Miro Worship: An Ode to Weinberger
As campaign season heats up around the country, it's a safe bet the internet will soon be deluged with music videos produced by musically inclined boosters in support of their preferred candidates.
Typically, this is a national phenomenon reserved for presidential elections. (Remember Obama Girl? How about Hank Williams Jr.'s "The McCain-Palin Tradition"?) To our knowledge, there has never been an original music video made in support of a local candidate for any office at a town, state or federal level — though why "Bernie and the Jets" doesn't exist yet is beyond us.
That all changed today when Nate Orshan — aka Nato — threw his musical weight behind the Democratic candidate in Burlington's mayoral race, Miro Weinberger, with a song and video called "Let's Go Miro."
In just under three catchy-as-hell minutes, Orshan espouses Weinberger's various virtues, including that he's a "Green Mountain Boy through and through," has "mad negotiation skills" (skillz?), and will "get with our creditors and sort out all our bills." High praise. Though that last one is a touch confusing, since in general pop-music parlance, when you "get with" someone, it means … er, something other than negotiating. Then again, that could well be a creative strategy for reining in the city's debt.
In any event, Orshan's song clearly puts pressure on supporters of the other two mayoral candidates, Kurt Wright and Wanda Hines, to come up with their own songs. We did a little brainstorming around the 7D office and came up with a few suggestions based on some classic-ish tunes.
For Wanda Hines, we liked "Help Me Wanda," "Sweet Child O' Hines" and "Hinesight."
The possibilities for Kurt Wright are almost endless, but some favorites were "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Wright to (Republican) Party," "(You've Got It) the Wright Stuff" and, of course, "(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want to be Wright."
There was also a suggestion for erstwhile Tim Ashe supporters: "Ashe to Ashes." (Too soon?)
UPDATE: Twitter users also got in on the fun suggesting more campaign songs, using the hashtag #btvmayorsongs. Deputy web editor Tyler Machado aggregated them in the following Storify story:
