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]

IDEAS The horror of boybands...

A quick illustration of how wide your options are for music videos...

• two iconic US 90s boybands have announced they're teaming up on a...

DIGITISATION 'The Face Book'

Great video here (tho' maybe thats my Retromania talking?!)- not sure if you'll follow the full preferred reading as the technology it mimics goes back as far as 1996, but the basis of the satire is clear enough
Raises some nice points about the limits to/dangers of digitisation and new media (and, indirectly, about the speedy obsolescence that befalls many once giant new media/technology names):

Spoof boyband video

Thanks to GeorgeG for this: a spoof 5ive video, which manages to both clearly reflect the conventions and satirise them in a postmodern, ironic fashion. The conventions and cliches of laddish togetherness and basic dance moves are there, but added in is the wink and nod that this is all actually very silly - you could argue that it serves a female (male gaze, conventions of boy band vids) and male (satirising the conventions, arguably countering the emasculation that sanitised/feminised depictions - with tweenies in mind - brings)...

Spoof vid eg1 Whitesnake Here I Go Again

Seen as the epitome of hair-metal absurdity (albeit with some decent tunes) David Coverdale (nicknamed Percy by Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant, who he's widely seen as copying) and his band Whitesnake provide a neat template for the hair-metal vid: manly men (with 'girly' hair) with serious expressions, hot car, hot lady, a bit of smoke...

Here's the original, followed by a spoof...

Is the following really any more absurd?!

Parodies

A little light relief/insight into the burgeoning impact of the postmodern aesthetic and the growth of new media brands outside the old media networks...
The 1st of these gets a little crude towards the end; sev examples here of another growing trend, building on the tradition developed by Weird Al Yankovich, but in 2011 operated as en entirely online operation - spoof/parody vids, in this case from the 'barelypolitical' YouTube channel, which uploads weekly comedy updates.
If you happened to be doing a Backstreet Boys vid, you might be interested in the BB ref in the Bieber spoof...