Few things make me as giddy as hearing Samuel Jackson cuss. Yes, he cusses – he doesn’t curse. The acclaimed actor stars in a new Obama ad, modeled after Adam Mansbach’s best-selling faux children’s book, Go the F**k to Sleep. It’s being released online this week and it’s a scream — literally.
Samuel Jackson, with the help of Little Suzie, literally screams ot an all too typical-looking American family in a nearly 4-minute web ad created by the Jewish Council for Education and Research boldly titled: Wake the F**k Up.
If you’ve been asleep for the last couple of years you might have missed the meteoric emergence of Mansbach’s now classic “children’s” book. Its genesis was a Facebook post crafted by Mansbach in frustration with his own daddy duties.
But the genius of the book is its attention to the children’s book form even as it embraces the fantasy of a profane response to the routine challenge of putting our children to bed. Wake the F**k Up takes just enough cues from this winning formula.
It screens like a political ad, but Jackson’s (and ultimately Little Suzie’s) profane interventions just might jolt voters/viewers out of their apathy and their nonplussed malaise – unfortunate results of the political fatigue that the current election cycle has been so adept at producing.
On the heels of the now notorious 47 percent video, this clip’s nursery rhyme narrative clearly constructs the distinctions between President Obama and former Governor Romney on a wide range of issues (health care, the economy, the social safety net, education, etc) – even as Little Suzie and Jackson continue to pull us out of our political slumber.
In an early scene, Jackson abruptly appears in front of the flat screen in the living room and directly addresses Lil Suzie’s parents: “…and he’s against safety nets; if you fall, tough luck./So I strongly suggest that you wake the fuck up.”
The narrative of the ad follows Little Suzie –after she wakes up – through her home, as she rhymes reasons why her parents, her brother, her sister, and her grandparents should wake up. The sleep analogy should not be lost on any of us. A “good” voter turnout for a presidential election is below 50 percent. A candidate can privately dismiss the 47 percent and the 1 percent has collected enough wealth to buy nearly 100 percent of our political system. These are not the times to be disaffected citizens.
In one telling scene, Little Suzie explains the ways in which Romney is anti-civil rights, citing voter suppression, his stance against gay marriage, and his unwillingness to support the Dream Act as critically obvious evidence. Consider the fact that these important constituencies, the LGBT community, the elderly, the young, as well as black and brown communities, do not often consider themselves as a quilted voting bloc, but in the simplest way — through the voice of a child – the centrality of civil rights in this election becomes crystal clear.
If Jackson’s ad enjoys even a tiny fraction of the frenzied viral success and circulation of the children’s book upon which it is craftily based, then voters will be treated to an ad that simultaneously makes all of this season’s political ads seem inferior and forces those of us who have been lulled to sleep in this process to finally wake up.
James Braxton Peterson is the Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University. He is also the founder of Hip Hop Scholars LLC, an association of hip-hop generation scholars dedicated to researching and developing the cultural and educational potential of hip-hop, urban and youth cultures. You can follow him on Twitter @DrJamesPeterson