Saturday, April 25, 2009
Video of the Week - When Censorship Goes Too Far
This week, The Onion. The Onion, of course, requires no introduction.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Punk's Not Dead, It's in Witness Protection (Part 2 of 2)
Le Tigre has always been a unique band. The group’s original line-up consisted of Kathleen Hannah, former front-woman for feminist punk band Bikini Kill, Sadie Benning, a renowned experimental video artist, and zine publisher Johanna Fateman3. When Benning left the band, she was replaced with J.D. Samson, an activist and artist who was a founding member of an experimental dance troupe called “Dykes Can Dance.”4 Thus, the band has strong ties to the avant guard art scene, something that not many punk bands can claim today.
The music they put together is distinctly political in style. Their most recent album, This Island, featured an entire song made up of sound clips from anti-war protests that were held on the day that the War on Iraq was declared. Their music has a fiercely feminist agenda, and their tour in 2004, during the presidential election, featured voter registration booths in an attempt to mobilize their fans.
Certainly, what Le Tigre does has the attitude of punk rock, but does it have the sound of punk? Le Tigre’s music started out as lo-fi electronic music with heavy emphasis on cheap sound effects and manufactured drumbeats. As the band has evolved, their electronic sound has become more lush and polished, giving them a more mainstream, professional sound, but it is still heavily electronic. This is not to say that Le Tigre’s music is completely devoid of guitars or basses (although it may be completely devoid of any physical drums, I’m not entirely sure about that), but emphasis is always placed on electronic music. Their live show—at least the one I’ve seen—uses very little in the way of live instrumentation. Instead, the show mostly features the three band members singing their songs over prerecorded music while performing mock-cheerleader routines in front of large video screens playing bizarre, experimental videos. How can this be called punk?
According to Le Tigre’s own website:
When pulled over by the Texas highway patrol searched, and questioned individually, each member of Le Tigre answered this question (without prior knowledge of the other responses or hesitation) "we play feminist punk electronic music." Apparently the questioning officer was satisfied with this description as we were calmly instructed to throw the remains of the joint we were carrying by the side of the road, obey the speed limit in Texas and, in the future, keep all prescription drugs in the original bottle with the pharmacist's label! We have yet to see our albums appropriately filed in the FEMINIST PUNK ELECTRONIC section that is so popular at most record stores, but we can dream can't we?5
Le Tigre can retain their ties to the punk community because of their insistence on labeling themselves as punk. Even though their music sounds nothing like the traditional definition of punk that we’ve looked at, their own insistence in calling themselves a punk band allows them to retain that label. However, a good deal of this power they retain in labeling themselves comes from Kathleen Hannah and her connection to the punk scene. Having been a veteran of the riot-grrl6 scene in the 1990’s in her band Bikini Kill, which had a much more traditional punk sound, Hannah is lent some credibility that other experimental punk artists don’t have. If Kathleen Hannah calls her band punk, few will argue with her because of her history in the punk scene. By punk standards, she has earned the right to the label by cutting her teeth in a “real” punk band.
Socialist punk-rocker Dennis Lyxzén was the frontman for the 1990’s punk band The Refused and is currently the lead singer of The (International) Noise Conspiracy. He has, additionally been a member of several other smaller punk acts over the years. Lyxzén’s first band, The Refused, started out as a straight forward hardcore punk band, but grew to develop more of a metal and electronic influence into their music. Their final album would hardly have been considered punk rock at all had it not been for its title: The Shape of Punk to Come: A Chimerical Bombation in 12 Bursts. The title clearly references Ornette Coleman’s 1959 record The Shape of Jazz to Come, which was a seminal record in the free-jazz movement of the 60’s that broke down all the conventions of jazz and music in general. The Shape of Punk to Come disregarded most of punk’s conventions, including electronic elements, metal elements, seven and eight minute songs, and one song which featured a string section. The album, ironically, had a major influence on the “hardcore” bands that came after it, despite the fact that these bands are rarely ever referred to as “real” punk bands.
The philosophy of the album can be summed up by the lyrics to its sixth track, “New Noise”:
How can we expect anyone to listen/If we're using the same old voice?/We need new noise,/New art for the real people.7
This philosophy is expanded on in the album’s liner notes: “we all need to recognize that style in contradiction to fashion is necessary to challenge the conservatism of the youth cultures placed upon us.”8 The Refused, in their later years, believed that punk needed a new direction and a new sound and that, to remain mired in the old sound of punk was too conservative for what the punk movement was really supposed to be about. They saw that the only way to keep the genre revolutionary was to allow it to take on revolutionary new styles.
Lyxzén’s current band, The (International) Noise Conspiracy, couldn’t be farther away from The Refused in terms of their sound. While The Refused was a hardcore punk band with elements of metal and electronic music, The (International) Noise Conspiracy draws heavily on mod-rock influences with bouncy, keyboard oriented music and infectious hooks and melodies. By comparison to The Refused, The (International) Noise Conspiracy are downright tame. Yet the philosophy of t(I)NC is no different from that of The Refused, both in their philosophies about their politics and their philosophies about their music:
We wanted to do a band that played soul music, but punk rock…[a]ll of us used to play in hardcore and punk-rock bands, and we had this will of distortion to hide behind. And we wanted to do something that could give people the same energy and the same intensity, but without the big amps and everything - use a small amp with an undistorted guitar and make the same noise with it.9
In live performances, Lyxzén still talks about bands like The Clash and Bad Religion as being his main influences (notice the image of The Clash in the video above), and he still calls his music punk rock, despite the distinct mod-rock sensibility his new band has developed. Yet, a large part of this is because, over the course of his career, he has “earned” the right to call all of his music punk rock because of his early days in The Refused where he played more traditional punk rock. Furthermore, having named the last Refused album The Shape of Punk to Come he left little room for anyone to argue against his genre categorization.
Many see punk rock as a genre in decline. I suppose the reason this frustrates me so much is that I see the obvious solution to its decline staring me right in the face. This is a case of orthodoxy run amok, allowing traditionalists a stranglehold on what can and cannot be called punk rock. When the sitcom, as a genre, made its transition from the traditional three-camera format to the single-camera format which has become more popular these days, there were no legions of die hard fans arguing vehemently that sitcoms in the new form were not “true” sitcoms. Perhaps this is because the sitcom is a genre with no social group formed around it and, therefore, there was nobody invested enough in the genre to cry foul. However, the other difference between the sitcom and punk rock, is that the sitcom is finding ways to evolve and survive with new innovations while punk rock, or what is traditionally referred to as punk, is dying of stagnation. The only way the genre of punk could ever be saved is by acknowledging these new groups, like The (International) Noise Conspiracy and Le Tigre, as part of the punk rock family, and allowing the music to follow the natural course of evolution that it wants to take.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Punk's Not Dead, It's in Witness Protection (Part 1 of 2)
Well, now that I’ve got my own little corner of the internet to spout off about whatever tickles my fancy, I thought I’d do a blog about something that I’ve written about before in my Livejournal, in papers for my undergrad classes, even in a poem. After spouting off about this informally for a while, I figured I’d put it down on wax here for everyone to read.
As those who know me are aware of, I’ve been a punk fan for quite a long time. The music and the culture drew me in when I was a teenager and I was trying to impress a girl who was really into the music. It amazes me how far the music has come since its humble origins in 1976.1 A small club in New York city, originally designed for country, bluegrass and blues music, started a small music scene where the artists played something so radically different, it shifted the entire direction of music for the next 30 some odd years. Every major musical movement since then has been directly influenced by punk: post-punk, new wave, alternative and indie-rock all have a direct relationship with punk rock. Even heavy metal, which is often seen as punk’s opposite or arch nemesis, has been heavily influenced by punk over the past three decades. Essentially, punk was the restart button for rock music, virtually erasing the prog-rock bands that immediately proceeded them, resetting rock music to the place it had started at in the 1950’s only, now, it had a bit more edge to it.
The earliest definition of punk was restrictively simplistic: three chord songs that are two minutes long, played with a lot of distortion. Clearly, an entire genre could not be born out of a definition as limiting as that. Obviously, the definition was not held to very strictly, as this definition would exclude the 8-minute long opuses of Flipper or guitar-less acts like Suicide or The Screamers, all of which are referred to as punk rock with little debate. Additionally, the early punk bands were all composed of members who were not raised on punk, considering how recently the genre had developed, but had other musical influences which they, of course, incorporated into their styles. Thus, we had punk mixed with rockabilly in the band X, punk mixed with British invasion style rock in The Jam, punk mixed with 50’s style girl group music in Blondie, and punk mixed with everything from reggae to blues to early hip-hop in The Clash. These innovations made for a genre that was diverse and creative and had the ability to evolve far past the boundaries of its original definition.
Therefore, if we can’t abide by the original definition of punk rock, what kind of definition can we propose for it? I would suggest a much looser version of the original definition: chord based rock music, usually played on the guitar, which is often characterized by a loud, abrasive, and confrontational sound. This definition leaves a lot of room for interpretation, but rightfully so. For a genre to have survived for over thirty years, as punk rock has, it would need to have a definition broad enough to allow for innovation and experimentation. Essentially, punk has been abiding by this definition for most of its life, even as many punk fans claim that the original definition still applies.
Recently, for class, I’ve been reading Jason Mittell’s Genre and Television, one of the few texts ever written on genre theory in television. It makes me wish that such an in-depth genre theory study could be done with rock music, especially since, unlike television, rock music creates distinct fan cultures and customs around different genres which would be fascinating to study. Unfortunately, while television has clearly defined genre lines that are used to categorize shows in TV Guide, rock music has blurry genre lines that are subject to much heated and, at times, vicious debates amongst the fan communities.
It’s these arguments over genre distinctions that have gotten the punk rock genre, and community, into trouble. Traditionalist punk fans argue for the purity of punk rock with the famous slogan “Punk’s Not Dead.” Normally, when they invoke this slogan, they are referring to the continued existence of traditional punk bands, which abide by the original definition of the genre or, at least, come as close as possible to that original definition. This, for traditionalists, is what punk should be, and anything that does not fit into that original definition is ruining the purity of the genre. Unfortunately, it seems that these traditionalists have taken control of the genre definitions.
For a genre to evolve, it would, inevitably, need to take on new characteristics. Punk has certainly done this but, because of a desire by traditionalists to keep the genre “pure,” bands who have introduced radical innovations have been labeled as something other than punk. This is despite the fact that these new bands do fit into the broader definition of punk that I have proposed and which, as I’ve stated, punk has essentially been abiding by since its inception. Thus, when I used to tell people that, in my opinion, The Blood Brothers were the best punk band of the 21st century, I would be met with laughter by traditionalists who told me that The Blood Brothers were not a punk band. When I asked what genre they should be categorized under, I heard responses like “hardcore”2 or “post-hardcore” (whatever that is). Yet, The Blood Brothers were a chord based rock band with a distinctly abrasive style of music, which was, arguably, even more abrasive than the original punk bands of the 1970’s. This has been the situation for a lot of bands that have a punk sound that sounds different than the traditional norm, such as At the Drive-In or Pretty Girls Make Graves. Some are relegated to the genre of “hardcore,” while some are placed into the virtually definition-less genre of “indie rock.”
A few of these innovative bands that don’t fit into the usual definition of punk rock have tried to take control of their own genre categorizations by refusing to refer to themselves as anything other than punk. To give two specific examples, I want to next take a look at experimental feminist band Le Tigre, as well as the multiple bands of Dennis Lyxzén.
To be continued...
Video of the Week - The Death of YouTube?
So, I thought I'd start this feature here on Church of the Sonic Death Monkey called "Video of the Week." This week, I wanted to pull up a video that addresses the new "Hulu Tube" controversy. There is the popular video circulating from some organization called "The Real News" that is extremely over-the-top and promotes a lot more gloom and doom than necessary. I really didn't want to put anything up on this site that involved a cartoon of a rabid Mickey Mouse trying to devour You Tube. So I thought I'd put up something from someone who is going to be affected by it. I think he makes a very good point at the end of the video. Even if YouTube does become less of a public sphere than it is right now, all the people on the web who have found a voice through YouTube are not going to be silenced. There will more than likely be a new space created if YouTube no longer becomes an open site.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
No Fantarding Allowed: Anti-Fanning and American Idol
I’m not a regular American Idol watcher by any means. I watched the third season all the way through, and have pretty much ignored every season before and after that one. This season, I turned on the Top 13 week because I had a night off from my Tuesday night class and, I admit, I started to remember why I liked the show. I thought I’d watch the rest of the season, but then remembered that I have a class on Tuesday nights and a poetry reading on Wednesdays, so I wouldn’t be watching much of the show this season. However, tonight, I skipped my Tuesday night class to sort out my taxes at the last minute and, when I finished my taxes a little earlier than I expected, I tuned in to watch the final 7 battle it out on Songs from the Movies week. The show was interesting, but not as interesting as playing along with the infamous anti-fan site VoteForTheWorst.com.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the site, VoteForTheWorst.com, also known as VFTW, is a website specifically designed for “haters” of American Idol. The site is filled with message boards that allow people to post about their hatred of American Idol, which, somehow, they have an encyclopedic knowledge of. There is a thread for people to make insulting photoshopped pictures of the contestants and judges, entire threads dedicated to the hatred of individual contestants, and then there’s the play-by play thread. The play-by-play thread allows users to comment on the show as it’s airing, thus giving users a chance to insult the action as it happens. At the end of the episode, the site’s managers choose the person they consider to be the worst singer of the night, and encourage all of their users to vote for that person, thus “sabotaging” the show by keeping the less talented singers in the competition. The website’s hatred is not limited to American Idol, as the site has also put shows like Canadian Idol and Dancing With the Stars in its crosshairs, but the main focus is always American Idol.
Like many internet message boards, cruelty is not only common, but encouraged. Most notable is the community’s response to Season 8 contestant Danny Gokey, whose wife died shortly before he tried out for the show. The community has developed two nicknames for Gokey: “Deadwife” and “DWD” (Dead Wife Danny). The attacks on contestants and judges are vicious and board members rarely admit to liking a contestant, a judge, or even a specific performance. Perhaps, this is because it’s forbidden by the message board rules:
Yet, the website is so active that, during a normal episode of the show, the server often overloads from the flow of activity on the message boards. The play-by-play thread updates on an almost minute-by-minute basis during each episode, as VFTW users want to get in all their negative opinions of a show that they are watching so intently, they can quote it. This raises the question: why create a massive community around a show that you hate, when you could, instead, simply not watch the show?
VoteForTheWorst.com is not the first site of its kind. The site grew out of the site SurvivorSucks.com which, as the name would suggest, was a site originally designed for users to talk trash about Survivor. SurvivorSucks.com has since expanded, with sections for shows such as Lost and The Apprentice. This sort of “anti-fanning,” if you will, is an interesting phenomenon, and it’s made me wonder why these communities form.
Clearly, the members of these communities do not truly hate the shows the claim to hate. There’s no reason to create an Internet water cooler to discuss a show that you despise. There’s no reason to turn a show that you don’t enjoy into appointment television. What these communities are a result of is the increasingly cynical attitude of early 21st century youth culture and the natural desire of the youth to fit in.
The cynic-chic attitude that began to permeate youth culture in the 90’s is best summed up in an old Simpsons episode from that decade, “Homerpalooza”:
In modern culture, it’s square to be hip. Showing a lack of enthusiasm for something that’s popular is, at least in certain circles, a way to win “cool points.” It has become fashionable to be the hater of everything and to hold high standards that no form of entertainment can live up to. This is especially true of indie and punk cultures, which formed around musical styles in which a band’s obscurity is seen as a badge of honor. As a fan in these communities, the badge of honor is having an in-depth knowledge of obscure and underground artists. Thus, to indulge in the pleasures of something as popular as American Idol is considered, in these circles, to be distinctly uncool.
Thus, in these circles of the youth culture, the only way to enjoy a guilty pleasure like American Idol or Survivor is to claim to be enjoying it ironically. Entire communities develop for people to continually ridicule these shows so that they might live in denial about the pleasures that they get from watching them. Communities like VoteForTheWorst.com give people excuses to be fans of something popular without admitting that they enjoy something mainstream. This is the ultimate paradox of our modern age: to retain one’s coolness, one must pretend to dislike that which is popular.
Is anyone else confused?
1 Forrester, Brent. "Homerpalooza." The Simpsons. Fox. 19 May 1996.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the site, VoteForTheWorst.com, also known as VFTW, is a website specifically designed for “haters” of American Idol. The site is filled with message boards that allow people to post about their hatred of American Idol, which, somehow, they have an encyclopedic knowledge of. There is a thread for people to make insulting photoshopped pictures of the contestants and judges, entire threads dedicated to the hatred of individual contestants, and then there’s the play-by play thread. The play-by-play thread allows users to comment on the show as it’s airing, thus giving users a chance to insult the action as it happens. At the end of the episode, the site’s managers choose the person they consider to be the worst singer of the night, and encourage all of their users to vote for that person, thus “sabotaging” the show by keeping the less talented singers in the competition. The website’s hatred is not limited to American Idol, as the site has also put shows like Canadian Idol and Dancing With the Stars in its crosshairs, but the main focus is always American Idol.
Like many internet message boards, cruelty is not only common, but encouraged. Most notable is the community’s response to Season 8 contestant Danny Gokey, whose wife died shortly before he tried out for the show. The community has developed two nicknames for Gokey: “Deadwife” and “DWD” (Dead Wife Danny). The attacks on contestants and judges are vicious and board members rarely admit to liking a contestant, a judge, or even a specific performance. Perhaps, this is because it’s forbidden by the message board rules:
No motherfucking fantarding.
No one here cares if you find David Cook attractive. No one cares if you're going to buy 300 of an Idol's new CD. VFTW is a board where we make fun of Idol and its contestants, not where we squeal over what they look like naked. If you want to do that, go here [link] or here [link]. Posting one SHORT comment about how you like someone is not fantarding. Any more than that, and no one wants to read it. Yes, we can ban you for saying you find someone attractive. Don't like it? Get out.
Yet, the website is so active that, during a normal episode of the show, the server often overloads from the flow of activity on the message boards. The play-by-play thread updates on an almost minute-by-minute basis during each episode, as VFTW users want to get in all their negative opinions of a show that they are watching so intently, they can quote it. This raises the question: why create a massive community around a show that you hate, when you could, instead, simply not watch the show?
VoteForTheWorst.com is not the first site of its kind. The site grew out of the site SurvivorSucks.com which, as the name would suggest, was a site originally designed for users to talk trash about Survivor. SurvivorSucks.com has since expanded, with sections for shows such as Lost and The Apprentice. This sort of “anti-fanning,” if you will, is an interesting phenomenon, and it’s made me wonder why these communities form.
Clearly, the members of these communities do not truly hate the shows the claim to hate. There’s no reason to create an Internet water cooler to discuss a show that you despise. There’s no reason to turn a show that you don’t enjoy into appointment television. What these communities are a result of is the increasingly cynical attitude of early 21st century youth culture and the natural desire of the youth to fit in.
The cynic-chic attitude that began to permeate youth culture in the 90’s is best summed up in an old Simpsons episode from that decade, “Homerpalooza”:
Teenager 1: Oh look, here comes that cannonball guy, he's cool.
Teenager 2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Teenager 1: I don't even know anymore.1
In modern culture, it’s square to be hip. Showing a lack of enthusiasm for something that’s popular is, at least in certain circles, a way to win “cool points.” It has become fashionable to be the hater of everything and to hold high standards that no form of entertainment can live up to. This is especially true of indie and punk cultures, which formed around musical styles in which a band’s obscurity is seen as a badge of honor. As a fan in these communities, the badge of honor is having an in-depth knowledge of obscure and underground artists. Thus, to indulge in the pleasures of something as popular as American Idol is considered, in these circles, to be distinctly uncool.
Thus, in these circles of the youth culture, the only way to enjoy a guilty pleasure like American Idol or Survivor is to claim to be enjoying it ironically. Entire communities develop for people to continually ridicule these shows so that they might live in denial about the pleasures that they get from watching them. Communities like VoteForTheWorst.com give people excuses to be fans of something popular without admitting that they enjoy something mainstream. This is the ultimate paradox of our modern age: to retain one’s coolness, one must pretend to dislike that which is popular.
Is anyone else confused?
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Branding That Which is Not Yours to Brand: Russell Simmons and Brave New Voices
The following is a blog I posted a few weeks back for one of my classes and I thought I'd reprint it here now that I have the blog up. The series has started airing since I wrote it. I have not watched an episode yet, but I intend to. It's only fair:
Around 2001 I found myself falling, entirely by accident, into the bizarre and wonderful world of Poetry Slam. To describe what Slam is, exactly, is always difficult, and is something that all slam poets are forced to do on a regular basis. The thriving community, which spans most of the United States and several different countries, still remains a relatively unknown phenomenon. At its core is a poetry competition with varying rules, but the constants of each competition are usually as such: 1) Poems must be 3 minutes in length, with a ten second grace period. Any poem that goes over 3 minutes and 10 seconds incurs a time penalty of .5 points for every ten seconds the poem goes over. 2) Judges are chosen at random from the slam audience and must judge on a scale of 0 to 10 with one decimal point. Five judges are usually chosen, the high and low scores are dropped, and the remaining three scores are added up for the poet’s score. 3) Poets are not allowed to use props, costumes, or musical accompaniment, only their words and their performance. Yet, to boil it down to simply a competition with scores fails to describe the thriving community that has grown out of it, a community that has a love/hate relationship with fame and public exposure.
Many of us involved in Poetry Slam are well aware that the idea of a poetry competition looks as silly to some outside observers as the concept of National Air Guitar Championships or the National Rock, Paper, Scissor Championship. Still, for most of us, it’s more than just a hobby, it’s a lifestyle. Slam scenes around the country have built up dedicated social circles, and many poets build their social lives around poetry. In the last apartment I lived in I had three roommates, two of which were from the local poetry scene. My last relationship was with a girl in the Worcester Poetry Slam scene, and she lived in a house where every person living there was a slam poet with the exception of the 11 year old boy living upstairs who was the son of two slam poets. Beyond the local scenes, there is also a national scene that breeds social relationships through the several festivals held every year.
These festivals allow poets from different scenes to come together and compete against each other. There are three festivals held by the “official” slam organization, Poetry Slam Incorporated. These include the National Poetry Slam, in which as many as 80 venues around the country send teams of around 4 or 5 poets to compete with each other, the Individual World Poetry Slam, which is essentially the National Poetry Slam with individuals representing each venue instead of teams, and the Women of the World Poetry Slam, which is essentially the Individual World Poetry Slam but for women only. In addition to these festivals, there are also two festivals held by separate organizations: the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational or CUPSI, a national slam for teams representing different colleges across the country, and Brave New Voices, a version of the National Poetry Slam that is specifically for teenagers.
The slam community has always had two minds about national exposure. Some wish to get the word about slam out to as many people as possible, while some are weary of the compromises with corporate interests that would be required for such exposure. The slam community is generally made up of artists who lean far to the left and would like to see as little corporate involvement as possible in their community. The problem becomes that large festivals require corporate sponsors and, when the organizers pick the wrong sponsor, tensions flare up. The organizers of the 2009 National Poetry Slam recently learned this the hard way when the entire festival was nearly shut down over an argument about a sponsorship from Hustler magazine.
One of the first times that the media took an interest in our community was in 1996, when documentary filmmaker Paul Devlin filmed the 1996 National Poetry Slam in Portland, Oregon and created the documentary SlamNation. The documentary has garnered mixed reviews from the community. Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, reknowned New York slam poet, said of the film:
Others have complained that the representation of the slam community is largely inaccurate. Whether or not it was accurate for the time, in the 13 years since the films release, the National Poetry Slam has more than doubled in size, and the style of poetry has greatly changed from that featured in the film.
Then came Def Poetry Jam. The HBO television series Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam, a spin off of Simmons’s Def Comedy Jam, was a series which put spoken word poetry on television for, as far as I know, the first time. The show featured a combination of prominent slam poets and non-slam related celebrities reciting poems. Some of the most reknowned poets in the scene have appeared on the show, including Big Poppa E, Taylor Mali, and even some of my own friends in the scene such as Eamon Mahoney, Paul Graham, and the late Shannon Leigh. Russell Simmons also took the Def Poetry brand one step further and created a version of the show for Broadway in 2002. Some in the slam community have been happy to see their art form showcased on HBO, while some complained that the show cheapened the entire art form, and told stories of the show handpicking poets with the most attractive, mainstream look and poetic style.
The series is, at this point, said to be done, but that hasn’t stopped Russell Simmons from taking one more step in commercializing the slam culture. Starting this April, HBO will be airing a new miniseries: Russell Simmons Presents Brave New Voices. The series, narrated by Queen Latifah, follows seven teams from different cities on their way to the Brave New Voices festival in 2008. Rather than just showcasing poems, this series intends to tell the stories of the performers as well.2
I think that this newest show is the most problematic representation of the slam culture that we’ve seen so far. The documentary, SlamNation, for all of its faults, only sought to document an existing festival and culture for an audience. Def Poetry Jam, while it did feature many slam poets, also featured celebrities such as Lou Reed or Cedric the Entertainer reciting poetry. Thus, Russell Simmons branding the show with his own name wasn’t exactly a way of co-opting the culture. Nobody holds a copyright on spoken word and what he did, while it did pull heavily from slam, was a separate entity from Slam Poetry.
What becomes problematic about Russell Simmons Presents Brave New Voices is that Russell Simmons is taking a pre-existing festival and culture and putting his own name on it to brand it as his own. As someone who was a competitor in The Brave New Voices festival back in 2003, I can tell you that it did not just spring up in 2008 because Russell Simmons decided to put a camera in front of it.
I am not opposed to the slam scene getting more national exposure. I worry about how the exposure will cause the scene to grow larger than it already has, making it even more difficult to manage in the coming years, but I do believe that people in the community should try to bring more people into the fold in any way possible. My problem is not even with HBO or Russell Simmons choosing to broadcast the festival on national television. My problem is specifically with the words “Russell Simmons Presents” being in the title. Russell Simmons, an outsider to slam, has no right to claim ownership over a community that has been growing since long before he decided to capitalize on it. If the festival is going to be broadcast on HBO, credit should be given to those who worked so hard to build it into what it is now. Branding does not give one the right to take credit for someone else’s hard work.
Furthermore, he is also branding a community that has become a part of so many of our lives. While Def Poetry Jam was, as I said, a different beast than slam itself, this new series crosses the line and is actually depicting our slam culture. To give a rather extreme example, if Rupert Murdoch presented a series of specials for Black History Month and branded them as Rupert Murdoch Presents Black History Month or even Fox Presents Black History Month, there would be an instant uproar. Rupert Murdoch, not being black, does not have the right to brand Black History Month as his own. This is not to say that the Slam Poetry community is tantamount to an actual race, but it is a community that is special to a great many people.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen more Slam Poets expressing outrage over this co-opting of our culture. Perhaps they’ve grown so used to Russell Simmons using our art form for his own commercial gain that they’ve simply decided to give up the fight. However, what Russell Simmons is doing here is much more of an affront to the community than anything he did with Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam. He isn’t simply using our artists for his show, he’s claiming our entire culture as his own. I worry that, when we someday look back on the history of Slam Poetry, Russell Simmons’s name will be covering up the names of those who actually did work to put the scene together.
1 O'Keefe Aptowicz, Cristin. Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam. New York City: Soft Skull P, 2008.
2 "Russell Simmons Introduces Brave New Voices on HBO." Associated Content. 8 Mar. 2009. Associated Content Inc. 24 Mar. 2009 http://www.associatedcontent.com.
Around 2001 I found myself falling, entirely by accident, into the bizarre and wonderful world of Poetry Slam. To describe what Slam is, exactly, is always difficult, and is something that all slam poets are forced to do on a regular basis. The thriving community, which spans most of the United States and several different countries, still remains a relatively unknown phenomenon. At its core is a poetry competition with varying rules, but the constants of each competition are usually as such: 1) Poems must be 3 minutes in length, with a ten second grace period. Any poem that goes over 3 minutes and 10 seconds incurs a time penalty of .5 points for every ten seconds the poem goes over. 2) Judges are chosen at random from the slam audience and must judge on a scale of 0 to 10 with one decimal point. Five judges are usually chosen, the high and low scores are dropped, and the remaining three scores are added up for the poet’s score. 3) Poets are not allowed to use props, costumes, or musical accompaniment, only their words and their performance. Yet, to boil it down to simply a competition with scores fails to describe the thriving community that has grown out of it, a community that has a love/hate relationship with fame and public exposure.
Many of us involved in Poetry Slam are well aware that the idea of a poetry competition looks as silly to some outside observers as the concept of National Air Guitar Championships or the National Rock, Paper, Scissor Championship. Still, for most of us, it’s more than just a hobby, it’s a lifestyle. Slam scenes around the country have built up dedicated social circles, and many poets build their social lives around poetry. In the last apartment I lived in I had three roommates, two of which were from the local poetry scene. My last relationship was with a girl in the Worcester Poetry Slam scene, and she lived in a house where every person living there was a slam poet with the exception of the 11 year old boy living upstairs who was the son of two slam poets. Beyond the local scenes, there is also a national scene that breeds social relationships through the several festivals held every year.
These festivals allow poets from different scenes to come together and compete against each other. There are three festivals held by the “official” slam organization, Poetry Slam Incorporated. These include the National Poetry Slam, in which as many as 80 venues around the country send teams of around 4 or 5 poets to compete with each other, the Individual World Poetry Slam, which is essentially the National Poetry Slam with individuals representing each venue instead of teams, and the Women of the World Poetry Slam, which is essentially the Individual World Poetry Slam but for women only. In addition to these festivals, there are also two festivals held by separate organizations: the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational or CUPSI, a national slam for teams representing different colleges across the country, and Brave New Voices, a version of the National Poetry Slam that is specifically for teenagers.
The slam community has always had two minds about national exposure. Some wish to get the word about slam out to as many people as possible, while some are weary of the compromises with corporate interests that would be required for such exposure. The slam community is generally made up of artists who lean far to the left and would like to see as little corporate involvement as possible in their community. The problem becomes that large festivals require corporate sponsors and, when the organizers pick the wrong sponsor, tensions flare up. The organizers of the 2009 National Poetry Slam recently learned this the hard way when the entire festival was nearly shut down over an argument about a sponsorship from Hustler magazine.
One of the first times that the media took an interest in our community was in 1996, when documentary filmmaker Paul Devlin filmed the 1996 National Poetry Slam in Portland, Oregon and created the documentary SlamNation. The documentary has garnered mixed reviews from the community. Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, reknowned New York slam poet, said of the film:
[SlamNation] showcased the best poetry and performances from the best poets across the country, and all within the anxiety-provoking context of the National Poetry Slam. One viewing of the movie could inspire a dozen new poems, and the seamless perfection of the group pieces found in the movie would forever change the number of and quality of the group work presented at the Nationals. It was also the perfect poetry slam propaganda for starting and encouraging new poetry slam venues.1
Others have complained that the representation of the slam community is largely inaccurate. Whether or not it was accurate for the time, in the 13 years since the films release, the National Poetry Slam has more than doubled in size, and the style of poetry has greatly changed from that featured in the film.
Then came Def Poetry Jam. The HBO television series Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam, a spin off of Simmons’s Def Comedy Jam, was a series which put spoken word poetry on television for, as far as I know, the first time. The show featured a combination of prominent slam poets and non-slam related celebrities reciting poems. Some of the most reknowned poets in the scene have appeared on the show, including Big Poppa E, Taylor Mali, and even some of my own friends in the scene such as Eamon Mahoney, Paul Graham, and the late Shannon Leigh. Russell Simmons also took the Def Poetry brand one step further and created a version of the show for Broadway in 2002. Some in the slam community have been happy to see their art form showcased on HBO, while some complained that the show cheapened the entire art form, and told stories of the show handpicking poets with the most attractive, mainstream look and poetic style.
The series is, at this point, said to be done, but that hasn’t stopped Russell Simmons from taking one more step in commercializing the slam culture. Starting this April, HBO will be airing a new miniseries: Russell Simmons Presents Brave New Voices. The series, narrated by Queen Latifah, follows seven teams from different cities on their way to the Brave New Voices festival in 2008. Rather than just showcasing poems, this series intends to tell the stories of the performers as well.2
I think that this newest show is the most problematic representation of the slam culture that we’ve seen so far. The documentary, SlamNation, for all of its faults, only sought to document an existing festival and culture for an audience. Def Poetry Jam, while it did feature many slam poets, also featured celebrities such as Lou Reed or Cedric the Entertainer reciting poetry. Thus, Russell Simmons branding the show with his own name wasn’t exactly a way of co-opting the culture. Nobody holds a copyright on spoken word and what he did, while it did pull heavily from slam, was a separate entity from Slam Poetry.
What becomes problematic about Russell Simmons Presents Brave New Voices is that Russell Simmons is taking a pre-existing festival and culture and putting his own name on it to brand it as his own. As someone who was a competitor in The Brave New Voices festival back in 2003, I can tell you that it did not just spring up in 2008 because Russell Simmons decided to put a camera in front of it.
I am not opposed to the slam scene getting more national exposure. I worry about how the exposure will cause the scene to grow larger than it already has, making it even more difficult to manage in the coming years, but I do believe that people in the community should try to bring more people into the fold in any way possible. My problem is not even with HBO or Russell Simmons choosing to broadcast the festival on national television. My problem is specifically with the words “Russell Simmons Presents” being in the title. Russell Simmons, an outsider to slam, has no right to claim ownership over a community that has been growing since long before he decided to capitalize on it. If the festival is going to be broadcast on HBO, credit should be given to those who worked so hard to build it into what it is now. Branding does not give one the right to take credit for someone else’s hard work.
Furthermore, he is also branding a community that has become a part of so many of our lives. While Def Poetry Jam was, as I said, a different beast than slam itself, this new series crosses the line and is actually depicting our slam culture. To give a rather extreme example, if Rupert Murdoch presented a series of specials for Black History Month and branded them as Rupert Murdoch Presents Black History Month or even Fox Presents Black History Month, there would be an instant uproar. Rupert Murdoch, not being black, does not have the right to brand Black History Month as his own. This is not to say that the Slam Poetry community is tantamount to an actual race, but it is a community that is special to a great many people.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen more Slam Poets expressing outrage over this co-opting of our culture. Perhaps they’ve grown so used to Russell Simmons using our art form for his own commercial gain that they’ve simply decided to give up the fight. However, what Russell Simmons is doing here is much more of an affront to the community than anything he did with Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam. He isn’t simply using our artists for his show, he’s claiming our entire culture as his own. I worry that, when we someday look back on the history of Slam Poetry, Russell Simmons’s name will be covering up the names of those who actually did work to put the scene together.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Buffy vs. Twilight: Depictions of Women in Vampire Stories
So, as a heterosexual male who is almost a quarter of a century old, this is an embarassing thing to admit, but I'll have to say it: tonight, I rented Twilight out of pure curiosity. I wanted to see what the big hubub was over twinkly vampires and restrained sexuality that made all the pre-teen girls turn out to the theaters in droves. I'll admit, I didn't have a bad time watching it. The characters were interesting and sympathetic, and watching all the kids getting ready for prom brought back good memories of my high school days. What struck me as particularly interesting, though, was the fact that young girls across the country were so enthralled by this love story that they didn't notice, or didn't care, that the story was so disempowering for women.
Perhaps it's unfair for me to compare the movie to Buffy, since the two main similarities between them are that they both contain vampires and I've watched both of them recently. Yet, the vampire element does put them in a similar genre, and its interesting to see how the movie Twilight and the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer use the same mythology to give distinctly different visions of femininity.
The first thing that struck me in Twilight was the fact that the vampires contain such supernatural speed and strength that humans have no hope of defeating them. When Bella is captured by the vampire, James, she has no way to defend herself other than with the help of the Cullen family. Buffy, on the other hand, shows a world in which the vampires, while stronger than the average human, can be defeated and killed by humans. While the series focuses on the one woman in the world granted the strength to be able to defeat vampires, her friends, who are not blessed with such powers, show themselves capable of defeating vampires, just with a little extra effort.
Thus, when Bella, in Twilight, finds herself inches from death at the hands of a vampire, her only savior is Edward Cullen, and his family who shows up afterwards. To be fair, the Cullen family is not all male, but it is a distincrly patriarchal family (the mission of the Cullen family is often said to be the mission of Carlisle Cullen, the "father") and Edward is the one leading the fight to protect her. Bella esentially becomes the damsel in distress, incapable of defending herself.
Joss Whedon, when he created Buffy, set out to intentionally show a more empowered version of women than what is normally seen in the horror genre. Rather than the blonde, feminine character being seen as the damsel in distress, he wanted to put one such woman in a position of power. In addition to her, there was Willow, who developed magical powers to assist her best friend. Add in Anya, Cordelia, Tara, Dawn, Faith, and the potential slayers in season 7, and you had a female centric team working to defend the world from vampires. The men in the series either served in an advisory capacity (Giles) or, in an interesting gender role reversal, as damsels in distress (Xander).
This is important considering the sexual role Vampirism has always played in fiction, dating back even to the earliest stories about them. The penetrating nature of their attack is distinctly sexual, as is the fact that it's normally a male vampire attacking female victims. The violent and non-consentual nature of the attack means that a vampire attack is usually symbolic of rape. Thus, we're left with two different views of how women are protected from predators in these two stories: in Buffy, we see powerful women protecting other women (although not exclusively, there are plenty of male victims too), in Twilight we see a woman whose only salvation from a predatory attack is a man with the same power and penchant for violence as her attacker.
Admittedly, I've only seen the first Twilight movie, and have not read either that book or any of the subsequent sequels. Perhaps Bella becomes more empowered as the books go on. I certainly hope she does, because I like her as a character and would like to see her become stronger. Still, there seems to be no intention to create a strong, pro-feminist character in the first movie of the series, and that doesn't particularly give me hope for an future installments.
Perhaps it's unfair for me to compare the movie to Buffy, since the two main similarities between them are that they both contain vampires and I've watched both of them recently. Yet, the vampire element does put them in a similar genre, and its interesting to see how the movie Twilight and the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer use the same mythology to give distinctly different visions of femininity.
The first thing that struck me in Twilight was the fact that the vampires contain such supernatural speed and strength that humans have no hope of defeating them. When Bella is captured by the vampire, James, she has no way to defend herself other than with the help of the Cullen family. Buffy, on the other hand, shows a world in which the vampires, while stronger than the average human, can be defeated and killed by humans. While the series focuses on the one woman in the world granted the strength to be able to defeat vampires, her friends, who are not blessed with such powers, show themselves capable of defeating vampires, just with a little extra effort.
Thus, when Bella, in Twilight, finds herself inches from death at the hands of a vampire, her only savior is Edward Cullen, and his family who shows up afterwards. To be fair, the Cullen family is not all male, but it is a distincrly patriarchal family (the mission of the Cullen family is often said to be the mission of Carlisle Cullen, the "father") and Edward is the one leading the fight to protect her. Bella esentially becomes the damsel in distress, incapable of defending herself.
Joss Whedon, when he created Buffy, set out to intentionally show a more empowered version of women than what is normally seen in the horror genre. Rather than the blonde, feminine character being seen as the damsel in distress, he wanted to put one such woman in a position of power. In addition to her, there was Willow, who developed magical powers to assist her best friend. Add in Anya, Cordelia, Tara, Dawn, Faith, and the potential slayers in season 7, and you had a female centric team working to defend the world from vampires. The men in the series either served in an advisory capacity (Giles) or, in an interesting gender role reversal, as damsels in distress (Xander).
This is important considering the sexual role Vampirism has always played in fiction, dating back even to the earliest stories about them. The penetrating nature of their attack is distinctly sexual, as is the fact that it's normally a male vampire attacking female victims. The violent and non-consentual nature of the attack means that a vampire attack is usually symbolic of rape. Thus, we're left with two different views of how women are protected from predators in these two stories: in Buffy, we see powerful women protecting other women (although not exclusively, there are plenty of male victims too), in Twilight we see a woman whose only salvation from a predatory attack is a man with the same power and penchant for violence as her attacker.
Admittedly, I've only seen the first Twilight movie, and have not read either that book or any of the subsequent sequels. Perhaps Bella becomes more empowered as the books go on. I certainly hope she does, because I like her as a character and would like to see her become stronger. Still, there seems to be no intention to create a strong, pro-feminist character in the first movie of the series, and that doesn't particularly give me hope for an future installments.
Introduction
Welcome to the Church of the Sonic Death Monkey! My name is Trevor Byrne-Smith and this is my little Post-Modern Pleasure Palace, so to speak. That is if you believe in the existence of post-modernism and your pleasure is intellectual musings about popular culture.
Perhaps I got us off on the wrong foot. I'm a graduate student at Emerson College working on a degree in Visual and Media Arts. I begin my thesis soon and then hope to go for a PhD in Media Studies when I finish my Masters. In an attempt to warm up my intellectual muscles, if you will, I started this blog to post some of my more academic writings about media studies. Here you'll find me waxing intellectual about television, film, music, new media, and anything else media related that might spring into my head. I don't claim to be a professional or a professor or even necessarily an expert. If you're looking for blogs from actual professionals in the field, there's a good selection of them in my Blog Roll. All I claim to be is a student, a thinker, and a fan.
Much like the characters in the movie that I stole the title of this blog from (High Fidelity), I don't believe that media and popular culture are mere throw away elements of our society. Every dry piece of classic literature your high school english teachers made you read was, at one point in history, written off as a base and vulgar element of modern society. Did you know that the novel, as an art form, was originally criticized for being nothing more than frivolous entertainment? Now we force teenagers to write papers about them because we believe they're culturally relevant. Oh, how times have changed. How much easier it is to see value in the past than in the present.
Popular culture is a part of who we are and how we live our lives, whether we like it or not. Some complain that it poisons or cheapens our society. Even if you're a pessimist, though, you can't pretend that popular culture doesn't affect our daily lives. As new technologies make the world smaller and make media more mobile, none of us can escape the grasp of media, short of becoming hermits living in the woods. Rather than rejecting popular culture altogether, why don't we study it, recognize its successes and failures, and start a dialogue about it? We can't eliminate television, radio, film or the internet from our lives, so why not open up discussions on how we can improve these things?
To quote from my favorite short lived television show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip:
"I'm writing about it because what's happened here is important. I think what's happening here is important; I think popular culture in general...[is] important."
So sit back, relax, find a seat on the couch somewhere between Roger Rabbit and Nosferatu, and enjoy The Church of the Sonic Death Monkey.
Perhaps I got us off on the wrong foot. I'm a graduate student at Emerson College working on a degree in Visual and Media Arts. I begin my thesis soon and then hope to go for a PhD in Media Studies when I finish my Masters. In an attempt to warm up my intellectual muscles, if you will, I started this blog to post some of my more academic writings about media studies. Here you'll find me waxing intellectual about television, film, music, new media, and anything else media related that might spring into my head. I don't claim to be a professional or a professor or even necessarily an expert. If you're looking for blogs from actual professionals in the field, there's a good selection of them in my Blog Roll. All I claim to be is a student, a thinker, and a fan.
Much like the characters in the movie that I stole the title of this blog from (High Fidelity), I don't believe that media and popular culture are mere throw away elements of our society. Every dry piece of classic literature your high school english teachers made you read was, at one point in history, written off as a base and vulgar element of modern society. Did you know that the novel, as an art form, was originally criticized for being nothing more than frivolous entertainment? Now we force teenagers to write papers about them because we believe they're culturally relevant. Oh, how times have changed. How much easier it is to see value in the past than in the present.
Popular culture is a part of who we are and how we live our lives, whether we like it or not. Some complain that it poisons or cheapens our society. Even if you're a pessimist, though, you can't pretend that popular culture doesn't affect our daily lives. As new technologies make the world smaller and make media more mobile, none of us can escape the grasp of media, short of becoming hermits living in the woods. Rather than rejecting popular culture altogether, why don't we study it, recognize its successes and failures, and start a dialogue about it? We can't eliminate television, radio, film or the internet from our lives, so why not open up discussions on how we can improve these things?
To quote from my favorite short lived television show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip:
"I'm writing about it because what's happened here is important. I think what's happening here is important; I think popular culture in general...[is] important."
So sit back, relax, find a seat on the couch somewhere between Roger Rabbit and Nosferatu, and enjoy The Church of the Sonic Death Monkey.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)