POMO RETROMANIA Shot-by-shot remake videos

This vaguely creepy effort by a US presenter has added a useful 1m hits to Selena Gomez' hit single. BELOW I consider examples where a different (new) track is used with a remake of an old video. There is an embedded playlist at the bottom of this post.

NB: There is some swearing from 2:38 in the video below.

More evidence that music video is the ultimate postmodern, intertextual format, the magpie medium that steals the nest eggs of previous videos and just about every audio-visual format going: the shot by shot remake videos.

The article that drew my attention to this doesn't mention an earlier filmic example of this strange phenomenon: Gus Van Sant's utterly dreadful Psycho remake (1960; 1998), adding colour and some jarring diegetic sound as the woefully miscast, towering Vince Vaughn uses his peephole. (See Wiki; trailer; FeudNation's often crude comparison flags up many of the problems using multiple clips from both) That was seen as a terribly arty effort by an auteur filmmaker - many of the music video equivalents share the element of tribute, but are much more playful and consciously postmodern.

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?!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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]

Postmodern intertextuality: Robert Palmer

I've seen this referenced in The Simpsons too, and many other shows/vids too - its sufficiently widely used to be described as a meme (a widely referenced cultural event, text or idea); as Andy used it as an example, here's how the intertextuality works in Bowling For Soup's 1985 video.

Wheatus, Blink 182, Weezer and similar pop-punk or alt-rock bands have all created postmodern videos centred on ironic intertextuality with classic TV shows or stereotypical depictions of a past time period with a modern twist.

Bowling For Soup appear to mock the casual sexism of the original video (from around 0:35 in):

They dress up as the glamourous models, the obvious humour ensuring they can maintain a macho, laddish image despite appearing in drag.

In a rather more ambiguous (or polysemic) style, the distributors of WT hit rom-com, Richard Curtis' Love Actually, created a chart hit with Bill Nighy in his fictional role singing Christmas is All Around. Is it simply sexist, or is is ironic and mocking sexism?


The reading of the original, from 1985 as the Bowling For Soup song title suggests, isn't necessarily that straightforward either. If it was intended simply to identify Robert Palmer with glamour and sex appeal, then it appears utterly preposterous to the contemporary viewer - but that doesn't necessarily reflect typical audience (especially youth) reaction when it was originally released. There are lots of shots of Palmer smiling (or smirking? again, its polysemic) - is he meant to be in on the joke ... is his original video actually sending up/pastiching the ever-increasing use of attractive models we saw with mid-80s pop videos? Or is it simply a crudely sexist video bluntly objectifying women, with its shots, for example, of legs in isolation?
Your take on this may well be dictated by your age!



Bands like BFSoup and Weezer didn't invent such explicit interextuality - the music video has always borrowed liberally from other media and from earlier music videos. Weird Al Yankovic has made a successful career out of lampooning hit songs, such as 1988's Michael Jackson spoof, Fat:


Remember, we saw similar traits from films too last year, eg: Psycho's Sam Loomis referenced through Halloween's Dr Loomis and then both through Scream's Billy Loomis.