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Pop Stars, Popes, Protests & Propaganda
37 Plays2 months ago
On our very first episode on Notes App Correspondents, we take on Coachella, global unrest, TikTok militarism, film theory, and the Vatican (and yes, they do all belong in the same conversation!)
Charlie gets into:
- Sabrina Carpenter and Justin Bieber at Coachella — spectacle and the lack thereof
- Ireland’s fuel protests and motorway shutdowns — and why Britain’s barely talking about it
- The Navy SEAL TikTok trend — meme-ified militarism?!
Meanwhile, Clementine breaks down:
- Male gaze vs female gaze — and how Sabrina complicates both
- The Trump-Leo showdown — and what it says about where power sits in 2026
If you liked the show, please do consider rating, reviewing, subscribing, and sharing - as it helps others find the show :-)
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Transcript
Coachella Critiques: Sabrina vs. Justin
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to Notes App Correspondence, a podcast by two journalists who take on culture and current affairs. I want to talk about Coachella. So obviously over the weekend we saw two undeniably huge stars in different ways, um both headline Coachella. So we have Sabrina, we love And we have Justin Bieber, who might be a bit more controversial, but I'm not afraid to admit that I am an old school Belieber, so I'm just going to put that out there now.
00:00:33
Speaker
We have very different shows, obviously. Sabrina Carpenter, as we expect, did an incredible production with her show. So much high-level production, very theatrical, different sets, different stages, backup dancers, different outfits, incredible outfits.
00:00:52
Speaker
great choreography, the whole thing, very maximalist, loved it. um And I, it was, I think it's fair to say, what people would have expected from her. On the other hand, Justin Bieber, um and if you were being generous with how you described his performance, you might use words like stripped back and minimal and intimate. If you weren't being so generous, I guess there are other words you could use. um
00:01:24
Speaker
Like lazy, you know, it's it's him and his MacBook against the world. i think it's worth acknowledging that they both got criticism, which is really interesting to me because, you know, on the one hand, you have this hugely...
00:01:37
Speaker
like highly produced show and on the other hand you have this let's you know let's call it minimal um that feels like a neutral term you have a minimal show and that for good reason received criticism at a payment of reportedly 10 million dollars there's there's some fair criticism to be done there with with that stage set up but it's interesting to see s sabrina get criticism too and i think the type of criticism she received
00:02:08
Speaker
with, you know, allegations of the show being more for TV and not for
Cultural Backlash: A Double Standard?
00:02:13
Speaker
the live audience. And then also the criticism around a fan interaction that she had, which was if people didn't see a fan, participated in like their kind of cultural celebration, which is called a Zagruta. And it was a type of cheering. And Sabrina perhaps didn't react the best way to that. What was her reaction?
00:02:36
Speaker
she said that well she asked them what they were doing and then when they explained they explained that it was their culture and she looked quite put off and she said she didn't like it which isn' isn't ideal she has since apologized it must be said but I think that the backlash over that and I'm going go out on a limb here and say this without meaning to diminish the kind of you know, cultural offences that were made perhaps, but um it feels like people were were perhaps very, very quick to jump on any reason to undermine what was undoubtedly an amazing performance and an amazing set.
00:03:15
Speaker
So I think that when you view that in contrast to Justin Bieber's set, it feels still quite rooted in in a in a rather stark double standard there, I would say. Sabrina's show had so many backup dancers. The set was...
00:03:34
Speaker
maximalist to Justin Bieber's minimalist. It was highly stylized in in that beautiful 50s nostalgic way that she does.
Sabrina's Journey: Child Star to Pop Icon
00:03:46
Speaker
um And she also performed her socks off. like Like she pulled out all the stops for this. And I think somewhere i I read that she'd spent seven months preparing for this set, whereas it feels like Justin Bieber, he could have done that. He probably does that for Hayley that and that exact set with with that same outfit and that same MacBook in their kitchen. Yeah, yeah, you know, and and in that way, perhaps it's intimate. But um no, you're absolutely right. And I think you have Sabrina bringing out all the stops, not just as you say, like backup dancers, crazy sets, crazy outfits, crazy production. Her stage presence was off the charts, as it always is.
00:04:32
Speaker
She had Susan Sarandon, she had Will Ferrell, it's not really comparable I think. But it is yeah it is it it was an interesting moment to watch both of them back to back is um is quite stark I think. But talk to me more about Sabrina, what did you make of the show, what do you make of her?
00:04:52
Speaker
Well, i I really enjoyed the show. i found the proud yodeling, i thought that was kind of an awkward and uncomfortable denouement bear witness to. But I wouldn't like to say that that detracted me from enjoying the performance and the the sheer total theater and spectacle it was. I thought she looked amazing, she sounded amazing.
00:05:18
Speaker
The songs, she's so good at them. She's so good at the songs. She's the perfect pop star, really, when you think about it. As in the, art she's she's like the archetypal pop star. yeah You know, perfect, I i suppose it's too subjective for what I'm trying to say here. But when you think of old fashioned notions of the pop star,
00:05:40
Speaker
That's her. She sings, dances. She's tiny. She's blonde. She looks the part. She dresses the part. She is the part.
00:05:51
Speaker
I did enjoy the show and it was nice to see a culmination of all the hard work that I know she's put in for for years since she was a child star. this yeah This felt like a culmination of that film.
Feminist Film Theory: Who's Watching Sabrina?
00:06:04
Speaker
yeah What I have been really interested in seeing over the past few months when it comes to discourse around Sabrina Carpenter is the question of does s Sabrina Carpenter pander to the male gaze or is she an expression of the female gaze?
00:06:23
Speaker
That's been a really interesting question. question and I've heard arguments on both sides. the ah the the The internet can't seem to decide if she is one or the other. So I guess it would be helpful to take stock of what we mean when we talk about the male gaze and the female gaze. The male gaze was a term or is a term coined in 1975 by a British feminist film critic called Laura Mulvey.
00:06:50
Speaker
She argued that classical Hollywood cinema objectifies women by filming them through a heterosexual, heteronormative, patriarchal lens. And she posited that film adopted a masculine perspective inherently, and and it turned women into sexualized spectacles rather than active narrative drivers and reflections of real people and real women. So as well as the script and characterization in cinema, the male gaze also operated through, or it still operates, sorry, through the mechanics of filmmaking itself. And that includes everything from the camera framing to movement to lighting and all of these
00:07:36
Speaker
come together to present the female body as something ultimately to be consumed. um And we as audiences are not absolved either, since we are encouraged and guided to see Through the eyes of the male gaze, we're also taking part in that act of lustful looking. Oftentimes we have been arguably complicit as onlookers.
00:08:04
Speaker
We have too enjoyed this voyeuristic act of objectification and and we've adopted the desire of the male protagonists and the male filmmakers as we identify with their perspective.
00:08:20
Speaker
Sorry. In time, the concept of the male gaze evolved to explore the female gaze, and this was a broad attempt to rework that dynamic by centering women's subjectivity and interiority.
00:08:35
Speaker
As a result, we or the female gaze moved away from the things that have typically been associated with male desire of women and more towards women's thoughts and feelings. So why has there been debate about which one Sabrina Carpenter
Sabrina's Complex Artistic Narrative
00:08:52
Speaker
occupies? On the one hand, her recent music is firmly rooted in a female point of view, in Please, Please, Please.
00:09:02
Speaker
She plays the exhausted girlfriend preemptively begging a man not to embarrass her. That's a very specific gendered frustration. um Not saying that women can't embarrass men as well, but in the way that she was singing it, you know, it's ladies, which one of us haven't felt that, right?
00:09:19
Speaker
Elsewhere, you know, she sings, she calls out man children and she generally, more generally, she speaks to a lot of things that many women can recognize.
00:09:32
Speaker
On the flip side to that, visually, she leans very heavily into that specific, tightly coded aesthetic of the 1950s, that hyper feminine, old Hollywood aesthetic that she's come to be known for.
00:09:45
Speaker
You know, we're talking the the big platinum curls, the the tightly corseted silhouettes, the coquettish posing, the overt sexualization of herself, all of which have historically been tied to the male gaze and male standards of desire and lust.
00:10:08
Speaker
um And we we certainly saw her moments of this staged sexual submission when she posed for ah latest album cover, A Man's Best Friend.
00:10:20
Speaker
She was on all fours like a dog and her hair was being pulled by a man. And people were really angry about that. I don't know if you remembered all of that kicking off on TikTok, but it seemed it did seem visually to set women back a ah long a long way. Yeah, I think that cover and of itself was such an interesting moment. It just was so divisive, I think, even amongst women. the biggest Sabrina fans. And it was difficult to look at, i think. But I think it could be argued that that's the point. I would have found the argument, does s Sabrina Carpenter occupy the male gaze or the female gaze, easier
Liberation vs. Objectification: Sabrina's Image
00:11:04
Speaker
to answer up until that point, I think.
00:11:08
Speaker
I think. But anyway, all of this kind of derogatory visual language has historically been designed to to render women desirable to men, consumable to men. And it feels like we haven't progressed far enough from men being able to call women the B word freely and that being socially acceptable. It doesn't feel like we've moved on far enough for for that to come back and be ironic in the way that she was flaunting it. But I think that's, well, that's just my opinion and I'm completely open to, to yeah, whatever anybody else says. I mean, what what do you think about that?
00:11:50
Speaker
think I think find it tricky. with her specifically and I'm not sure why because I feel like she for some reason in my mind does a very very good job of being very stereotypically gorgeous what you know very kind of engaging in i suppose things that would typically be male gaze coded as it were you know so dancing around on stage in lingerie
00:12:22
Speaker
that album cover in particular ah um and you know I think several kind of magazine covers as well I think the Rolling Stones cover was I mean a lot of the things that she does and wears are incredibly provocative and incredibly you could say aimed at male approval or male attention and then I think it's really interesting that for some reason i don't I'm not quite sure if I can pinpoint how but it still somehow seems as though she manages to not be that and to also be very female gaze coded and I don't know if that's because of her because she's obviously absolutely stunning and appeals to to men in the way that she dresses and looks for sure but her personality is so anti-men at times that um I think that really helps her case. this so there There is this confusing juxtaposition. Subjectively, she's speaking as a woman to women.
00:13:31
Speaker
And when you look at her lyric, it feels like she's addressing us as a gender, as a sex and only us. But visually, she's drawing on imagery that was originally constructed for men and their very, very narrow definition of beauty. so... so So with that in mind, is she reclaiming or subverting those tropes knowingly, or is the denigrating imagery and messaging reinforcing them?
00:14:01
Speaker
you know i think I think the answer is both, and I don't think that's accidental. She had a huge rebrand into this gorgeous blonde bombshell that was facilitated by a big team behind her and nothing is ever, a or nothing is never not deliberate to that extent in Hollywood.
00:14:23
Speaker
She's clearly very aware. I mean, she's she's clearly an intelligent woman. She knows what she's doing. She's aware of the history she's drawing on and she leans into it.
00:14:34
Speaker
She leans into it to the point of exaggeration and there's there's performance in that, but at the same time, that imagery still circulates in a patriarchal commercial system that rewards exactly those tropes. And she knows that. So even if she's subverting them, she's also benefiting from them.
00:14:55
Speaker
in a way that only women that look exactly like she can, can benefit and arguably reinforcing those tropes in that process. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. i think, I mean, look, I think it's a very clever strategy. um It's,
00:15:14
Speaker
it's very, it's incredibly clever and an incredibly, I imagine a very difficult tightrop tightrope to walk, to appeal to both, to to basically everyone in that way. um i think if we want to give her a little more credit for kind of making clear, I suppose, where she stands, i think we could draw on, you know, her VMA performance, which yes, visually she's,
00:15:44
Speaker
She's in skimpy clothing and, you know, she looks great as she always does. But she also brings out, you know, like activists and drag queens and she has signs that talk about trans rights and things like that. So I think there is a very specific type of male audience that that it is clear that it's not for.
00:16:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's such a good point. That's the point. um I totally agree with you. so So in terms of the question, when we think about the question, which one do you think she occupies?
Gendered Meta Gaze: Sabrina's Dual Performance
00:16:17
Speaker
I actually think now we are in 2026 and society's understanding and society's digestion of gender means there's now room for another gaze or another label for a gaze. And I would call it perhaps the the gendered meta gaze or a gendered reflexive gaze, by which I mean a double performance of liberation and objectification. She's both inhabiting the role and critiquing it at the same time.
00:16:49
Speaker
She's the object of the gaze, but also the one staging it. And we as the audience are in on it. We we are. We recognize the references like she does and its sexual tropes. And we also recognize the irony and the the silliness that she presents in the lyrics. um And that awareness is baked into our appeal, I suppose, of her that also feels like a very it feels very specific to this moment especially Gen z who instead of ever rejecting problematic systems outright it seems there's a tendency to engage with problematic systems through irony to play with them and to wink at the audience in doing so
00:17:38
Speaker
so Male gaze or female gaze, I would say she exists. She occupies gendered meta gaze.
00:17:50
Speaker
She knows what she's doing. She's doing it anyway. And she's doing it with a smug. It's often said that everyone in the world is connected in some way via six degrees of separation. And I'm thinking Sabrina Carpenter was connected to Barry from Saltburn who is connected to the nation of Ireland, which thus means I'm going to segue s Sabrina Carpenter into some other headlines that we've been thinking about this week about Ireland.
00:18:20
Speaker
Charlie, take it away. here i loved that. Well, thank you, Clem. I don't think, I think on Sabrina's 2026 bingo card I don't think being spoken about in relation to the news that we're seeing come out of Ireland at the moment would have been on there but alas it should have been so yeah we've been thinking and talking a lot about Ireland in the last week I think we've seen well we have seen a lot of news come out of Ireland this week but I think only through
00:19:00
Speaker
quite a lot of effort to find out what's happening.
Ireland's Protests: Media Silence
00:19:03
Speaker
And I think it's really alarming that There seems to have been barely any media coverage or registering of this in any kind of, not just the UK, but across the EU or anywhere else in the world, um which is really interesting to me. So for anyone who's not super familiar with what's been happening, which would not be surprising because there's been very little coverage of it, there have been a series of protests. So on Tuesday, there were initiated protests a series of convoy-style protests which shut down motorways all across Ireland and Northern Ireland, um across Tipperary, Limerick, Cork, Galway, Dublin and a bunch of other places and, you know, we saw images of passengers getting out cars and dragging their luggage across the motorway.
00:19:53
Speaker
Those images went viral and there was very little explanation why online and on social media. So what had happened in the run-up to that is the conflict between the US, Israel and Iran escalated, as we all know, and pushed into the Strait of Hormuz, which is an incredibly important water passageway that is responsible for, you know, carrying some of the world's largest crude oil tankers because it's super, super deep. And when that wasn't able to be used in its normal way, global fuel prices have obviously soared. We've seen that with
00:20:30
Speaker
flight disruptions and flight delays and you know fuel prices everywhere going up but especially so in Ireland and that has hit the people that use heavy machinery on a daily basis obviously the most, that the people that use diesel the most.
00:20:47
Speaker
So that is you know the farmers, the haulers, the fishermen and the contractors mainly. What had happened in light of virtually no response from the Irish authorities or no kind of help or guidance as to as to when this is going to end is essentially those convoy-style protests that I mentioned and this kind of blockading of fuel depots and ports. So what happened after that is that by day three, the army was deployed to remove those vehicles. The Irish justice minister warned that any damage during removal wouldn't be compensated and you had to remove your vehicle immediately. We saw kind of armoured vehicles on the roads, which led to the assumption kind of
00:21:30
Speaker
relatively widespread assumption that the army had rolled in to take care of these protests. It was only clarified later by the defense force that that was actually a completely different, unrelated matter and they were on their way to a UN training mission, which feels like convenient timing. But I think the fact that people instantly believed that tanks were rolling through Ireland and and were deployed to put these protests to rest, shall we say, says something about like the anxiety currently that's being felt nationally and the kind of distrust simmering there. I think the question that I wanted to ask, and it would be so interesting to get your take on this as well, and I think from our perspective and in our line of work is...
00:22:14
Speaker
why this hasn't been deemed newsworthy internationally and when would it be if not now? I was just about to ask you the same question. Why has this been registered? I suppose in this country in particular, we have a very insular, we have a very insular perspective. And I don't think, I don't really think this country as a whole thinks about Ireland at all.
00:22:39
Speaker
Or if they do, it's very little and it's on St. Patrick's Day when there is Guinness. Outside of that, there has been very little evidence to me, at least in the conversations that I have had, that British people don't know what's going on.
00:22:55
Speaker
Firstly, they don't know what has gone on. And I'm talking hundreds and hundreds of years. They probably couldn't tell you who Oliver Cromwell. Well, they probably could tell you who Oliver Cromwell was, but they couldn't tell you why he was so why his actions were so consequential to the people of Ireland. And I don't think it's been centuries.
00:23:18
Speaker
And I don't think we as a nation have ever really got over that, that kind of negligence. And I think British people are so different to Ireland. It sounds harsh. but they're indifferent unless it benefits them with Guinness and St Patrick's Day.
00:23:34
Speaker
Yeah, you're absolutely right. Yeah, it would mean they have they would have to reconcile their gory past, and people don't want to do that. They're not jumping to do that. No, you are absolutely right. I think the kind of British Empire as a whole, it's it's not just Ireland that suffers from that fate um of us ignoring our past. It's... pretty much everywhere. um It's just interesting to, it's interesting when it's so close to home, right? And it's, you know, it should be really important to us. And it's so, with your point around kind of people partaking when it's convenient for them. And Patrick's Day is obviously a huge thing here and it's a huge thing in London. And, um,
00:24:18
Speaker
and elsewhere in the world. I mean, if you think about like Boston and the St. Patrick's parade and things like that. um And it's obviously very easy to partake when it's a celebration, but um it seems that people, yeah, are very quick to shy away from from any other kind of discussion. um i mean, if you think about, gosh, I think you must be familiar with this too. And um the amount of English people, especially that will claim any kind of Irish heritage, no matter how distant It's so painful and it's so embarrassing and oh gosh it's just so phony isn't it people people need to really give that a rest and and it would be it would be it would still be nauseating but it would be less so if they weren't so ignorant and
00:25:11
Speaker
about the history of relations there, the and the history of international relations between Great Britain and Ireland. know who bats for Ireland? The Pope. Of course, the
Pope Leo vs. Trump: Moral Tensions
00:25:26
Speaker
Pope. Pope Leo. Pope leo almost one year into his job as Pope Leo, he has made headline after headline yeah with his disagreement with the Trump administration this is a news story that I have found very interesting to watch as it develops yeah so what enlightened me because I'm not sure i'm I'm fully kind of cognizant with this so what is the tell me more about the disagreement and and how it started
00:26:00
Speaker
so this is a So this is a continuation of a long running tension between the Trump administration and the Catholic Church that actually began with Pope Francis before Pope Leo. So back in 2016, Pope Francis criticized Trump's border wall plans saying that building walls instead of bridges was not Christian.
00:26:23
Speaker
Trump then responded by calling it disgraceful that a religious leader would question his faith. And that really set the ensuing tone, the Vatican framing Trump's policies as moral issues and Trump framing back the Vatican as overstepping into politics. Right. That tension has since carried through immigration and climate concerns, but it's now becoming...
00:26:50
Speaker
lot more acute under Pope Leo. The real trigger this month was the war with Iran. Pope Leo condemned the war and warning against using religion to justify violence.
00:27:02
Speaker
Trump responded almost immediately attacking him publicly on social media, calling him weak on crime and bad on foreign policy. He then, this is where it gets really bizarre, but I suppose not so bizarre that we should be shocked in this age of ai But Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ-like figure. He looks like he's dressed like Jesus, that the lighting in the shot is like is like an old painting of with religious allegory. It's very strange, but it did alienate some of his staunchly Christian following, incidentally. But now it's gone even further.
00:27:44
Speaker
Speaking in Cameroon, Pope Leo said the world had been ravaged by a handful of tyrants and he condemned leaders who spend billions on war while neglecting people. But it's not just Trump, I should say, and I do mean the Trump administration.
00:28:00
Speaker
J.D. Vance, who has converted to Catholicism in his adulthood, he escalated it by trying to draw the boundaries of what the church is allowed to say. He argued that the Pope should stay out of politics and he should be, well, he argued that the Pope should be really careful when talking about theology. If the Pope isn't qualified to talk about theology, I really don't know who is. Pope Leo earned a doctorate in canon law. So if anybody is qualified to speak on this, i don't know why it wouldn't be him.
00:28:37
Speaker
um If J.D. Vance, in his few years of Catholicism, wants to explain that further, he can he can reach me on email or WhatsApp because I'd love to hear it.
00:28:47
Speaker
well I'm very confused but anyway so when he says you know stay in your lane Leo he's really what he's really doing is trying to define the lane and and you know rein in what the church is allowed to speak on it's I mean it's just bizarre you know it it is an attempt to limit the church's authority at a time where The Catholic Church is seeing a record number of people joining and converting, much like J.D. Barnes, I suppose. really is It's undergoing a huge surge in popularity.
00:29:23
Speaker
um and you know yeah An attempt to limit the church's authority in public life, right as Leo is using that authority more prominently. and And you can see the fallout already.
00:29:36
Speaker
Christian leaders, Catholic and non-Catholic, have come out defending the Pope's right to speak on war and morality. I know our new Archbishop of Canterbury, she spoke out, or she she backed Pope Leo's comments and...
00:29:53
Speaker
Yeah, so Vance is actually, in giving us his unsolicited, well, in giving us his two cents, he's actually widened gulf of argument. What does that mean for the church's position?
00:30:09
Speaker
It's interesting to see the the Catholic Church become more politically relevant again, ah but not in a formal sense, as we have seen you know hundreds of years ago. US system, via the Constitution, was designed with checks and balances to stop power becoming too concentrated.
00:30:27
Speaker
But I think a really alarming feature of the Trump administration has been to stretch those checks, and And balance has really become an elastic concept under the Trump administration. He was able to or appoint more Supreme Court justices than we would have liked. He does away with traditional governance. He is very happy to override things with an executive order.
00:30:54
Speaker
And yeah, as we say, stretching the definition balance. not just politics, but also morality. So that's this that's the space that the church is stepping into. In Britain in particular, it's been, you would you could go into the pub and most people would say the church has no business interfering with the state.
00:31:17
Speaker
But I think this has been a really interesting inversion of that concept and it's it's made grey an argument more that for most people has been black and white.
00:31:30
Speaker
You put that so diplomatically when you were discussing the characteristics of the Trump administration.
00:31:39
Speaker
otherwise he's going to sue me or he's going to call me a a piggy or saying oh or he's going to create an AI generated image of you and and put it just yeah and he's going put it through grok um that humiliation purposes it then here um yeah While we asked it on the the topic of the US s and of the Trump administration, um and whilst we're steering clear of any overtly ah political assertions, I'd like to talk about the Navy.
TikTok and the Navy: Glamorizing Militarization?
00:32:19
Speaker
What am I going to do with a submarine?
00:32:22
Speaker
I want to talk about this, what I think is frankly quite an alarming trend on TikTok lately, Now this this started gaining traction a few weeks ago now, but it's essentially, it's set to the backdrop of um a song by the village people, which is called In The Navy. The lyrics of the song recite, essentially repeat, they want you they want you they want you as a new recruit.
00:32:54
Speaker
And what was happening on TikTok recently is that people were using that backdrop to do a a physical kind of challenge, I suppose, of a a push-up challenge, which, by the way, looks absolutely heinous. Um, you would never find me doing that. But um I think it's really, i just, I just find it so bizarre. And i think people, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that people need to be a little bit more careful with the trends that they partake in and what they mean. i think this is such, especially in light of, you know, the context and the background
00:33:38
Speaker
the backdrop that we have at the moment of US, Iran, Israel, and this kind of rather, I guess, fraught geopolitical landscape, if I may put it ah in the most mild way possible.
00:33:53
Speaker
And I just think it's it's quite scary to me that this kind of idea or concept of militarisation has become this like, funny kind of meme. And I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who would say that I'm taking that far too seriously. and it's just silly and it's just a fitness challenge and I'm sure in many ways it is just a you know ah silly kind of fitness challenge but with the backdrop of they want you as a new recruit it just feels very unsettling and disconcerting to me and when you couple that with okay if we look at the UK by comparison we have quite
00:34:31
Speaker
in my view, quite sinister at but advertisement um for across the military. um But, you know, especially if we're talking about the Navy, we have, you know, adverts that talk about kind of, you know, the, I was born in Carlisle, but I was made in the Royal Navy with everyone.
00:34:50
Speaker
I'm sure everyone has seen those. And I just think they do a really good job at targeting, ah disproportionately targeting young people They offer benefits like free education, free university or in the US college education. and I think target people that don't really understand the ramifications of signing up to the military forces and kind of glamorize enlistment, which I think to me feels like what this trend is doing.
00:35:16
Speaker
And it feels even worse than that to me because now you don't even need them to do it because you're doing it for them. It's user-generated content. Yeah.
00:35:31
Speaker
business This is the final stage. And I just i just think militarism should not feel fun and it should certainly not feel algorithm friendly. i mean, the joke's on them because i was I was born in the Navy, but I was made in the YMCA.
00:35:46
Speaker
oh he The irony is, of course, the US Navy in 1979 did partner with the village people to film the In the Navy music video on the USS Riesner in an aim to boost recruitment.
00:36:00
Speaker
ah it's sorry the the the the navy itself wanted to boost recruitment the village people took the gig and ah ah it was only afterwards that the navy said they did not realize the group's gay icon status or the dublin in their music until after filming which i just think come on i wonder how the group feel now seeing this seeing this trend take place it's um yeah it's i mean guys just go out in soho it's okay uh That's all we've got time for on our first episode of Notes Up Correspondence. Thanks for listening.
00:36:37
Speaker
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