The City of Raleigh's new promotional theme song/video "Shine, Raleigh, Shine" is making its way into the world, and early returns are...well, not so good. The song sounds sort of like an overwrought Bon Jovi power ballad as sung by Jewel, while the visuals offer a bustling montage of museums, sporting events and other stuff around town, accompanied by helpful statistics ("#10 Best Walking City -- Prevention, March 2006").
The video hit YouTube on Wednesday, drawing a series of withering thumbs-down reviews in the "Comments & Responses" section:
"Raleigh - #1 for super cheesy videos"
"Uhhh...that sucked. As a citizen of Raleigh, I would like to apologize to the rest of the world."
"One word: embarrassing."
By Thursday afternoon, some of the more pointed comments began disappearing. Then the comments section was disabled. Finally, at about 2:30 p.m. Thursday, the video itself vanished from YouTube with this explanation: "This video has been removed by the user." But you can still watch it on the Raleigh Convention Center Web site.
For a more lighthearted and effective example of regional civic pride, check out the "It's Carrboro" video. Or for something truly epic, there's Fontana's 10-minute mini-suite "City of Medicine" (from the 2005 Durham tribute "Rockin' the Blocks").
ADDENDUM (1/5): Paul Jones points out an altogether harsher document, the "Welcome to Durham" movie trailer (the film also has a MySpace page).
SECOND ADDENDUM (1/5): Not much love for "Shine, Raleigh, Shine" on raleighing.com, either.
News & Observer music critic David Menconi's random (and we do mean
random) musings about all things related to music and culture of the
"popular" variety.
