Spring Breakdown poster; image courtesy of wikimedia.org
Today’s entry is on Spring Breakdown, which apparently one Facebook commenter went into labor while watching. Incentive!
Posts Tagged ‘Facebook
Barbie gone Gaga; image courtesy of flickr.com
Just wanted to make sure you all heard about the unofficial Lady Gaga dolls created by Veik11, which I saw one friend post on another friend’s Facebook page earlier this morning. If not, Perez Hilton is excited about them. As with all things Gaga, I’m ambivalent. While my overall opinion isn’t too different from how I felt about Mattel’s Ladies of the ’80s collection, I have a few notes particular to Gaga in doll form. Pros and cons time.
Pros
1. I like the DIY spirit of Veik11′s dolls and his approach to fandom. Better a Bratz or Barbie doll be turned into Gaga by the owner than stay a Bratz or Barbie doll. I can only hope girls and boys were this creative in turning their gifts into artistic projects.
2. Likewise, better she be outfitted in crazy, homemade versions of Gaga couture than the store-bought glittery pink duds she tends to wear in the box.
3. I like the idea that any doll can be turned into Gaga, regardless of color. In fact, having a black or Latina Gaga might ease some of the blonde white lady racial tension she inherited from Madonna.
Cons
1. Even better if a Ken doll be turned into Gaga, don’t you think? I do.
2. Let’s ugly Gaga up a bit more, shall we? Cover her in more blood, dye some of her hair black or purple, and give her a longer nose. In short, make her more grotesque. In doing so, owners might be honoring their burgeoning feminist idol while at the same time challenging the normative constructs of both the doll and the girl in her.
3. Give her a band or something. Maybe bring in a stuffed animal to play kazoo. Maybe have a Groovy Girl on the drums. Let’s just make sure that the diva doesn’t have to stand alone.
4. Barbie doesn’t have to be Gaga. She can be whatever the owner wants her to be, whether it’s a sleeping companion, a boy, a drag queen, the first female President of the United States, an audience for his or her unseen short film, or a discarded figure on the floor.
Cover of Movie Music: The Film Reader; image courtesy of routledge.com
So, one thing I didn’t mention in my indictment of (500) Days of Summer is the soundtrack. While I may have mentioned my thoughts on how music culture is configured in the movie, I didn’t discuss the soundtrack itself: how it serves to bolster the narrative, enforce the movie’s indie-ness, or its commercial success as an ancillary product.
I didn’t discuss it because I don’t really have any opinion on it. I wasn’t particularly familiar with or blown away by the songs in the movie — I thought the music was pleasant. I’d imagine it’s doing a respectable job as its own product and as an extension of the movie’s marketing campaign, though say this while qualifying that running the numbers is now a completely different game than it was, say, in the 1990s, when soundtracks were big business that could easily be reflected by a quick glance at the Billboard charts. Now, we have iTunes, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook groups, online ad campaigns, innumerable blogs, and several other outlets fragmenting the marketplace. But I’d imagine the soundtrack is doing well.
All this is to say that I wondered what the scholars who contributed to Movie Music: The Film Reader would make of the movie’s soundtrack. The anthology is a slim collection of essays edited by Kay Dickenson that was published in 2002 but primarily feature pieces from the 1990s, a decade that I’ve already defined (along with many others) as a peak time for soundtracks, which is reflected in some of the scholars’ inquiries. Perhaps it drove home for me just how temporal the objects of analysis in media studies can be, particularly music. A good reminder, if still a frustrating dillemma.
With that said, I thought I’d briefly highlight some essays that I found useful.
Jeff Smith’s “Structural interactions of the film and record industries” is a fascinating and concise industrial history of the relationship between record labels and film studios from the 1950s on. Starting out as a mutual-benefit relationship, film studios tried to form their own record labels with the intent to fashion albums and recording talent in-house, which was met with little success. As a result, record labels kept the upper-hand from the 1970s on, but left movie studios the opportunity to further develop cross-promotional and synergistic strategies without having to worry about A and R.
This is interesting to read alongside romanticized notions that the 1970s was a renaissance period for maverick filmmaking that eschewed studio control (I specifically like to think of this story while working out the bureaucratic steps that may have been taken in order for Martin Scorsese to get the rights for The Ronnettes’ “Be My Baby” for Mean Streets).
And, as Smith’s piece was originally published in 1998, I also think of it as a harbinger of deregulation measures and conglomeration to that defined the culture industry at the end of the 20th century.
Lawrence Grossberg’s “Cinema, Postmodernity, and Authenticity” gives a cursory glance at the importance of rock music in teen pics from the 1950s on, but pays particular attention to movies from the 1980s (specifically the ones aligned with the Brat Pack). He argues that while rock music is meant to indicate an intergenerational upheaval of value systems between establishment parents and rebel kids, movies from the 1980s actually saw teen protagonists questioning and grappling with identity politics while ultimately (or presumably) toeing the line, doing very little to break down gender norms, class divides, racist ideologies, and heterosexist agendas. At the same time, these movies incorporating more a post-modern political sensibility through irony, parody, and reference.
I wonder what Grossberg would say about how French electronic act M83 hails the 1980s, specifically in 2008′s Saturdays = Youth, an album heavily indebted to both the sound and style of the Brat Pack movies and soundtracks. I’m sure he’d get a chuckle out of learning that Anthony Gonzalez, the man behind M83, is in his mid-20s and too young to remember these movies “authentically.”
Kay Dickinson’s “Pop, Speed, Teenagers, and the ‘MTV Aesthetic’” is an interesting look into how teen movies and their soundtracks incorporate the look and sound of MTV, specifically looking at Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes (a movie dear to my heart — I still have a copy of the soundtrack and nursed a brief crush on DiCaprio when he was at his most androgynous). Dickenson is particularly interested in three aspects:
1) The symbiotic relationship between the highly stylized movie, its soundtrack, and the music videos that accompany both.
2) The deliberate uniformity of each text’s aesthetic and how they maximize youth-oriented marketing potential for what was widely regarded as a teen movie.
3) How the fast editing style of the movie and music videos popularized by MTV result in visual imperceptability (i.e., that the eye cannot keep up with the images); while a bit of a tangent, this phenomenon reminded me of John Cline’s Flow column about the increasing incomprehensibility of many segments in action films shot on digital camera.
I think there are limits to Dickenson’s argument — the Brat Pack movies or the Hughes-influenced teen pics from the late 1990s, which were not so reliant on fast editing as they were on soundtracks, trendy clothes, slang, and photogenic young actors, talking about their feelings still uphold the MTV aesthetic in my mind, perhaps suggesting that the network did not have a uniform visual style.
Also, there’s minimal discussion of how Luhrmann’s kinetic style heightened the story’s romantic elements and how this might have played into its intense popularity among teenagers (seriously, I saw this movie dozens of times during my junior high and high school days; I also assume that DiCaprio’s vaunted teen idol status as a result of the movie led him to be cast in Titanic, a movie beloved by kids of my generation, including my friend Brandi, who saw the movie at least sixteen times in theaters and taped the ticket stubs to the wall by her bed). I’d be very curious how Dickenson reads Luhrmann’s visual style against Hughes’s (and Dawson’s Creek creator-wordsmith Kevin Williamson’s) use of dialogue, particularly regarding matters of the heart.
Lisa A. Lewis’s “A Madonna ‘Wanna-Be’ Story on Film” is a piece I was already familiar with because, as I’ve mentioned numerous times on here, Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference, from which the essay originally emerged, was a formative text for me as a media studies scholar.
In this piece, Lewis does a formidable job mapping out a multitude of texts surrounding Madonna in the mid-1980s. There’s star text (Madonna). There’s film text (Susan Seidelman’s 1984 classic Desperately Seeking Susan, starring Rosanna Arquette, who plays a young suburban housewife who becomes obsessed with and later develops a liberating friendship with Susan, a mysterious club denizen, played by Madonna). There’s soundtrack analysis (Lewis particularly pays attention to the club scene where Susan dances to Madonna’s song “Into the Groove”). There’s fan discourse (teen girls and young women — maybe unmentioned young men as well – appropriating the Material Girl’s iconic look, while mutating and individuating it; this development is read alongside the movie, which shows Rosanna’s Roberta becoming Susan, as well as behind-the-scenes goings-on, as Rosanna and Madonna became friends off-camera). There’s even consideration made for how corporate culture feeds into all this, coming to a head when MTV and ABC document a Madonna lookalike fashion show at Macy’s to coincide with the film’s release. In short, a dizzying but lucidly plotted out argument about the power female artists (and their fans) can exert within and outside of an increasingly synergistic media culture.
Hmmm. Also a reminder of how much I love Desperately Seeking Susan, which I would catch on Comedy Central from time to time when I had cable. I haven’t watched it in a while. May warrant a repeat viewing ASAP.
11
Aug
09
St. Vincent on Letterman
I’m swiping this from my friend Colleen’s Facebook profile. Maybe you all saw this back in June, but I thought I’d share (since I hadn’t). I especially thought I’d share if your name is Kristen and you’re coming back from vacation and you love this song.
Pretty awesome, in my estimation. And a pretty big deal for Ms. Annie Clark to be on Letterman.
Although, dammit David Letterman. You dirty old man. Do you have to ogle your female guests so obviously? It’s not as bad as when Mary-Kate Olsen was promoting The Wackness, but still.
I keep forgetting to write about Cotton Incorporated’s Fabric of My Life ad campaign. But there seems to be a demand (specifically from my friends, the Kristens, who urged me to do a write-up at lunch today). So, let’s turn this draft into post, friends.
In a nutshell, three female singer-songwriters (Jazmine Sullivan, Miranda Lambert, and Zooey Deschanel, respectively representing R&B, country, and crossover indie pop) retool the jingle to let you, the (female, aged 18-34) consumer see just how easy, functional, versatile, and, above all, hip and stylish cotton is. The campaign, created by DDB, was launched in April, with 30-second spots running on television and the Internet.
To my knowledge, the print campaign will launch sometime this summer. This could suggest that the campaign isn’t doing so well. My hunch, though, is that magazines, now crippled by the recession, have been tightening their advertising budgets throughout the 2000s in the wake of several publication folds as more people have become reliant on computers, search engines, and social media to provide them with information.
The campaign has a micro-site, complete with extended versions of the television ads, behind-the-scenes-footage, interviews from the spokeswomen, customizable interactive style books, and Facebook applications. Personally, I thought the micro-site was pretty useless. I built a style book and didn’t need Cotton Incorporated to tell me that I like bright solids, flats and sneakers, minimal yet quirky jewelry, and an overall elegantly off-kilter look. I’ve been dressing myself for some time now. But the micro-site’s existence is interesting and a clear indication of how advertising is evolving and making itself appear more individualistic and available to John and Jane Websurfer.
I find the television ads interesting too, though I never actually saw them on the big glowing box in my living room (I saw them on the little glowing box in my office). While part of the same campaign, the three spots stand alone. They feature three different narrators with different musical styles, different “personal” styles (I assume these women have stylists), and different fan bases. Thus, they cultivate different images for themselves, which is evident in the narrative differences in both the songs and the ads. The two things they all do are 1) stare out a window as if inspired — perhaps by cotton? — and 2) play dress-up at the end of each ad, with the final shot being a closet door.
With Sullivan, we have an aspirational narrative — the opening line, ”they said it was only a dream, and dreaming was only for fools” is accompanied by images of Jazmine at a photo shoot. As the song goes on, Jazmine assures us that dreams “are alive just like me and you” and “can be real if you let them.” We see her being touched up by various (African American, one white) stylists, strolling through an upscale urban area (that I’m guessing is Philadelphia, where she calls home), writing in a local coffee shop, and talking to (African American, one white) students in a music school.
With Lambert, we have a “back to my roots” narrative — the opening line “took a shot, shooting for the stars, working overtime” is accompanied by the glammed-up singer being photographed at a red carpet event. The next line “you and I know it’s a struggle for the high road; I keep it simple though” coincides with images of Lambert on her tour bus, writing, playing guitar, and cuddling her dog. Upon her return home, we see an excessive display of folksiness — feeding the chickens, tending to a horse, and fly fishing (!).
Finally, with Deschanel, we have a “personal day” narrative — the opening line “woke up today, it was another lovely day” underscores Deschanel performing a concert, before running off-stage (rather sheepishly) and reappearing at home, working on a song at the piano, where she also keeps Post-It notes. From there, she wanders the (Los Angeles?) streets, walking a bike around, looking for banjos at an outdoor market, and hitting up the record store.
I’d like to point out some disparity in popularity. In my estimation, Sullivan and Lambert are similarly matched as representatives of their genre — not superstars like Beyoncé and Carrie Underwood, but young, established artists with a growing fan base. This can be crudely calculated by the number of hits their YouTube clips received (13,655 for Sullivan, 13,884 for Lambert). Deschanel’s clip, however, was viewed 144,032 times. I don’t think this has to do with her popularity as a musician–She and Him, her project with M. Ward backed by Merge Records, is what my partner terms “NPR-big”. Rather, I think Deschanel the spokeswoman gets to capitalize on two key aspects of her public persona that the other two artists can’t–she is also an established actress and fashion maven.
And it’s pretty easy to see how these narratives play into generic conventions, and how those conventions are raced and classed. Sullivan, a black woman and R&B singer, is aligned with the city, her neighborhood (but not her home, which we don’t see beyond her closet), and educational programs within her community to “set an example” and ”make a difference” (and probably shoulder some burden of representation). Lambert, who was raised in Lindale, Texas–a small, Christian, predominantly white farming community in East Texas– eschews the glitzy artifice of the entertainment industry for the “realness” of her roots. Deschanel, who was born into an entertainment family, lives in a quirky but assuredly upscale (and potentially gentrified) neighborhood that was bought by her career as an actor from a reputable family, which affords her considerable creative and leisure time.
So, while the spokeswomen may serve to be all things to all (female) people and get those people to buy from Cotton Incorporated, who those people are tellingly different from one another.
08
Jul
09
Feminist Music Geek Update!
For those of you on the Facebook, you can now join this blog’s fan group (I see two friends already have who are not me — thanks Chi Chi, thanks Susan). I’m using the page to post links to new entries right after I publish them, like I do on Twitter (@ms_vz). Enjoy!
