The Roots and Gadgets of Pop Culture in the Late 20Th Century Copy

Jeremy Marquez Gd 491 - 602 10 Dec 2018 The Roots and Gadgets of Pop Culture in the Late 20th Century Thesis Statement: The recontextualization and aggregation of Modernism is the essence of the innovations of music, album art, and the supporting subcultures that emerged from 1968-1982. “ I never know which version I’m going to be I seem to have so many choices open to me.” -Wire1 As a child in the 70s, my parent’s record collection had a lasting impression on me. In the hazy environment of a psychedelic-soul and funk-flavored household, I would gaze for hours at the colorful imagery of the gatefold record-covers while the sounds from my dad’s stereo-geek system permeated my senses. Beginning in my teens, my discovery of the zeitgeist of punk and its peripheries had its intended deconstructive effects on me, and expanded my perspective on music, the imagery associated with it, and the supporting subcultures that surround them to fortify a vital gestalt foundation for my creative process. 1 Wire (1979). 40 versions 154. Pink Flag Records, 1979 Marquez !2 Now as a design student armed with research and critical thinking, I’ve been able to place these creative novelties and objects in a socio-cultural context; a postmodern popular culture in a consumer/corporate neoliberal society. I’ve embarked on an analysis of this particular era of the late 20th century in order to explore its history and characteristics, and the subsequential philosophies that lay the groundwork for popular culture in the last 40 years. Aside from years of listening to music, researching informed music critique, and curating and producing art, music, and culture events at Revoluciones Collective Art Space, critical literary theory provided me with additional analytical tools to create a dialogue about these creative products within the context of the postmodern condition. For better of worse, I myself unwittingly contributed to the wane of subcultures in my hometown of Denver through homogenization and commodification; siphoning them through a proto-hipster, late-capitalist fetishization of surfaces. At a talk at the Whitney Museum in 1982 entitled, Postmodernism and Consumer Society, Frederic Jameson, describes postmodernism as the crafting of pastiche: “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor: pastiche is to parody what that curious thing, the modern Marquez !3 practice of a kind of blank irony, is to what Wayne Booth calls the stable and comic ironies of, say, the 18th century.” In Jameson’s view, pastiche is the appropriation of past styles, ideas, and themes into a centerless and hollow spectacle. Pastiche can be seen as one of the principle concepts of the postmodern perspective. By borrowing objects from modernism, postmodern culture recontextualizing them as a surface decoration. In 1971, David Bowie heralded in Warhol’s vision for a brave new world with a song called “Andy Warhol”, by accentuating the surfaces and poses of Warhol’s factory, and simultaneously revealing the hybridity of the artist and his artistic creations. “Dress my friends up just for show ... Andy Warhol looks a scream Hang him on my wall Andy Warhol, Silver Screen Can't tell them apart at all”2 The following year, David Bowie released what I call the first postmodern record, entitled The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The rockstar making a record about a rockstar was the first of its kind in a disillusioned industry recovering from the mass hallucination of the 60s. Bowie sought to create a character whose music was highly influenced by Lou Reed, had the style and swagger of Iggy Pop, 2 Bowie, David (1971). Andy Warhol. Hunky Dory. RCA Records Marquez !4 and an alien who predicted that mankind would face it’s apocalypse in five years. Ziggy Stardust was a tragic tale of substance abuse and the struggle with fame which Bowie himself would ironically fall victim to during the touring and performing of the album. The line between the artist and his art began to blur, and reality and fiction became indistinguishable for Bowie. This confusion of life and fiction is sometimes called hyperreality. In Simulacra and Simulation, French sociologist Baudrillard defined "hyperreality" as "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality"3 Over the next five years, Bowie would constantly redefine himself, his productions, and continue to devise new characters and themes for each of his albums. To Bowie, these characters reflected aspects of his own personality and allowed him to fragment his own identity for the sake of a public spectacle. Along with the corresponding characters, each album had its own mode, and Bowie often self-consciously collected styles from various sources without shame; wearing his influences on his laced sleeve. His music was a bricolage of folk, art-rock, psychedelia, glam, proto-punk, and eventually his own brand of Philly Soul. In 1975, Bowie released the Young Americans album, and became the first white performers on Soul Train. As the Thin White Duke, he took key snippets of the black American R&B style and sutured them up into what he called “Plastic Soul”, a fitting appellation for his slick-surfaced simulation. Bowie’s postmodern styles and influence from the 70s would extend into the 80s along with that of other musicians, artists, and authors. 3 Baudrillard, Jean (1994). Simulacra & Simulation. University of Michigan Press. p. 1. Marquez !5 In the early 1970s, many rock bands reacted against the ideals of the flower-power music landscape by subversively extracting the signifiers of rock ‘n’ roll culture and wearing them as playful fashion. In the late 1960s, near the beginning of the history of the diaspora of black electronic music, dub was a prime example of the co-evolution of technology and postmodern art forms. Jamaican DJs such as King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry spliced audio tape loops and began to strip down reggae tracks to their bare rhythmic elements, the bass and drum, and reintroduce the guitar and vocals into analog minutiae as texture. They called these tracks versions, and eventually these versions would appear as b-sides to many reggae record singles. The dub versions would then spawn their own versions, and versions of those versions. Dub versions can be seen as akin to Baudrillard’s simulacra; copies of copies. In 1972, English art-rock band Roxy Music released their self-titled debut with mixed referencing of multiple styles, riffs, and nods to rockabillies original template, pompadours, ironic rockstar cliches of costume stage wear, and frontman Bryan Ferry’s neo- Sinatra crooning and his entire ironic lounge singer style. The album art was designed as an homage to 50s pin-up models. In an attempt to elevate pop into an art avant-garde, Roxy Music added theatricality and a dissolution of identity to an exhausted popular idiom. The opening track, Remake/Remodel, declares their modus operandi by referencing, through each instrument’s solo in a jazz-style breakdown, random, Marquez !6 discrete musical bits. The guitar recalls the Peter Gunn Theme, “Day Tripper” by the Beatles on bass, and the horns of Wagner’s “Rise of the Valkyries” are mimicked by Andy McKay on sax. A look at the lyrics, delivered in Ferry’s neo-Sinatra crooning, reveal what seem to be a typical rock/pop theme of the narrator and his female love interest, but delivered with female signifiers describing an automobile. Upon getting fired from Roxy Music in 1972 for stealing the glory from frontman Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno embarked on a solo career that would position him as a renaissance postmodernist. Taking cues from the 60s avant-garde leaders such as Lamont Young and John Cage, Eno explored music from an non-musical approach that was rooted in artistic processes, chance, and systems. Inspired by Steve Reich’s tape recorder manipulations, Eno began to compose what he called “sound paintings” with collages from bits of reel-to-reel tape recordings. By applying non-musical sounds and blending them into pop music structures, Eno subverted the high / low cultural boundary with a vision of what art could be. By the mid-seventies, Eno was producing music with David Bowie and David Byrne (Talking Heads) which juxtaposed samples of field recordings and Middle Eastern and African rhythm and textures with western pop song structures. These were extremely prolific and innovative times for all involved, but their outputs weren’t received without criticism. Accusations of neo-colonialism were thrown at albums such as David Bowie’s Lodger, and David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush with Ghosts where white Brits and Americans appropriated music of the Third World for their own ends. This brings to mind Poststructuralist Edward Said’s notions of Post-colonialism and criticisms of Western culture’s bias, abuse, and misunderstanding of Eastern cultural artifacts. Marquez !7 By the early to mid-70s, Jamaican-born dj Kool Herc used two turntables and two copies of the same funk record and began to cut them back and forth to extend the “break”, the rhythm breakdown in the track, and create a style that was intended to prolong the dance sequences of dancing crews in the Bronx.4 Soon other djs such as Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash followed suit, blending funk and soul records with an audio mixer, using the “scratch” technique as rhythm and texture, and pioneering sampling as defining characteristics of the burgeoning Hip-hop genre.

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