I’m all for having fun, but if you’re going to record it and put it on the Internet for the world to see…and you are representing the “top” university in the country…at least try to make it sound smart.
The phenomenon of medical workers doubling as variety show performers was not a good look in 2020, with people dying in their facilities due to malpractice and poor management of covid.
In 2024, the look isn’t any better, but for other reasons.
So Harvard med school students apparently have a ton of time to coordinate rap music videos. I’m not sure who their target audience is here…prospective students? But isn’t this an “elite” medical school that shouldn’t need to recruit?
Is the point of this video to tell us “plebes” that Harvard MDs are Best in Class? Because this video makes me want to run far away from any doctor with Harvard on their resume.
Now, let’s first talk about the rap here. I’ve never been a huge fan of rap/hip-hop but when rap is good, it’s really good, and when it’s bad, it’s awful.
Early rap was authentic, raw, sometimes even joyful. It was above all, clever. Here’s the Sugar Hill Gang from 1979, with Rapper’s Delight, the song that started it all:
(Fun fact: When I was a 70s/80s kid somehow I snagged a copy of this rap on vinyl - the long version - I think my stepmom had bought it and let me have some of her unused records. I used to play this in my bedroom on an old record player. I had no clue I was playing music history in the making! Sadly I did not save the record.)
Compare that fun and lively beat from Sugar Hill with the evil drone underlying the Harvard rap video. Modern, corporatized rap is often deadened and designed to dumb people down - like Taylor Swift’s overly produced music, it’s crafted to hypnotize people and not in a good way.
The Harvard rap video is a mix of elitism and dumb lyrics. Except for the lead “rapper,” the majority of med students are masked up, even outdoors.
In one line, the rapper tells us that she “skimmed the reading.” Oh great, just what we want, doctors who don’t study.
In perhaps the biggest rap cringe line of all time: “MD stands for My Demeanor.”
So if you were a patient with chronic pain, would you find a Harvard med school student rapping about “can you rate the pain” funny?
“You’re messing with some Harvard MDs” - sorry, not scared.
These kids are around 30 years younger than I am and yet I feel I’m watching some old grandma attemping to be “hip.”
So what I want to know is, who funded this video? Was this paid for by Harvard?
There has been a concerted effort in recent years to push an elite scientism that seeks to elevate a professional technocratic class as being smarter and better than everyone else. The problem is, the more they push this idea with dumb marketing gimmicks and propaganda, the more the mask is coming off and we are seeing just how NOT better these people are from everyone else.
Maybe it’s old-fashioned, but there’s something to be said about the dignity expressed in old doctor’s shows like Dr. Kildare with Richard Chamberlain.
Harvard Medical School Students Rap in Cringe Idiocracy Video