The US
First Lady sat down with Variety magazine to talk Pop Culture and how
her husband used that to make an impact…of course among other things she
said. Read below from Variety
Ten days before delivering the best-received speech at the Democratic
National Convention, first lady Michelle Obama was in her East Wing
office describing an entirely different appearance she was about to make
that was poised to have an equally notable impact.
This story first appeared in the August 23, 2016 issue of Variety. Subscribe today.
That was Carpool Karaoke, the insanely popular segment on CBS’ “Late
Late Show,” in which she sat in the passenger seat with host James
Corden and belted out renditions of Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed,
Delivered I’m Yours,” Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” and
Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” as they circled the driveway on the
South Lawn.
“First of all, I was riding in a car with somebody else, without the
Secret Service,” she says, with more than a hint of glee. “So right
there, [I said], ‘Let’s keep driving!’ I think we drove around the South
Lawn about 100 times.”
Below are a few quotes from her cover story…
1. Despite being First Lady, she views herself as an average woman who’s in tune with pop culture.
“I view myself as being the average woman,” she says. “While I am first
lady, I wasn’t first lady my whole life. I’m a product of pop culture.
I’m a consumer of pop culture, and I know what resonates with people. I
know what they’ll get a chuckle out of and what they think is kind of
silly. And whenever my team approaches me with ideas and concepts, we’re
usually like, ‘Is this really funny? Are people going to understand
it?’”
2. When she’s being silly and making people laugh, she also has a message behind it.
“What I have never been afraid of is to be a little silly, and you can
engage people that way,” Obama says in an interview with Variety in her
upstairs White House office, decorated in an eclectic mix of abstract
art and framed mementos from her tenure. “My view is, first you get them
to laugh, then you get them to listen. So I’m always game for a good
joke, and I’m not so formal in this role. There’s very little that we
can’t do that people wouldn’t appreciate.”
3. In order to gain awareness to her initiatives, she came to where the people are.
Obama explains that as she launched the initiatives, she knew it would
take “reaching people where they lived on a day-to-day basis, and the
next step was, ‘How do you do that? Where are the people?’ Well, they’re
not reading the op-ed pieces in the major newspapers. They’re not
watching Sunday morning news talk shows. They’re doing what most people
are doing: They are watching TV.”
She adds: “A lot of our audiences are kids and teens, and they want to
be in on the joke. And they’ll listen again. We’re just a little looser
with this stuff than most traditional first ladies.”
4. While she doesn’t have a budget, she still gets the job done.
“It has been wonderful having the platform of the first lady’s office.
But if you sort of look at who we are, we don’t have a budget. We don’t
have congressional authority. But I still believe we managed to have
impact on these issues, which sort of sets the foundation to think,
‘Gosh, we can do a lot, even when we’re not here, just with the power of
public awareness.’ ”
5. FLOTUS loves entertainment, but feels it’s crucial to add diversity in Hollywood.
“For so many people, television and movies may be the only way they
understand people who aren’t like them,” she says. “And when I come
across many little black girls who come up to me over the course of this
7½ years with tears in their eyes, and they say: ‘Thank you for being a
role model for me. I don’t see educated black women on TV, and the fact
that you’re first lady validates who I am….’”
She adds, “My mom says it all the time: ‘People are so enamored of
Michelle and Barack Obama.’ And she says, ‘There are millions of
Michelle and Barack Obamas.’ We’re not new. We’re not special. People
who come from intact families who are educated, who have values, who
care for their kids, who raise their kids — if you don’t see that on TV,
and you don’t live in communities with people like me, you never know
who we are, and you can make and be susceptible to all sorts of
assumptions and stereotypes and biases, based on nothing but what you
see and hear on TV. So it becomes very important for the world to see
different images of each other, so that, again, we can develop empathy
and understanding.”
She calls diversity in entertainment “critical,” because she sees the
industry as being able to influence perceptions, in the way that
viewers in the ’70s “developed a love for Archie Bunker and empathy for
George Jefferson.”
“There are folks who now know black families — like the Johnsons on
‘Black-ish’ or the folks on ‘Modern Family.’ They become part of who you
are. You share their pains. You understand their fears. They make you
laugh, and they change how you see the world. And that is particularly
true in a country where there are still millions of people who live in
communities where they can live their whole lives not having contact or
exposure with people who aren’t like them, whether that is race or
religion or simply lifestyle. The only way that millions of people get
to know other folks and the way they live … is through the power of
television and movies.”
Read the full article on Variety.com
Source: Variety/YBF
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