Cluster Blog

I don’t really remember Mariah Carey’s “Touch My Body” causing a huge amount of talk or garnishing 24/7 radioplay. This was totally OK with me until I looked it up on Wikipedia, which treats the release of “Touch My Body” as a significant historical event. There’s a serious amount of dedication packed into that page, and it made me wonder if it was a cultural milestone I really should have paid more attention to. In hindsight, its a pretty good song, like this critic said: 

“This sensual jam is 100% Mariah, packed with satisfying harmonic layers and hooky background ‘oh’s,’ supersonic verses and a chorus as catchy as a winter sniffle.”

Hell yeah, but I dont know if it merits a Wikipedia entry that rivals those of entire physical countries in word count.

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_my_body vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chechnia , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suriname)

Mariah released the song in 2008. I was at that time a mostly sentient being, and one who kept track of pop things. So if it was such a big deal goddamit why dont I remember boogying to that sensual jam in high school? I don’t know, its my own problem, not one that really worries me, either. It actually should just serve as a piquant reminder of pop music’s ‘now you hear it now you dont’ kind of ephemera.

But besides all those teenage superfan think-tank wiki contributors, there is somebody worth noticing who was impacted by “Touch My Body.” Oliver Laric, a Austrian video artist and sculptor, made a green screen edit of the music video for “Touch My Body” and set it free in the internet to be remixed. Here are some of the results from various youtube eccentrics:

Touch My Body Remix

Mariah flaunts ‘the bod’ amongst scenes of third world poverty, romps with piglets, and has her physical size manipulated in a few good ways.

Touch My Body With a Billiard Cue 

Mariah imposes on a game of pool in Russia.

Mariah Carey ft Me - Touch My Body

Mariah does her thing with young child hovering uncomfortably in the void.

Here’s Oliver Laric’s site if you should be curious about more of his stuff:

http://oliverlaric.com/

The main featured video in this post is actually unrelated to Laric’s project, but way cooler. On youtube, the description below the video reads:

“A DVD-ROM found in a karaoke bar in northeast Perlovka. The bartender proudly said that the video was engineered by experts in the regional administration of culture and was commissioned by the Perlovka OGBZ 13 director, I.B. Saveliev, a great admirer of ‘Masha Karikovoy’s’ talent.” 

Don’t ask me why Mariah Carey seems to be so popular in Russia. 

It’s probably classified anyway.