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Fabricating the absolute Fake Fabricating When rock star Bono told Oprah Winfrey that America is an ideal that is supposed to be contagious, the talk show host was moved to tears. Such an imagined America, rather than the nation-state USA, is the topic of Fabricating the Absolute Fake. Pop and politics become intertwined, as Hollywood, television, and celebrities spread the American Dream around the world. Using concepts such as the absolute fake and karaoke Americanism, the book examines this global mediation as well as the way America is appropriated in pop culture produced outside of the USA, as demonstrated by such diverse cultural icons as the Elvis- inspired crooner Lee Towers and the Moroccan-Dutch rapper Ali B. This revised and extended edition includes a new chapter on Barack Obama and Michael Jackson as global celebrities and a new afterword on teaching American pop culture. Jaap Kooijman is Associate Professor in Media Studies and American Studies at the University of Amsterdam. “A brilliant, thoroughly enjoyable work of cultural critique, Fabricating the Absolute Fake takes seemingly exhausted concepts like ‘Americanization’ and turns them on their head. Refusing simple binaries between the fake and the authentic, or between cultural impe- rialism and native resistance, Kooijman demonstrates just how flexible the signifiers of Americanness can be when they circulate globally.” Anna McCarthy, Cinema Studies, New York University Jaap Kooijman “Most daring and persuasive is Kooijman’s ability to move between and connect the most delicious pop and the most searing political events (9/11, the murder of Pim Fortuyn), never evading the seriousness of entertainment nor the spectacle of politics. A book that is a pleasure for what it conveys of its subject and for its intellectual rigor, managing to Revised and Extended Edition be at once subtle and straightforward, complex and lucid.” Richard Dyer, Film Studies, King’s College London Fabricating ISBN 978-90-8964-559-3 “Fabricating the Absolute Fake shows that pop culture is more than ephemeral entertainment. When looked at with Kooijman’s the absolute Fake cosmopolitan eye, pop culture can be seen as a continuing ritual in celebration of national identities, America’s identity for sure, America in Contemporary Pop Culture but also, intriguingly, a Dutch or even European sense of self.” Rob Kroes, American Studies, University of Amsterdam 9 789089 645593 Jaap Kooijman A U P A U P fabricating the absolute fake Fabricating the Absolute Fake America in Contemporary Pop Culture Revised and Extended Edition Jaap Kooijman Cover illustration: “Ice Cream Parlor,” 2004 © Erwin Olaf Cover design: Neon, design and communications | Sabine Mannel Lay-out: Heymans & Vanhove, Goes Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978 90 8964 559 3 e-ISBN 978 90 4851 955 2 (pdf) e-ISBN 978 90 4851 956 9 (ePub) NUR 757 Creative Commons License CC BY NC (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0) Jaap Kooijman / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2013 Revised and extended edition Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise). Table of Contents Acknowledgments 7 Additional Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 11 Fabricating the Absolute Fake 1. We Are the World 23 America’s Dominance in Global Pop Culture 2. The Oprahification of 9/11 43 America as Imagined Community 3. The Desert of the Real 69 America as Hyperreality 4. Americans We Never Were 95 Dutch Pop Culture as Karaoke Americanism 5. The Dutch Dream 121 Americanization, Pop Culture, and National Identity 6. Yes We Can, This Is It 147 America and Celebrity Culture Conclusion 169 Let’s Make Things Better Afterword 175 Teaching the Absolute Fake Notes 187 Bibliography 209 Index 221 Acknowledgments In his stand-up comedy show Delirious (HBO, 1983), Eddie Murphy does an amazing imitation of Stevie Wonder giving his acceptance speech after win- ning a Grammy Award. Stevie just cannot “shut the f*ck up” and is still saying “I want to thank…” when the credits of the televised Grammy Awards show are rolling. As a Dutch teenager, back in 1983, I loved Eddie Murphy and Stevie Wonder, not yet realizing that these American entertainers (and many others) helped to make “America” an integral part of my own culture. Now, twenty-five years later, as I write these acknowledgments, the image of Eddie Murphy “do- ing Stevie at the Grammy’s” keeps popping up in my mind. I want to thank the students who participated in the courses that I have taught on this subject. Since 2001, I teach the MA courses America in Global Media Culture and Images of America at the Media and Culture Department of the University of Amsterdam. In 2003, I taught the graduate course America in Media Abroad at the Cinema Studies Department of New York University. In 2006, I taught the MA course American Pop Culture as Hyperreality at the American Studies Department of the University of Amsterdam. Discussing the subject with the students has been invaluable for the writing of this book. I want to thank the organizers and the fellows of the two sessions of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies that I attended: The Politics of American Popular Culture: Here, There, and Everywhere (October 2002) and American Culture in the U.S. and Abroad (September 2005). I want to thank Marty Gecek, Tilly de Groot, and the American Embassy in the Hague, the Netherlands, for making my participation possible. I want to thank Linda Berg-Cross, Jude Davies, Bart Eeckhout, Milena Katsarska, Carol Smith, and Reinhold Wagn- leitner for continuing our discussions at other occasions, including the confer- ences of the European Association for American Studies. I want to thank Kate Delaney and Ruud Janssens for commenting on parts of the manuscript that were published before in different form: “Bombs Bursting in Air: The Gulf War, 9/11, and the Super Bowl Performances of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey,” in Post-Cold War Europe, Post-Cold War America (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2004), edited by Ruud Janssens and Rob Kroes, and “Let’s Make Things Better: Hyper- Americanness in Dutch Pop Culture,” in Over (T)here: Transatlantic Essays in Honor of Rob Kroes (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2005), edited by Kate Delaney and Ruud Janssens. 7 I want to thank my colleagues at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, the Media and Culture Department, and the American Studies De- partment of the University of Amsterdam for the inspiring intellectual envi- ronment. I want to thank Eloe Kingma for helping me to make research pro- jects possible. I want to thank the members of The 9/11 Effect research group of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and the Institute for Culture and History, and in particular my fellow initiators Marieke de Goede, Joyce Goggin, and Margriet Schavemaker. I want to thank Joke Hermes, Jeroen de Kloet, Tarja Laine, Ruth Oldenziel, Maarten Reesink, Marja Roholl, and Jan Teurlings for commenting on parts of the manuscript. I want to thank Sudeep Dasgupta and Wanda Strauven for their feedback at crucial moments. I want to thank José van Dijck, Richard Dyer, Rob Kroes, Giselinde Kuipers, Anna McCarthy, and the anonymous reviewers for reading the entire manuscript. I want to thank Thomas Elsaesser for letting me imitate his concept of karaoke Americanism and Chris Keulemans for letting me appropriate his con- cept of “the American I never was.” I want to thank Erwin Olaf and his team for granting me permission to use the “Ice Cream Parlor” photograph on the book’s cover. I want to thank Jeroen Sondervan, Christine Waslander, and the staff of Amsterdam University Press for turning the manuscript into a book. I want to thank Anniek Meinders for initiating this book project. I want to thank some of my friends who actively kept me from writing, either in Amsterdam, Berlin, New York, or Minneapolis: Christopher Clark, Rob van Duijn, José Freire, Daniel Gerdes and Tesseltje de Lange, Richard Gon- lag, Esther van der Hoeven, Theresa Kimm, Kenneth McRooy, Laura Minder- houd, Timon Moll, Donato Montanari, Francine Parling and John Stueland, Gus Reuchlin and Katinka Schreuder, Nelly Voorhuis and Sara van der Heide, my fellow players of the Amsterdam Tigers basketball team, and my fellow deejays of the Re-Disco-Very crew. I want to thank my (extended) family: my parents Aat Kooijman and Sonja Langeveld, my sister Annelies Kooijman, and my best friends Laura Copier and Maarten Vervaat. I want to thank Stevie, Michael, Diana, Tina, Bruce, Ray, and all the other stars of USA for Africa for introducing me to “America” – and Eddie Murphy for making fun of them. Jaap Kooijman Amsterdam, June 2008 8 fabricating the absolute fake Additional Acknowledgments When Fabricating the Absolute Fake was published in June 2008, no one had heard of Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber, Barack Obama had not yet been elected, and Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston were still alive. For this new edi- tion, the original text has been revised and updated. Chapter six has been add- ed, addressing the intertwinement of politics and pop by discussing Obama through the perspective of celebrity culture. This chapter is partially based on my keynote lecture “The King of Pop and the President of Cool,” held at the 2011 annual conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies. I thank Astrid Fellner and Klaus Heissenberger for their critical feedback. Also newly added is the afterword on using Fabricating the Absolute Fake in courses on American pop culture.

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