it is an ever blurring border war, and a pretty important one from my perspective. parody and irony are one of the defining characteristics of our postmodern culture, as is trangression. the amount of “references” that exist in every facet of our culture have increased to such an extent that this pastiche/parody/referencing/irony/stealing has become a major source of culture itself. and much of this parody deals in a transgression of some commonly held norm. south park is one of the more popular examples, paris hilton coughing up cum, or lion cubs performing an abortion to stop the birth of the anti-christ and the blood-orgy lovin woodland creatures, for instance.
aside: i know that blogs, as all online reading, work better in small doses, but i couldn’t stop writing, so please read on. eano + brian + steve + cam&ali + anyone else, i want thoughts.
but what happens when the limits of parody are transgressed? obviously people have been stealing other people’s ideas for a looong time, but like postmodernism itself, it is the degree to which this is happening that is of issue. quantity is at stake, not quality.
i love parody, and i think its dangerously important. my recent fave is robot chicken, a stop-motion animation show that is part of the wonderful adult swim cartoon series (which includes cartoons that you must watch: aqua teen hunger force and sealab 2021). a recent episode has the cast of ‘that 70s show’ do ‘that 00s show’: “kitty my ipod is broken, im gonna put my foot right up steve jobs’ ass” “oh hush red, im blogging”; “fez! i just took your picture with my phone!”; “who just text messaged me that im a douchebag?” “buuurn!”; “hi im tv’s topher grace, as you’ve seen tonite, the precious trappings of our material obsessed existence become the sitcom fodder of the future. so hey, please remember, try not to be such a douchebag. thanks for listening”
but this is taking ‘that 70s show’ and putting a spin on it to produce a new meaning. that’s parody. what i’m concerned with is cultural theft, and its sudden increase. for example, the new nissan ad campaign steal’s the camera techniques of michel gondry’s music video for ‘hardest button to button’ by the white stripes. if you haven’t seen the original (go to whitestripes.com and watch it for one thing, its ingenius), it uses a series of quick cuts from a stationary camera synched to the beat of the song and is a very distinctive camera technique, making for a brilliant music video in gondry’s long list of brilliant videos. a commercial for a nissan suv (i think its nissan) steals this same technique, and even uses many of the same angles (the final spinning shot is basically the exact same). clearly this is not being used in a parodic manner, nor is it an homage. it is plagarism. and i hate to think that some unoriginal prick made a lot of money from it.
another example. nike is now getting into the lucrative skateboarding market, and their new ad campaign is the most blatant case of ripping off a subculture in some time. as a pitchfork report shows, their ‘major threat campaign’ outright plagarizes legendary punk band minor threat’s album cover. not only did the band and their label not approve of this use, but they would of refused had they been asked (minor threat and dischord records are like the antithesis of nike and its exploitive corporate practices), and are now considering legal action.
theory on postmodern culture tends to fall into either a ‘for’ or ‘against’ category. baudrillard sees us trapped in a simulation, a copy with no original. jameson sees us dominated by late capitalism, stuck in an eternal present full of blank parodies (like the nikes and nissans i mentioned, he calls them pastiche). on the other hand, lyotard sees us as escaping the dangers of meta-narratives, the totalizing and univeralizing myths that continue to fail us, such as the enlightenment project. haraway sees us as cyborgs, finding pleasure in the confusion of boundaries, namely human and machine but oh so much more. and my favourite (and if all goes according to plan, my future phd supervisor), hutcheon sees us fighting back with irony and parody, forming a complicitous critique (god bless the matrix).
my optimism puts me on the ‘for’ side of postmodern culture (even though postmodernism denies such reductionism and binaries), and though i put my faith in parody, this prevalence of stealing over parody is unnerving. i guess it is just like the mainstream to steal from a subculture and use it for its own greedy means. now theyve stolen stealing!
the complexity in this parody/stealing issue arises from the blurred distinction, because much of what i do, and a lot of the culture i enjoy, treads a very fine line. kid koala and the avalanches have made beautiful art out of sampling, but you could very well call it stealing. i dont like lazy sampling, like say, p diddy, but i like complex or obscure sampling/stealing? or to go back, led zeppelin stole a lot of their music from earlier blues music? even my own graphic design is often stolen. our new soph logos are ripped from banksy grafitti art.
but im not making money off this, i just want our uniforms to look cool, so i dont feel bad, but am i doing the same thing as nike and nissan?
if anybody got thru this, you now know what i will be doing with my life. cultural studies. but with more important things than nike and nissan ads… though they are important…
oh, i also think that cinderella man, the new russell crowe movie about a boxer during the depression, is basically seabiscuit, except with a boxer instead of a horse.
