Baudrillard's 'simulacra': Weezer's Buddy Holly eg

KEY TERMS: postmodern(ism)           meta-narrative        Baudrillard: simulacra      deconstructionism        intertextuality       Barthes: action codes        auteur theory         camp         queer/ed/ing       Mulvey: male gaze       feminist v post-feminist       countertype       stereotype      normative       hetero-normative       Hebdige: subculture          Bourdieu: cultural capital         Thornley: subcultural capital      McQuail: uses and gratifications

EG's REFERENCED:Weezer Buddy Holly
Depeche Mode It's No Good
Outkast Hey La
Beastie Boys Sabotage
Miley Cyrus Wrecking Ball
Nirvana In Bloom
Charli XCX + Troye Sivan 1999
(+ auteur directors Michel Gondry + Spike Jonze)

Here we have a 2018 video heavily intertextualised with 90s/noughties references. The full preferred reading is unlikely to be accessible to XCX's primary audience 

And here we have 1 of the key influences on Rose McGowan's outfits - so, a signifier of a signifier of a signifer ... Baudrillard's simulacra

HOW THIS XCX VID ILLUSTRATES AUDIENCE TECHNIQUES

The original MTV awards pic from 1998.

Bourdieu's CULTURAL CAPITAL: We could argue that the XCX are knowingly suggesting those who can recognise or figure out the refs have higher cultural capital, though as pop culture references that only holds true within social groupings that value popular culture (Bourdieu analyses how the cultural preferences of economic elites is deemed high culture and more worthy, linking culture and social class)
Thornley - Hebdige's SUB-CULTURE: Thornley adopted Bourdieu to refer specifically to subcultural (Hebdige's term for distinctive social groups, especially youth) capital. Amongst young teen pop fans (not to mention the band's fanbase more specifically) recognition of this set of intertextualities would be seen as impressive (so: offering increased cultural capital)
McQuail's USES + GRATIFICATIONS: Discussing this also offers education, entertainment and personal interaction.
Reynolds' RETROMANIA: It further taps into what Simon Reynolds dubs Retromania in his book of the same name: our web 2.0, converged age offers up easy, cheap access to past popular culture that once required dedication and considerable expense (record collecting).
Altman's SET OF PLEASURES: The video offers an 'intellectual puzzle', one of 3 categories of audience pleasure Altman identifies as common strategies.

OVERVIEW:

A short post, just reflecting a discussion today on the postmodern philosopher Baudrillard's contentious (but ingenious?) concept of the simulacra, which argues that as we now exist in an endless sea of signifiers, or chains of signifiers with no concrete starting/reference point, we cannot claim to know of any actual 'reality'. So, Disneyland is the real America; the Gulf War, supposedly fought on our TV screens in 1991, never really happened, to take two of his most infamous proclamations.

Its a concept which often and readily applies itself to music video, with many videos influenced by other videos which may have been influenced by other media (especially TV/film) in turn. Weezer's Buddy Holly, directed by Michel Gondry, is an exemplar - it is a representation of a 90s band as part of a 70's TV show about 50's America, which heavily influenced perceptions of that decade (so, the long chain of signification in which any perceivable reality has been utterly lost, and is rendered unknowable)

Below the video I've uploaded a photo of p. 175 from the excellent Money For Nothing, Austerlitz's history of the music video; he describes the video, for example, as 'a pastiche of a pastiche'. We would later see Nirvana and other acts (see Outkast's Hey Ya at the end of the post) copy this idea of inserting the act into an old TV show (and the Beastie Boys, of course, created their own affectionate pastiche of the 70/80s cop show with Sabotage).

<sup>ANALYSIS:
Music video is both widely influential on other media and borrows heavily from other media in a 2-way dynamic flow.

In anything from Top Gear's car reviews through Guinness ads and Michael Bay films we can see the short takes, selective slo-mo, shot variety etc that are basic conventions of music video.

Likewise, we can see many of what Barthes termed action codes are common in music video, such as whip pans (especially common in performance footage).

The Weezer video illustrates the auteur theory: this is as much known as a Spike Jonze (the director) video as a Weezer video! Jonze's distinctive style is on display here.

Its a great example of the postmodernism that is also a basic, common feature of music video. That 'wide borrowing' from other media is intertextuality - and this example takes this to such extremes that it also neatly encapsulates Baudrillard's simulacrum theory.

The degree of irony, the camp representation, is also a common aspect of music video. The band are portraying themselves ironically as stiff, goofy - look at Depeche Mode's It's No Good for another great example of this postmodernist quality: deconstructionism. (Using conventions or cliches in a knowing, self-aware way to effectively critique them - they employ blatant male gaze with POV shots which cut to cleavage close-ups for example - just as Wes Craven did with Scream, whose characters discuss the conventions of horror films ... "I'll be right back...")

The postmodernist attack on meta-narratives (ideologies or systems that represent unifying ideas of how things do or should work) can also be seen with the rise of post-feminist critiques of feminist thinking. We can see a classic example of what Laura Mulvey termed the male gaze in GnR's W2TJ; Mulvey would be just as righteously angry at Miley Cyrus' Wrecking Ball video. Sinead O'Connor publicly warned Cyrus about male record bosses' exploitation. Cyrus' response was a post-feminist position: I have chosen to express my sexuality this way, I have agency (control), not the male director, manager or record label boss.

her queering of gender identity furthers this point, and is seen as a useful feature for attracting a 'woke' millennial (youth) audience, less accepting of normative representations than older generations.</sup>

Austerlitz on the Weezer vid

FROM THE WIKI:

Postmodernist French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal. Where Plato saw two steps of reproduction—faithful and intentionally distorted (simulacrum)—Baudrillard sees four: (1) basic reflection of reality; (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretence of reality (where there is no model); and (4) simulacrum, which "bears no relation to any reality whatsoever".^[7] In Baudrillard's concept, like Nietzsche's, simulacra are perceived as negative, but another modern philosopher who addressed the topic, Gilles Deleuze, takes a different view, seeing simulacra as the avenue by which an accepted ideal or "privileged position" could be "challenged and overturned".^[8] Deleuze defines simulacra as "those systems in which different relates to different by means of difference itself. What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity, no internal resemblance".^[9]

<sup>See the ProdEval blog for more on this and other media theories.


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