Most Important Albums of the 1990s

Yesterday, out of curiosity, I asked my students what they thought the most important albums of the 1990s were. And I guess I asked for two reasons. First, because I went to college between 1990 and 1994, so I’m curious what their generation thinks of my generation. Second, because my own appreciation of 1990s music has actually changed as I’ve grown. For instance, now I might include The Writing’s On the Wall (1999) by Destiny’s Child, not only because its hit single ”Say My Name” (below) is totally brilliant, but also because the album was important for the fusion of hip hop and R&B. But back when the album actually came out, I was less open-minded and would have been scornful of such mainstream pop.

The question, of course, as I’ve discussed before [here], is what criteria we use for defining “most important.” Is it some ineffable aesthetic quality? Its originality, innovation, or guts? Its influence on the music industry or the broader culture? Its enduring popularity? For instance, as I mentioned in my blog before, Madonna’s hit “Like a Virgin” had a huge effect in 1984, but I rarely hear it on the radio anymore compared to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” which came out the same year and which is still very popular (and which I totally love, though I wouldn’t have admitted to liking it so much back when it came out.)

In my view, Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind would be the number one most important album of the 1990s, because it single-handedly ended the reign of hair-metal and brought indie-rock into the mainstream. Also, every song on the album, not just the two hit singles, rocks, and it remains popular with younger generations today. But at the time, I was much more into another album that came out the same year, Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, which I would argue should be included. And other members of my generation might fondly remember R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People (1992) and Beck’s Odelay (1996). I would also argue that Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders (1993) should be at the top of the list for its brilliant poetics, jazz riffs, and serious themes. Perhaps because of those qualities, I think it did more to bring hip hop to a white, college-educated music consumer than any other hip hop album (kind of like what Bob Marley did for reggae.)

One of my students suggested Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill (1995), and though I never would have thought of that, I have to agree. I had just started a teaching position at a summer program for Japanese and Korean exchange students, and they all loved it. And globally, Ace of Bass’s Happy Nation (1993) was huge, as was the Spice Girls’s Spice (1996). There are some other groups such as Radiohead, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Wu Tang Clan, Dr. Dre, and Snoop Dog whose albums (one might argue) should be added, but I have to confess that I never personally got into their stuff. (I was more into the obscure indie-pop of Beat Happening and Sebadoh when I was in college, and am now more into the ethically and intellectually astute hip hop of Mos Def.)

Interestingly, the album that I listen to the most right now is The Score by the Fugees (1996), but I only started listening to it a couple years ago. “Ready or Not” (below) is one of the best songs ever, and quite a few women have told me how meaningful Lauryn Hill’s brilliant presence on – and departure from – that album was for them.

Someone asked me about the next decade, 2000 — 2010. I have in the past asked students about what they consider is their generation’s contribution to the development of popular culture. I know what my generation is — indie and hip hop. (See Jeff Chang’s excellent book on the hip hop generation. I don’t know if there’s a similarly excellent book on the indie scene. If someone knows, please tell me!!!) My students have speculated about the effect of the internet, iPods, and the FCC’s deregulation of radio in 1996 on the production and consumption of music. For sure, the telecommunications act of 1996 assassinated radio, and perhaps that is why few of my students feel they can strongly claim a distinct musical contribution, but indie rock was mostly distributed by an underground hand-to-hand passing around of bootleg cassette tapes, not the radio. And I have to wonder why it’s even possible that some of my students would claim The Beatles as their favorite band. I don’t mean to argue that the Beatles weren’t great, because I find that argument silly and pretentious, but come on!!! How could your favorite band be the same age as your grandparents? Move on!!!

Jessye Norman, The Roots, and Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama

Jessye Norman

After we read a couple of Langston Hughes’s poems in class last week, one of my students told me about this project to musically perform Hughes’s book Ask Your Mama, and it looked pretty cool, so I thought I’d post it up on my blog and say a few words. Hughes always meant this poem to be performed with music and even provided musical directions, but he died before it could happen. This year, opera singer Jessye Norman teamed up with composer Laura Karpman to do it. Among many others, they invited members from the hip hop group The Roots, whose artistry is well-known for pushing hip hop to higher aesthetic, musical, and intellectual levels. This website here that my student e-mailed me includes some of the recordings along with several interviews — one with Roots’s drummer Questlove — that you can listen to. And here’s a promotional video:

Questlove of The Roots

As Questlove points out, this project reminds us of something that hip hop has always foregrounded — the fact that literature, music, pop culture, political activism, and community are not so distinct as we often imagine them. Especially in the literature classroom, students seem to expect literature to be a purely textual and serious thing, no matter how much I try to insert music, pop culture, politics, and community, and — most importantly — laughter into the curriculum (as I did [here] in my blog on the hip hop canon last fall, as well is in my many blogs on pop music [here] and on performative poetry [here].)

Langston Hughes

But of course, the literary text’s intimate relationship with its performance and its cultural context is something I struggle with too. It’s not that easy to bring all this together in the sterile setting of the classroom. Moreover, text has the advantage of seeming solid, permanent, and immutable, in contrast to the fleeting nature of individual performances and timely articulations in specific political contexts.  The internet definitely helps return the text to its performative dimension or at least makes that performative dimension more accessible. I say “helps,” because I know we could have a long conversation about whether the internet successfully does return it home to its performative originality or whether the internet form somehow changes the performative text.

The Magentic Fields Teach/Kill Saussure

One of my colleagues today told me about this song, ”The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure,” by The Magnetic Fields, one of the greats to come out of the college-indie-pop scene of the 1990s, and a perfect example of postmodern aesthetics. Next time I teach structuralism and Saussure, I’ll have to remember to play this song.

 

 

Meanwhile, I just discovered that my old professor, Michael Berube, whose essays I sometimes teach in my intro-theory course, returned to the blog-o-sphere after a year vacation from it. His blog is one of the inspirations for my own, and apparently he’s been back on for some time, and I didn’t even realize it.

1980s MTV, the meaning of style, and feminism

In my theory class we have just begun the unit on the relationship between representation and agency, and in my other class we just finished reading John Updike’s novel Roger’s Version, a novel that adapts the plot of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter to the postmodern condition of the 1980s. (See my blog post a couple weeks ago here for more about postmodern Scarlet Letters.) In it, one of the main characters — a teenage single mother named Verna – is a huge fan of Cyndi Lauper at the beginning of the novel, but by the novel’s end has switched her allegience to Madonna. Updike’s novel is set in the autumn of 1984 and spring of 1985 — the year Ronald Reagan was reelected on a platform of traditional family values and an end to government-run social programs… and also the year that Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and Madonna’s  “Like a Virgin” dominated the MTV and pop music charts. Music historians often consider both of these songs as together occupying the same moment of sexual liberation for women in popular culture, though arguably that moment of liberation began long before in the 1960s. At the very end of the novel by Updike, Verna decides she prefers Madonna over Lauper at the same time she decides to leave her child with her uncle Roger and find her own pathway to material success, like Madonna in “Material Girl,” which was released in January, 1985.

I’d like to compare and contrast these two music videos, because in contrast to Updike’s characterization of them in his novel, I think they have very divergent visions for sexual liberation. One seems to me to be an example of post-punk feminism and the other a co-optation of post-punk feminism. However, the fact that both appear in Updike’s novel as co-equals and that MTV and radio might very likely play them back-to-back illustrates how complicated the concepts “representation”  “ideology” “hegemony” and “feminism” actually are.

First, Cyndi Lauper’s ”Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” which was first released at the end of the year 1983.

What is most blatant in this video is Lauper’s emphasis on her multicultural group of friends. In a sense, her song is similar to the mildly feminist lyrics in The Spice Girls 1996 hit “Wanna Be” that go, “If you want to be my lover, you have to get with my friends.” In my opinion, these lyrics are good advice for anyone, no matter what gender identity they claim to have. And likewise, in her video, Cyndi Lauper represents the ways personal agency comes from a positive community of friends. In addition, her post-punk  style of dress deconstructs traditional gender roles by mixing a ridiculously out-of-date prom dress with goofy sunglasses. For literary critics, this postmodern stylistic device of mixing and mashing is called pastiche, and theorist Dick Hebdige has famously analyzed the “meaning of style” in his book on punk rock, Subculture, to show how – through such pastiche — young people culturally subverted and resisted mainstream ideas about how they should behave.

Less than a year after Cyndi Lauper’s hit, in November of 1984, Madonna released “Like a Virgin,” which in my view co-opts a lot of the liberatory potential of Lauper’s hit in a way that rearticulates women’s identities as objects of sexual desire. For a YouTube clip of her MTV Awards performance in 1984 click here, and for the original music video, click here.

Many have argued that Madonna was one of the early pop stars to create an enduring and mainstream image of women enjoying sex. Indeed, during the MTV awards, she rolls on the floor, apparently with sexual abandon and pleasure. However, in my view, both her MTV performance and her original video are not feminist in the way that Lauper’s is. When compared to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” noticeably isolates the woman from any community. Her entire feeling of self worth is derived from being the object of male desire – a rather creepy sensibility that is totally contrary to every brand of feminism I’ve ever encountered.  In addition, Madonna’s postpunk style of dress also performs a postmodern pastiche that scandalously blends Catholic and sexual iconography, but in contrast to Lauper’s deconstruction of what it means to be sexy, Madonna’s transgressive style of dress agressively asserts and intensifies her sex appeal.

Ultimately, it would be an oversimplication to call one of these songs progressively feminist and the other reactionary. Clearly, both artists consciously and deliberately represented sexuality in a way that had political implications for how men and women relate to each other – encouraging both men and women to be open about sexuality rather than repressed. And therefore one could argue that both songs had an effect on women’s agency. Both offer transgressive and subversive representations of women, but both also emphasize pleasure-seeking over any substantial community building. Therefore, some feminists would react negatively to both videos, but in my view, it would be a mistake for feminists to eschew the importance of fun and pleasure in our daily lives, and so at the end of the day, I think both Lauper and Madonna’s representations have something to offer to the on-going, open-ended project of feminism. And that is why Updike’s character Roger is simultaneously disturbed, threatened, and sexually aroused by them.

In conclusion, I’d like to end this post with a more recent clip of what seems to me to be a strongly feminist song by singer Christina Aguilara and rapper Lil’ Kim — their 2003 hit, “Can’t Hold Us Down.”

“Nigger” / “Nigga”: Tribe vs. Mos Def

What does hip hop have to teach us about deconstruction? Quite a lot, in my opinion.

Way back in 1993 (when I was a junior in college, gasp), Tribe Called Quest released their Midnight Maurader album, considered by some to be one of the top hip hop albums of all time. On it, the controversial hit “Sucka Nigga” [lyrics] observed that black youth had taken the racial slur “nigger” and transformed it into a “term of endearment… nigga.” (Is this at all similar to how Hester Prynne transforms the meaning of the scarlet “A” on her chest from adultery to able in The Scarlet Letter?) Tribe’s song provocatively raises many questions about the use and meaning of words, and as the song explains, the black community in the United States was (and still is) deeply conflicted over the use of the word “nigga” by black musicians and comedians.

Then, six years later in 1999, Mos Def released his highly acclaimed album, Black on Both Sides, which included an explicit and direct response to Tribe entitled “Mr. Nigga” [lyrics]. Mos Def’s song suggests that the original, racist meaning continues to subject black people to unfair prejudice. And furthermore, one might go so far as to say that the clownish antics of some hip hop artists and their lyrics may even be perpetuating it, despite whatever intentions or claims to the contrary they may assert.

So, against Tribe’s playful deconstruction of the word “nigga” that attempted to ”flip the script” on American racism, Mos Def presents a hard cautionary tale about how the meaning of the word continues to insist in the cultural practices of people not just in America but also around world. In a sense, Tribe seems to exemplify Derrida’s concept of “play,” and against Derrida, Mos Def seems to exemplify Lacan by reminding us of how the symbolic order continues to structure how we imagine ourselves in the world and how we experience the contradictions of reality (a contradictory experience that Lacan calls the Real, with a capital “R”.) Both songs, in my view, are doing deconstruction — contextualizing the cultural production and transformation of meaning and deconstructing the many binary oppositions invoked by the word “nigga.”

So, to put these songs in their historical context, back in the early 1990s, many people and organizations were concerned with “hate speech” — speech acts that give rise to violence and/or prejudicial action against minorities. The political debate concerned itself with two political rights, free speech and universal, personal integrity (since hate speech sometimes led to horrible acts of violence, called “hate crimes,” not to mention systemic discrimination.) Theorist Judith Butler eventually published Excitable Speech about this issue in 1997. Rather than engage directly in these legal debates, hip hop artists waged an artistic, performative battle against American racism.

In a sense, what we have now are two words. One word is the derogatory “nigger,” originally articulated by the “white man,” whose mouth, in Tribe’s splendidly poetic imagery, reminds us of the dome of a capital building — the very political structure that legitimated racism for so many years. The other word is “nigga” whose meaning is not so much positive as it is a historical reminder of the “adversity” that black Americans overcame as a community. In other words, as everyone knows, white people can not use this word (and any white person who does deserves to get his or her ass kicked) because they did not experience that adversity, but black people can because it reflects a commonly shared, historical identity.

Mos Def, however, reveals how the author of a text does not control its meaning (just as Roland Barthes showed in his famous essay, “Death of an Author“) because of how the signifier circulates in different social contexts. In fact, just as Michel Foucault argued in ”What is an Author?” so too does Mos Def seem to argue in “Mr. Nigga” — that authors and hip hop artists are products of legal and socio-economic systems. Hip hop has been appropriated by white suburban youth who (as Lacan suggests in his argument about how we construct our identity in relation to spectral others) enjoy the thrill of transgression by imitating gangsta rap culture and by pretentiously disavowing their own white privilege. And in a way, hip hop artists never had full control over their medium, having to respond to a marketplace dominated by white consumer culture and powerful corporations.

What artists, comedians, novelists, and hip hop artists have realized is that it’s not enough to simply demystify racism, because our culture and our language continues to reflect racist biases long after we as a nation realized that racism is a false ideology. And so, their project to deconstruct the language of American culture (which includes its racist language) is a project begun centuries ago, in the memoir of Olaudah Equiano and the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, well before commedian Richard Pryor first made it a central issue in his stand-up routine back in the 1970s.

Cyber Hip Hop in Diaspora… multicultural, multinational, glocal, transnational, post-national…

With some pride, I want to announce the new issue of Ogina: Oromo Arts in Disapora, the new “webzine” (on-line magazine) that I help to edit. This issue has been praised by Oromo websites and blogs here, here, here, and here. Naturally, it is very exciting for me to be a part of this adventure and to be a part of what I have previously in this blog called the “Oromo Renaissance.” As I mentioned there, most Americans don’t know who the Oromo are, even though they are the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, and this sudden flourishing of cultural activity has only recently become possible because of a more tolerant Ethiopian government and a newly globalized Oromo culture. The new issue of Ogina focuses on hip hop and spoken word poetry, and it features several artists, an interview with two of them, and an essay about how the internet changes the nature of culture and politics by creating a transnational public sphere.

What that essay by Qeerransoo Biyyaa argues is that Oromo hip hop is a “glocal“ phenomenon because it brings together a global art form and a local political movement. However, Qeerransoo Biyyaa raises important questions about the internet as a tool for cultural and political communication. On the one hand it allows displaced Oromo refugees a means to share their cultural identity all over the world, but on the other hand, less than 1% of Oromo living in Ethiopia have access to a computer.

Making such observations, Qeerransoo Biyyaa raises some important theoretical questions about the very nature of culture itself as well as the nature of what the philosopher  Jürgen Habermas calls the “public sphere.” Such questions are clearly important to many Oromo in the United States and Canada who are refugees living in exile, and since my blog is a “theory teacher blog,” I want to draw attention to how he is using theory to make very practical observations about his culture and about the possibilty of political agency for his people.

But here I will raise yet another question. What is the best concept for describing the kind of cultural activity we are seeing here?

Before you continue reading this blog post, please take a moment to think about how many times you’ve heard the words “multicultural” or “multiculturalism.” Probably a lot, and since the early 1990s, it has become popular for Americans to say that we live in a multicultural society. Instead of the proverbial “melting pot” metaphor in which everyone is supposed to assimilate to a single national culture, we now celebrate the “salad bowl” of different cultures all mixed together. To celebrate our cultural diversity is to participate in the ideology of multiculturalism.

But is multiculturalism really the best concept? Certainly, in my view, it’s better than monoculturalism (a.k.a. national chauvenism) which argues for a homogenous culture and celebrates that one culture as somehow superior to all others. But multiculturalism’s celebration of diversity (as I have mentioned in my previous blog post on intercultural competency) can sometimes seem a little shallow. We’re all different, hooray? Is that it? Certainly there’s more to multiculturalism than that, and indeed there is. Theorists of multiculturalism are very serious about not only the importance of cultural recognition but also the problems of cultural recognition when it is understood as an end in itself. In other words, for many, the true end — or goal — of multiculturalism ought to be social justice, not the naive celebration of difference.

However, as many scholars and journalists have pointed out, all the while that people in the United States were celebrating their multicultural nation in the mid-1990s, large multinational corporations such as Nike and Wal-Mart were moving their factories overseas where they could find a cheaper and more powerless workforce to exploit. For the Oromo living in Ethiopia, such global trade was both good and bad. It was good because it opened up large markets for their biggest commercial product — coffee. But it was bad because the multinational corporations controlled the market and left the Oromo people politically powerless, economically dependent, and socially traumatized. In fact, an award winning movie Black Gold analyzed this problem and proposed fair trade coffee organizations such as Equal Exchange as a possible solution.

At the same time that we notice the rise of multinational corporations in a more globalized economy, we also notice another phenomenon. Not only are there more immigrants, but — because of new technologies such as the telephone, television, and the internet — immigrants are remaining more and more emotionally, culturally, and even politically attached to their homeland. Hence, just as multinational corporations are not based in any single nation-state but operate in many nations around the globe, so are diasporic communities such as the Oromo also multinational — living and operating as a single culture in many different nations. The concept “multicultural” doesn’t really capture this phenomenon, so today we use the word “transnational” to better explain the movement of commodities, capital, culture, and people across national borders. And what about communities such as the Oromo and Native Americans who have never felt fully at home within their own homeland and who have never been fully enfranchised by the national government to which they are subject? Aren’t they essentially transnational communities, even if they never emigrate?

However, though we may throw around terms such as transnational, global, and glocal, the nation-state has not disappeared (as the recent effort to strengthen the border between the United States and Mexico indicates.) The nation-state is still the primary political structure available to people through which to adjudicate legal disputes and deliberate on policy. But in terms of both cultural identity and business practices, it has become more confusing and complicated. Some people such as John Carlos Rowe argue that the word transnational is too weak. It doesn’t draw enough attention to the conflicting senses of identity and the challenges of governing multinational corporations and transnational communities. Since the old model assumed that the nation-state governs people and their business inside a nation, how do we govern people and businesses that seems to exist in more than one nation or between nations? Rowe favors the word “post-national” because, he argues, the very strangeness of that made-up word actually calls attention to itself as a fundamentally paradoxical situation.

So, which of these words — multicultural, transnational, glocal, multinational, transnational, global, or post-national — provides us with the best conceptual lens through which to see our world today?

most important hip hop albums in history?

Recently, I was speaking with the librarian at my university about the necessity of including hip hop in our school’s collection of music. She agreed, but that opens up the obvious question — which hip hop? Obviously, we can’t afford to buy everything. And we wouldn’t want to anyway, because we would only want to buy the “good” stuff. 

Here below is a tentative list that I started brainstorming. I know we won’t get all of them, so this is just a “thinking out loud” kind of list. And sometimes I’ve only named the artist, because I couldn’t make up my mind which particular album. I welcome suggestions and input, but please explain and justify your choices.

Parliament — Mothership Connection
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five — The Message
Gil Scott-Heron — The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Public Enemy
Tribe Called Quest
Queen Latifah
Salt-N-Pepa — Very Necesssary
New Jack City (soundtrack)
Afrika Bambaataa
Ice T
De La Soul
Mos Def — Black on Both Sides
Black Star — Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star
Kanye West
Missy Elliott
The Fugees — The Score
Tupac Shakur
Boogie Down Productions
NWA — Straight Outta Compton
Ice Cube — Amerikka’s Most Wanted
Cyprus Hill — Cypress Hill
Eminem

The question for the literary theorist, of course, is a rather classic question. What makes any literary work canonical? Why does one thing get included in the anthology of great works while another thing doesn’t? What are the criteria for inclusion and exclusion? For me, socially conscious hip hop is the kind of stuff I prefer to include, and the commercial “sex, drugs, ‘n’ glamour” hip hop is the kind of stuff I prefer to exclude. That’s a political decision, not an aesthetic one, but it gets tricky because sometimes the distinction is not so clear. Then, there are the albums that get quoted by other albums. So, if you listen to a lot of hip hop you will hear echos of particular rifs from earlier albums by Gil Scott-Heron, Public Enemy, and Tribe Called Quest. Through musical quotations, samples, and allusions, the industry itself has already decided on certain ”classics” — albums that have become benchmarks for all future work. This is what the modernist poet T. S. Eliot means when he talks about “tradition and the individual talent” and relates a little bit to what the theorist Stanley Fish means when he talks about an “interpretive community.”

Or, perhaps the hip hop artist Mos Def put it an even better way – ”we are hip hop.” In other words, the people who create and listen to hip hop are the people who are always already determining not only its future, but also its past.

So, when we choose something for a class or for a library collection, what is the (his)story of hip hop that we want to tell?

the psychology of a postmodern global hit

What makes a global hit? Certainly, there is no denying that the quality of the artwork is important, but is something appealing globally because its appeal is universal? If we think psychoanalytically, maybe we can discern some other factors besides quality and a supposed universality that make something a global hit.

 

As an example of what I mean, I’d like to analyze some popular videos on YouTube. Unlike artworks such as pop songs and novels, whose popularity is in many ways created by a large corporate media industry, the popularity of a video on YouTube would seem to depend purely on the tastes of ordinary people on the internet. So, in that sense, it is interesting to wonder why one YouTube video might become a huge global hit rather than another. Take a look at this video “Yatta!”  which originally appeared on a Japanese sketch comedy show “Silly Go Lucky” in 2001. The word “Yatta!” literally means “I did it!” in Japanese, usually with the connotation of “hooray!” or “yes!” It can also have the same sexual pun as “I did it” does in English. In the song, the vocalists express their happiness over shallow accomplishments (such as having a cute dog) in spite of Japan’s recession in the late 1990s.

After “Yatta!” circulated on YouTube, it became so popular that it was immitated by amateurs in the United States, France, and Sweden, and translated and performed by a pop music group in Argentina. Later, it even appeared on the TV show Heroes. You can find these by looking at the “related videos” on YouTube. Eventually the comedy group made a new video that shows its own global appeal and translates the lyrics.

What is so appealing about this parodic music video? Other blogs have speculated that perhaps the reason is because it is a feel good, motivational song. Others have appreciated how its irony so beautifully satirizes global apathy. But I wonder, is the music video a global phenomenon because of the universal way it delights in its own innocent obscenity? In my opinion, the answer to that question is no. Its supposed universality of enthusiastic apathy and excessive innocence can’t be the reason, because “Yatta!” is not only very Japanese — it’s excessively Japanese (and not especially universal.) It very deliberately and obviously parodies the Japanese cute-boy bands of the late 90s that exemplified the shallow, materialistic, pop culture malaise at the time. And so, I argue, this video became a global hit because of the world’s fetishization of Japan as an “other” — a fetishization that this video indulges.

But what was the time? Before I continue with my psychoanalytic reading of “Yatta!”, we need to follow Freud’s advice and consider the context for the song. The song actually reminds me very much of a conversation I had with a friend of mine named Hiroaki when I was living in Japan. In 1997, because of overspeculation by Japanese banks and because of the East Asian crash, Japan was experiencing a recession, similar perhaps to what the U.S. is about to experience now, and it is this event that the song Yatta! alludes to. However, two years after the “bubble” burst, in the spring of 1999, my friend Hiroaki pointed out something else entirely about the state of young Japanese white-collar workers. He observed that young people would stay at their companies until late at night only pretending to work — they knew they had to appear hard-working in order to get promoted, but they didn’t really know what they were supposed to work for. In his analysis, he explained that after the devastation of World War II, his parents’ generation worked very hard — almost neurotically hard — to rebuild their country. However, at the same time, they consciously repressed many of the other traditional social values of their country because of the deep shame they felt, shame not only at losing the war, but also shame about having started it in the first place. Consequently, Hiroaki argued, his generation came of age in a culture saturated with the pursuit of wealth but lacking any sense of meaning or social ethics beyond “getting promoted.” And this is why, perhaps, Japan was often observed to be the most postmodern nation in the world — if one defines the postmodern world as one saturated in meaningless yet recognizable signs.

What American and French theorists of the postmodern (Frederick Jameson, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, etc.) failed to notice (precisely because they were American and French and preferred to fetishize the Japanese rather than talk to any of them) is the painful repression of culture that was taking place — a repression that all Japanese were aware of, but did not know how to respond to. As the theorist Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, we are often aware of what we are repressing, but we rarely know what to do about it.

So, back to why this video has its global appeal. Consider first that it may have global appeal in part because the rest of the world loves to snicker at the shallowness of Japanese exuberance and material success. However, at the same time, we secretly recognize (as Barthes and Jameson did) that this postmodern exuberance is only the most extreme expression of our own French, Swedish, or American culture. After all, in parodying Japanese cute-boy bands, it also clearly alludes to iconography and style of The Village People. And this recognition in the Japanese other of our secret desire to be this exuberantly apathetic — our secret desire to be Japanese, to be excessively innocent (an innocence symbolized by the Edenic leaves), and to repress the shame of our own history — is the pleasure of the music video, a music video that is perhaps even more pleasurable if we do NOT know the lyrics than if we do. In other words, we know that it’s Japanese, and we take pleasure in the performance of shame. As two different Japanese friends each said privately in e-mails to me about this video, “How embarrassing!”

Let’s consider another example.  This global sensation that combined the “levan polkka” by the Finnish group Loituma with a clip from the Japanese anime series, Bleach. The character Orihime Inoue is spinning a negi, a Japanese vegetable similar to a leek. Even Public Radio Internationl was compelled to cover the story here.

The temptation, perhaps, is to assume that a music video becomes a global hit because of some “universality” or “worldly resonance with the zeitgeist” or “technical superiority” or “authentically human quality” or even just simply a “basic-ness.” And one could easily argue that the trance-like sound of Loituma’s polkka is universally basic to the human soul.

However, I want to make the same argument here that I made about “Yatta!” Few people knew about Loituma until its sounds were combined with the happy Asian leekspinning girl. It was the happy Asian leekspinning girl that made the Finnish song a global hit!!! The image of innocence that we simultaneously laugh at and desire to escape into is what gives us pleasure. And the images we select are of course almost always of foreign spaces. Why is Reggae the global music par excellance? Because of its Pan-African politics? I don’t think so. It’s a beach party, ya’ll. It’s popular now for the same reason that the Caribbean so fully captured the European imagination four hundred years ago.

the ideology of pop

Does pop music have an ideology? Recently, John Cougar Mellencamp has told the presidential candidate John McCain to stop playing his songs “Pink Houses” and “Our Country”, and you can see articles about that by clicking [here] and [here]. Mellencamp is a vocal Democrat. Does that mean that his music is ideologically “liberal”? Was McCain simply misunderstanding the ideology of the songs?

Well, I doubt anyone would say the lyrics of his songs are subtle. ”Our Country” is a song that hopes America can someday live up to its principles of tolerance and diversity, and “Pink Houses” would seem to be criticizing the gap between the rich and poor in America, so its line “Ain’t that America” is meant to be sarcastic. In that sense, his songs seem to articulate some of the standard features of the Democratic Party’s campaign platform or ”ideology.”

So, was McCain’s simply listening to the chorus to each song and not paying attention to the content of the lyrics? Maybe.  But on the other hand, it’s not as if McCain is opposed to diversity and dismissive of poor people. Quite the contrary. It’s just that the McCain and Clinton/Obama campaigns have different approaches for resolving these issues in addition to having different priorities.

Perhaps ideology is something more complicated than belonging to a political party or having views.  For instance, one might interpret the movies Knocked Up, Waitress, and Juno, which have all appeared in theaters this past year, to all be “pro-life” because none of the characters get an abortion (and in two of the movies, nobody even says the word “abortion.”) But because the movies are so goofy in style and so unrealistic in plot, it’s hard to read them all as committed to a pro-life political agenda (though some film critics have read them this way) just because of the characters’ choices. (By the way, I’ll be blogging on those movies soon.)

One way to think of ideology is as a system of symbols or keywords that seem to be foundational or essential. So, in Mellencamp’s songs, the phrases “our country” and “freedom” and “America” are repeated over and over. Irregardless of the political party that Mellencamp prefers, his songs still evoke an emotion that both Republicans and Democrats can relate to. Thus, just as Nickel analyzed the ideology of 19th century history books to be centered around the word “freedom” so that every historical event basically had the same moral and every historical figure was the same character “type”, so are Mellencamp’s songs centered around a sense of national identity and national destiny. What’s interested about such keywords such as “freedom” or “country” is that even though they seem to be essential to American ideology, they are actually quite hard to define. Their meanings are indeterminate, and perhaps their indeterminacy is precisely what makes them powerful ideological symbols.

Now, if we think of ideology in the way Zizek does, then we start seeing music as a performative gesture or “speech act.” Zizek is making a distinction between the literal meaning of a speech act and the social meaning. So if a friend of mine is doing something annoying and asks if I mind, I might answer, “No I don’t mind,” but the social meaning is “I will tolerate your being annoying if you tolerate me being annoying later. We are friends.” The social meaning is our friendship. Likewise, Mellencamp’s songs are very complex speech acts that express feelings about the future and past of this country. Although his songs criticize America’s hypocrisies, they also express hope for it. The social meaning is the assumed destiny of the country and the shared hope.

What is perhaps almost more important than the content of the lyrics is Mellencamp’s country style that expresses longing or nostalgia for an idealized folksy America (even if that folksy America never really existed.) Thus, his songs express hope for the future in terms of nostalgia for the past. And this idealization (which is as much a style as it is an idea) is the ideology of the song.