporary. Not this year. This year I could have been watching the soldier show from 1990.
The theme this year was “random themes” apparently, as they started out with an Irving Berlin theme and a mini documentary about his life. Um, okay. But then abruptly they changed to a random mix of “classic” songs like: Born in the USA, Don’t Stop Believing, Walking on Sunshine, & Van Halen’s Jump.
Suddenly they switched to a Michael Jackson tribute and a whole slew of songs by Jackson 5 or Michael Jackson. I never was a huge Jacko fan, and I’m more sick of him now than when he was alive, so I was disappointed in that.
Then they abruptly changed to a “New York” theme, and sang the song New York, New York twice, and then totally butchered Empire State of Mind.
They also played a random Spanish song, and then a religious song, lest the Christians cry “persecution” like they always do, the fucking crybabies, while refusing to give other religions equal air time. And then they did a handful of country songs I hadn’t heard of (with the exception of Sweet Home Alabama) and then they did the Army song and left.
The choreography this year looked as if it was done by an 8th grader. I swear I’ve never seen such poor choreography in my life. They would stomp their feet and wave their elbows in the air a lot like they were doing a chicken dance, and occasionally throw one arm out to the side and then the other. I could probably do better choreography. It was painful to watch so I actually stopped watching and played with my iPod Touch and just listened. It was that painful to watch!
The singing wasn’t great, either. I didn’t hear one song and think, “Wow, that singer needs to be recording albums!” One guy played the piano and did a great job, but that was the only performance that impressed me. Did I mention how badly they butchered Empire State of Mind?
Meanwhile, the Republicans would have hated the show because there were more non-white performers than white performers, and yet I’d say it was less racially diverse than it has been other years. Some years they would have Asians or Pacific Islanders or Native Americans on the cast; one year they had a woman who was from Africa and had moved to the US and joined our Army on her path to citizenship. This year they had more blacks on the cast than all other races combined, although that was easy since they only had blacks, whites and one lone Latino. While I love to see a racially diverse cast, and I hate when reality shows are almost entirely white with one or two “token” minorities, this did feel a little odd, since this racial make-up doesn’t reflect the US or the Army demographic make-up, either. (The Soldier Show had it’s “token” – the token Latino!) It’s not even that I wanted to see more white people, but I would have loved to have seen more of a racial mix or at least something that reflected Army demographics.
I first noticed this issue when, while flipping through the program ahead of time, Hubby joked that all the women had “stupid” names* (remember, my husband’s black before you get mad) and that black women sure do name their kids stupid names. That was when we noticed that the women were almost entirely made up of black women (with “stupid” (Hubby’s word, not mine. I plead the fifth on this) names). Then, even if you hadn’t looked at the program, it was quite obvious while watching the show that the female singers were, with little exception, black.
Consider this: While the Army is only about 13% female, women made up 50% of the cast. How is that fair, that women are far more likely to get this gig than men are? And while white women and black women are almost equal in the Army, the soldier show was almost entirely black females, which really seemed skewed.
Among men, the army is about 60% white and 20% black, they were about 50-50 white men to black men in the show.
I know I’m nitpicking, and it’s “racist” to even notice this, let alone mention it, but the casting did feel very skewed. That’s all I’m saying. I might not even be complaining if they’d all been great singers – then at least one could say they picked the best singers, regardless of demographics. But they weren’t good singers. I don’t know, maybe no one else applied so they took who they could get and I should shut up now.
Maybe what I’m really annoyed about is that 20 minutes of Michael Jackson songs. The man was a mentally ill, drug-addicted, child molester who hated his own race so much that he changed his skin color and he bought white children to raise as his own because he didn’t want black children, and yet black people think he’s some huge hero to them that they have to pay a tribute to. (As if they wouldn’t have a shit fit if some white star did the same (but opposite) thing!) I think black people are as blind about Jacko as white folks are about the Republican agenda. It makes me ill. And maybe if the cast hadn’t been 60% black, they wouldn’t have wasted so much time sucking Jacko’s dead dick in this show.
I guess I’ve said enough.
*This is Hubby’s pet peeve. He talks about the famous African-American women who were pioneers and they were never named “Shaniqua” or “Kapricia” etc. In fact, he had this whole theory is that if you give your daughter a “ghetto” name, that it impacts on her prospects, not only becuase someone might not want to hire a “Shaniqua” but that somehow psychologically giving her such a name keeps her from having higher ambitions in life. Thus she’s more likely to make bad choices that will trap her in her “poor” world with other people who have names like her. I’m not sure I’m explaining it right, but there you have it.
Also: the black men on the cast all had “normal” names.
