Variety
magazine and Michelle Obama, US First Lady to talk about Pop Culture and how
her husband made an impact among other subject discussed.
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.
That was
Carpool Karaoke, the insanely popular segment on CBS’ “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 enamoured 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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