POSTMODERN, SIMULACRA Weird Al Yankovich parody v pastiche

[UPDATE FEB 2017 -scroll down for Weird Al discussion] This is a topic I've frequently touched upon, so you should also look at this post on Weezer...
 
As its such a useful example, I've referenced it in further posts on this topic (and others): use the tag!







The excellent, very readable, history of the music video by Austerlitz discusses this video - it really is worth having a flick through the index ... or just reading the book from scratch! [tag; specific post on the book]

Then there's a Robert Palmer example of intertextuality, a tag applied even more frequently than (queer theorist; gender as performativity) Judith Butler I see...

Is THIS depiction of Elvis (the magnificent Tortelvis!) any less 'real' than the videos/film clips that define him in the popular imagination - an image Elvis and his manager fought to control, but for many people boils down to a fat guy in a comedy white jumpsuit? Is the Weird Al version of 'Wacko Jacko' (below) any less real than the MJ we think we know from media coverage? The creators of the Weezer video did so having been bombarded with signifiers of the decade, such as the sitcom they parodied ... their representation (or simulacrum) is itself now a powerful signifier that will influence many more impressions of 'the 50s'.

If I asked you now to think about 'the 60s', chances are you'd think of hippies, flower power, the Stones ... many of the iconic 60s festivals were actually in the 70s, ditto many of the Stones classics thought of as 60s, while the metropolitan (major city) drug phenomenon took until the 1970s to spread further into towns and cities across Western countries, beyond London, San Fransisco etc. The 60s ended around 1974?! Maybe 1973?!
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A pastiche is a work of visual art, literature, theatre, or music that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists.^[1] Unlike parody, pastiche celebrates, rather than mocks, the work it imitates.^[2] [Wiki]

GENRE/PoMo: Mash-ups, hybridity, Rehfeldt, Kutiman

SEE ALSO: http://musividz.blogspot.com/2011/10/genreaudnew-media-pomohybridity.html

In film, hybridity is often a straightforwardly commercial decision: add comedy to romantic drama (rom-com) to help draw in a male aud.

Rap meets metal; the mashup was also racial, with rap's white aud small until this

In music, there is something of this - acts such as Madonna and Gaga are constantly striving to remain relevant to a young aud by taking on aspects of whatever is cutting edge in music at that time; Madonna in particular has an incredible track record of identifying musical trends and producers whilst still fairly underground and exploiting these to keep her own sound fresh. She has frequently used elements of whatever's big at the time in the gay club scene.
From the point that hiphop began emerging in the late 70s (broken big by Run DMC in the mid-80s, and really taken to stratospheric heights once white rappers emerged from Vanilla Ice to Eminem), the concept of genre in music has been problematic. Hiphop is a genre but one defined by its used of all other existing genres.
The concept of the mash-up emerged as a specific variant of this: literally blending two (or more) tracks which the mixer thinks work well together - perhaps the most famous example being Jay-Z's Black Album: remixed by Danger Mouse, weaving in Beatles tracks, to create The Grey Album.

A mashup or bootleg (also mesh, mash up, mash-up, blend and bastard pop/rock) is a song or composition created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the instrumental track of another. To the extent that such works are 'transformative' of original content, they may find protection from copyright claims under the "fair use" doctrine of copyright law [wiki]

The blurring of distinct categories is a hallmark of the postmodern aesthetic, and postmodernists argue that originality is impossible - all that can be done (as everything original already exists/has been thought of) is to mashup, remix existing ideas.
Nu-metal is an interesting example - bursting into the limelight in the mid-90s, and taking up the commercial status lost by grunge as it faded away following Cobain's death, it combined metal and hiphop. The pioneer bands (Korn, Deftones, Limp Bizkit) were controversial within the metal fanbase, the hybridity seeing many genre fans rejecting them as inauthentic; not actually metal.
Its time as a predominant musical force was quite brief ... but currently enjoying a resurgence as Limp Bizkit return.
Moreover, Korn have just announced a dubstep-influenced album (with Skrillex): http://loudwire.com/korn-frontman-discusses-new-dubstep-album-current-state-of-rock/ The concept of metal is stretched to its limit here ... and this is hot on the heels of Metallica's album with Lou Reed (leading some to talk of Loutallica!)
But nu-metal is far from unique. Beatallica are a band who fuse Metallica-style singing and playing with Beatles tracks; Dread Zeppelin fuse reggae, Elvis and Led Zeppelin; Apocalyptica play orchestral, classical music renderings of thrash metal bands (I particularly enjoy their version of Slayer's South of Heaven; a brutal album whose power still comes through even when riffs are cello rather than guitar based!)

We've looked at the work of Andy Rehnfeldt (here's his website; YT channel; Facebook; MySpace; and a random hater!)
Tape-swapping, using the post, was a key means of how emerging genres would evolve and grow back in the 80s; ventures such as this wouldn't have gotten anything like the near 27m views Rehfeldt's vids have enjoyed on YouTube by Nov 2011. His shtick is simple but delivered with real elan: using original video footage, re-present a track re-recorded in an anthitetical musical style - so we get Rebecca Black's Friday as death metal (big improvement there of course!) and some Katy Perry aural atrocity rendered listenable as death metal, but equally Slayer's crushingly heavy Angel of Death as Radio Disney, and Metallica's Enter Sandman as smooth jazz! Have a look and see if he's covered any bands within your genre...



Even Wonderful World gets the death metal treatment...

Kutiman mashes up vids he's found on YouTube

His own site, http://thru-you.com/

Actually mashing video, we have the VJ artist Kutiman, who's had 6.3m hits himself. He runs his own site as well as the YouTube channel; one example of his work follows below

Practice Pitch(1) Picking a Track

Just as the Music Video Day has hopefully got us thinking about the best way to approach a film shoot, and be organised for this, the aim for the practice pitch is to get you thinking about different ideas on and approaches to your own music video. This is intended to be quite fun and light-hearted, but should help highlight aspects of the work required for your 'proper' pitch come September!

To get us going I need you to do three things:

1. Pick a song which you have as MP3 (cannot have sexually explicit lyrics or swearing)
2. Create a blog post, with one paragraph about the band/track (some hyperlinks, including a link to the lyrics, would be useful!), and a 2nd paragraph...
3. ...giving some idea of what we expect to see in typical music videos from within this genre; common codes and conventions (links to examples would be useful).

We'll gather all the tracks together, hit shuffle and you'll each be assigned another track to work up a pitch

One quick example from me, done in a few mins, so not necessarily as stupendous and well researched as yours... Do note though that I made sure there were various hyperlinks embedded to enable anyone to find out more than I've written in my one-para summary! I also found useful links to enable anyone who gets Dread Zeppelin, my submitted track, to view a range of vidz from within their genre.

TRACK: DREAD ZEPPELIN: "Heartbreaker (At The End Of Lonely Street)"