Product placement in pop music

From wired.com, this article by Eliot Van Buskirk: "Products Placed: How Companies Pay Artists to Include Brands in Lyrics."

Here's the punchline:

"things have gotten so weird in the music business that high-profile acts are inserting ads into their song lyrics. The next time you hear a brand mentioned in a song, it could be due to a paid product placement. And unlike magazines, songs are not required to point out which words are part of an advertisement."

the specials: rudeboy version 2--two-tone

more skins

skins

Siouxsie Sioux: Fetish Wear, Swastika

One of the best examples of the kind of transgressive punk style, as described and analyzed in Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style--Siouxsie Sioux, of Siouxsie and the Banshees. As Hebdige observes, punks' use of the swastika was meant to shock the bourgeoisie, not out of any political affinity for Nazism.

Lord Buckley on Groucho Marx

Among other things, Buckley performs his "jive translation" of Shakespeare's rendering of Brutus' funeral oration for Julius Caeser.

Amy Winehouse and blackface

This is a particularly acute analysis of Amy Winehouse and her (mostly) occulted relation to the Black female vocal r&b/soul tradition, from Daphne Brooks, in The Nation.

"Black women are everywhere and nowhere in Winehouse's work."

"Uncommon Valor": More POW/MIA Disinformation

If you're looking for another film that propagates the POW/MIA mythology (effectively demolished in H. Bruce Franklin's Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, there is Uncommon Valor (1983), starring Gene Hackman. It airs pretty regularly on AMC.

I can only recommend it for historical/research purposes; not for any cinematic values.

Music and video to go with Chapters One and Two, Marcus Reeves' "Somebody Scream"

One of the deep sources of rap was Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Clay,) who "taunted opponents and incensed white America with his boastful rhymes" (Reeves, 8).

Another deep source: the Last Poets, "the New-York based poetry group who fused spoken word poetry and African rhythms with the message of black pride, nationhood, and activism" (Reeves, 9). "Niggers Are Scared of Revolution," from their first, self-titled album (1970). Lyrics are here.

One of the most famous original sources of the "break," or the instrumental break, that DJ Kool Herc used to construct his soundtracks, using two turntables, flipping back and forth, "extending a five-second breakdonw into a five'minute loop of fury" (Chang, 79). This is The Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache" (1973).

The first commercially successful rap recording, "Rapper's Delight," released in October 1979.

"Freedom," from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (1980). The star is the DJ, Grandmaster Flash, the first time "non-hip-hoppers heard a hip-hop DJ ply his trade" (Reeves, 29).



But the real tour de force of Grandmaster Flash is this: "Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel" (1981).




Blondie's "Rapture," the first time rap was ever broadcast on MTV. With some lines that no one outside the exclusive downtown New York City scene could decode: "Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody's fly, D.J.'s spinning, I said, 'my, my,' Flas is fast, Flash is cool."

The video for Afrika Bambaata and the Soul Sonic Force's 1982 hit, "Planet Rock," complete with scenes of breakdancers, which ushered in rap's "electrofunk" era. "His crew dressed like a wild cross between a band of New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians and interstellar Afrofuturist prophets" (Chang, Can't Stop Won't Stop, 170-71). The song samples Babe Ruth and Kraftwerk.

"Planet Rock," the longer, 12" version, in full effect.

The video for Afrika Bambaata and the Soul Sonic Force's 1983 release, "Renegades of Funk." Bam & co. align themselves with other renegades like Sitting Bull, Tom Pain, Martin Luther King, and Malxolm X.

This is the cover of the Renegades of Funk 12": Bam and the Soul Sonic Force as superheroes.



The video for Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" (1983). According to Jeff Chang, "The song was a home-studio concoction of Sugar Hill songwriter and house band percussionist Ed 'Duke Bootee' Fletcher, featuring a memorable synthesizer hook from Jiggs Chase...Bootee and sugar Hill mogul Sylvia Robinson could not interest Flash in recording it...But Robinson and Bootee recorded the track anyway, peeling off Furious Five rapper Melle Mel to add his last verse from a forgotten version of 'Superappin' [a song released by Grandmaster Flash in 1979, one month after "Rapper's Delight" appeared]...Flash saw where this was going, and he pushed th rest of the Five into the studio to try to rap Bootee's lines. It didn't work...The video appeared, with Flash and the crew lip-synching along to a rap only Mel had helped compose."

The record was the fifth rap single to hit gold.

At the end of the video is a streetside arrest skit that does feature the Furious Five.

Buying into Pabst Blue Ribbon

Farhad Manjoo penned a great review in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review of what appears to be a very important book: Rob Walker's Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are.

I was particularly intrigued by Manjoo's account of what Walker calls "murketing"-- the ad industry's "underground method of selling that depends on our complicit embrace of brands." By way of illustrating, Manjoo recounts Walker's story of Pabst Blue Ribbon, or "PBR," that is so beloved by today's punks. And I quote:

Consider Pabst Blue Ribbon. Beginning in the 1970s, the cheap beer that had long been synonymous with the blue-collar heartland began a steep decline, with sales by 2001 dipping to fewer than a million barrels a year, 90 percent below the beer’s peak. But in 2002, Pabst noticed a sudden sales spike, driven by an unlikely demographic: countercultural types — bike messengers, skaters and their tattooed kin — in hipster redoubts like Portland, Ore., had taken to swilling the stuff. When asked why, they would praise Pabst for its non-image, for the fact that it seemed to care little about selling.

Traditionally, a company that spots a sudden market opportunity responds by gearing ads toward the new customers. But Neal Stewart, Pabst’s marketing whiz, had studied “No Logo,” Naomi Klein’s anti-corporate manifesto, and he understood that overt commercial messages would turn off an audience suspicious of capitalism. Thus the company shunned celebrity endorsements — Kid Rock had been interested — and devoted its budget instead to murketing, sponsoring a series of unlikely gatherings across the country. Like “some kind of small-scale National Endowment for the Arts for young American outsider culture,” Pabst paid the bills at bike messenger contests, skateboarder movie screenings, and art and indie publishing get-togethers. At each of these events, it kept its logo obscure, its corporate goal to “always look and act the underdog,” to be seen as a beer of “social protest,” a “fellow dissenter” against mainstream mores.

Pabst’s campaign was designed to push beer without appearing to push it. To the extent that it conveyed any branding message at all, it was, Hey, we don’t care if you drink the stuff. To people sick of beer companies that did look as if they cared — don’t Super Bowl ads smack of desperation? — Pabst’s attitude seemed refreshing and inspired deep passion in its fans. Many customers did more than just buy the beer. Walker speaks to one who tattooed a foot-square Pabst logo on his back. Pabst’s low-fi marketing is “not insulting you,” the fellow tells Walker....

Walker doesn’t always pin down how much these marketing efforts contribute to the coffers of the companies that employ them. What he makes clear, however, is how thoroughly such campaigns invade the culture, especially youth culture. Members of a hyper-aware generation often hailed for their imperviousness to marketing are actually turning to brands to define themselves. Want to protest a “corporate” beer? Well, get a Pabst tattoo!

In reality, Pabst Blue Ribbon’s anticapitalist ethos is, as Walker puts it, “a sham.” The company long ago closed its Milwaukee brewery and now outsources its operations to Miller. Its entire corporate staff is devoted to marketing and sales, not brewing. “You really couldn’t do much worse in picking a symbol of resistance to phony branding,” Walker writes. But P.B.R.’s fans don’t care. In the new era of murketing, image is everything.

Pretty amazing, eh? Especially if, like me, you've been at punk events where everyone was consuming PBR like mad. Two things I find especially remarkable. First, that Pabst marketing studied Naomi Klein's No Logo to figure out how to sell PBR to the punks and the skaters. And second, that PBR has outsourced its operations to Miller. According to wikipedia, "In 2001, [Pabst] closed its last brewery in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The InBev purchase of Anheuser-Busch in July 2008 prompted Pabst to claim to be the largest American-owned brewer. In fact, it is a 'virtual brewer,' a marketing company whose 85 brands are brewed by either Miller or Lion."

"Sham" doesn't begin to describe it...despite what (Frank) Dennis Hopper says in Blue Velvet:

Nazi Rockers ... Fuck Off

From DC Larson, in Counterpunch.

Rock'n'roll was born from a multiplicity of racial and cultural idioms including r&b, hillbilly country, blues, bluegrass and gospel. Proudly embracing that taboo diversity, it thrust its middle finger into the aghast mug of stilted, button-down propriety. (I speak here of the raw, original item, and not subsequent, commercially-cultivated replicas.)

It acted as a socially-unifying component of the growing Civil Rights movement, and brought people together on the dance floor just as others would unite at polling places.

Not to paint too rosy a picture. It wasn't the entire solution but it did help spark the crucial process. And its service in helping to usher away racial segregation should not be forgotten.

Review of Somebody Scream!

“Soul Train” in 1976 (Michael Ochs Archives/Corbis)

Good review of Marcus Reeve's new book, Somebody Scream: Rap Music’s Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power. The book will be required reading in my Popular Culture class in the fall. I hope it works well!

How Teens Learn to Buy Identity and Distinction (If They Read)

I thought this article, from Newsweek (March 17, 2008), was quite remarkable. Do we really want teenage girls to read? They could just watch t.v. to get this information.

Article to be read alongside Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.

"Branding for Beginners," by Eve Conant

Chanel Vamp Lip Gloss, Jimmy Choo heels, Gauloises cigarettes, Absolut vodka: they're the kind of brand-name products you'd expect to find in a glossy magazine. But they're popping up with astounding frequency in novels aimed at teen girls, according to a new study by Naomi Johnson, a communications studies professor at Virginia's Longwood University. Johnson looked at six best-selling novels from the "Gossip Girl," "A-List" and "Clique" series, and found that brand names appeared an average of more than once per page: 1,553 references in all. Among them were 65 allusions to brand-name alcohols, cigarettes or prescription drugs. The brand names helped drive plotlines and define characters, says Johnson, who also noticed a degree of snobbery at work: almost all 22 references to Keds served to label the girl wearing them a loser. Other lessons: don't wear Target bikinis; do wear Chanel. (A spokesperson for Alloy Entertainment, a marketing-firm subsidiary that holds the copyright for each line of books, told NEWSWEEK that it does not accept payment for product placement in any of its titles.) "The Judy Blume books I read as a kid were about life lessons and defining yourself," says Johnson. "The life lesson here is that you can buy your identity."

Symptomatic quotes:

from Dial L for Loser: "Her purple eyelet Betsey Johnson halter dress...and BCBG wedges were way more eye-catching than Alicia's...sarong."

from Gossip Girl #8: Nothing Can Keep Us Together: "A few girls lounged in leather armchairs. Jenny recognized a red-and-white patterned Marc Jacobs top on one of them."

from The A-List: "Taste testing was done...between where Skye's sheer Galliano shirt ended and her low-slung D&G camouflage pants began."

The White Stripes: Thoughts on Immigration

From "Icky Thump":

Well, Americans:
What, nothin' better to do?
Why don't you kick yourself out?
You're an immigrant too.

Who's usin' who?
What should we do?
Well you can't be a pimp
And a prostitute too

Watch the video here.

Globalization and pop music

From "As U.S. Pop Wanes Abroad, Talent Scout Looks Wide," Jeff Leeds, NY Times, December 5, 2007

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 4
Sales [of pop music] began shifting more than a decade ago. In 2000 roughly 68 percent of worldwide sales derived from so-called local repertory — artists working in their native country — up from 58 percent in 1991, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade group in London. Though American stars like Beyoncé and the Red Hot Chili Peppers still connect with fans in territories around the world, the ranks and global appeal of major United States acts appear to be waning, many music executives say. In Spain, for instance, only one American album — the soundtrack to “High School Musical 2” — is in the most recent Top 10 chart.

Facebook & Papua New Guinea?

New York Times, December 2, 2007
Myspacebook.past.
Friending, Ancient or Otherwise
By ALEX WRIGHT

THE growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Second Life has thrust many of us into a new world where we make “friends” with people we barely know, scrawl messages on each other’s walls and project our identities using totem-like visual symbols.

We’re making up the rules as we go. But is this world as new as it seems?

Academic researchers are starting to examine that question by taking an unusual tack: exploring the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies. In the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging and “friending,” they see the resurgence of ancient patterns of oral communication.

“Orality is the base of all human experience,” says Lance Strate, a communications professor at Fordham University and devoted MySpace user. He says he is convinced that the popularity of social networks stems from their appeal to deep-seated, prehistoric patterns of human communication. “We evolved with speech,” he says. “We didn’t evolve with writing.”

The growth of social networks — and the Internet as a whole — stems largely from an outpouring of expression that often feels more like “talking” than writing: blog posts, comments, homemade videos and, lately, an outpouring of epigrammatic one-liners broadcast using services like Twitter and Facebook status updates (usually proving Gertrude Stein’s maxim that “literature is not remarks”).

“If you examine the Web through the lens of orality, you can’t help but see it everywhere,” says Irwin Chen, a design instructor at Parsons who is developing a new course to explore the emergence of oral culture online. “Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present. The Web is all of these things.”

An early student of electronic orality was the Rev. Walter J. Ong, a professor at St. Louis University and student of Marshall McLuhan who coined the term “secondary orality” in 1982 to describe the tendency of electronic media to echo the cadences of earlier oral cultures. The work of Father Ong, who died in 2003, seems especially prescient in light of the social-networking phenomenon. “Oral communication,” as he put it, “unites people in groups.”

In other words, oral culture means more than just talking. There are subtler —and perhaps more important — social dynamics at work.

Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, spent two years living with a tribe in Papua New Guinea, studying how people forge social relationships in a purely oral culture. Now he applies the same ethnographic research methods to the rites and rituals of Facebook users.

“In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the question of how people know you,” he says. “When you look at Facebook, you can see the same pattern at work: people projecting their identities by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself in terms of who your friends are.”

In tribal societies, people routinely give each other jewelry, weapons and ritual objects to cement their social ties. On Facebook, people accomplish the same thing by trading symbolic sock monkeys, disco balls and hula girls.

“It’s reminiscent of how people exchange gifts in tribal cultures,” says Dr. Strate, whose MySpace page lists his 1,335 “friends” along with his academic credentials and his predilection for “Battlestar Galactica.”

As intriguing as these parallels may be, they only stretch so far. There are big differences between real oral cultures and the virtual kind. In tribal societies, forging social bonds is a matter of survival; on the Internet, far less so. There is presumably no tribal antecedent for popular Facebook rituals like “poking,” virtual sheep-tossing or drunk-dialing your friends.

Then there’s the question of who really counts as a “friend.” In tribal societies, people develop bonds through direct, ongoing face-to-face contact. The Web eliminates that need for physical proximity, enabling people to declare friendships on the basis of otherwise flimsy connections.

“With social networks, there’s a fascination with intimacy because it simulates face-to-face communication,” Dr. Wesch says. “But there’s also this fundamental distance. That distance makes it safe for people to connect through weak ties where they can have the appearance of a connection because it’s safe.”

And while tribal cultures typically engage in highly formalized rituals, social networks seem to encourage a level of casualness and familiarity that would be unthinkable in traditional oral cultures. “Secondary orality has a leveling effect,” Dr. Strate says. “In a primary oral culture, you would probably refer to me as ‘Dr. Strate,’ but on MySpace, everyone calls me ‘Lance.’ ”

As more of us shepherd our social relationships online, will this leveling effect begin to shape the way we relate to each other in the offline world as well? Dr. Wesch, for one, says he worries that the rise of secondary orality may have a paradoxical consequence: “It may be gobbling up what’s left of our real oral culture.”

The more time we spend “talking” online, the less time we spend, well, talking. And as we stretch the definition of a friend to encompass people we may never actually meet, will the strength of our real-world friendships grow diluted as we immerse ourselves in a lattice of hyperlinked “friends”?

Still, the sheer popularity of social networking seems to suggest that for many, these environments strike a deep, perhaps even primal chord. “They fulfill our need to be recognized as human beings, and as members of a community,” Dr. Strate says. “We all want to be told: You exist.”

Jeff Chang on hip-hop activism

The man always comes correct. From Mother Jones...

"Can rap sell activism as well as it has $150 sneakers, bottle service, and grill work? Can the very people who've made vast fortunes off selling stupid help reform the industry?"

Jeff Chang on M.I.A.

from The Nation...

"If rootlessness is the defining condition of the planet of slums, then what does it mean for art to come home? Kala's answers--like all great "political" art--cannot be any more than provisional. But now, at least, no longer running to or from someone else's utopia, M.I.A. is behind the wheel, switching the lost youth of the Fourth World into the network society, her radio on."

In Defence of Fashion

I'm starting to feel a bit shallow and ill-read and it's showing--do I only read the New York Times?? Perhaps. In any case, I found this article by the inimitable Guy Trebay quite invaluable.

Some of the main points:

Intellectuals, feminists, "thinking people" love to deride fashion.

The academic uniform "is intended to make you look like you’re not paying attention to fashion, and not vain, and not interested in it." (Anti-fashion fashion.)

"Clothes are ideas...costume serves to billboard the self." (Identity would be impossible to convey without fashion.)

"[T]he appetite for change so essential to fashion is a more culturally dynamic force than is generally imagined."

Fashion is essential to the New York City economy--reason enough not to deride it so cavalierly.

Here's the article in full:

New York Times, September 2, 2007
Admit It. You Love It. It Matters.
By GUY TREBAY

DEPENDING on who is doing the talking, fashion is bourgeois, girly, unfeminist, conformist, elitist, frivolous, anti-intellectual and a cultural stepchild barely worth the attention paid to even the most minor arts.

With Fashion Week beginning in New York on Tuesday — the start of a twice-yearly, monthlong cycle of designer presentations on two continents and in four cities that will showcase hundreds of individual designers — it is worth asking why fashion remains the most culturally potent force that everyone loves to deride.

“Everyone” is not here intended to imply the deeply initiated, those pixie-dust people for whom the shape of a dress or the cut of a sleeve is a major event. There is certainly a place for those types, whether they are cuckoos like the late fashion editor Diana Vreeland (who once wrote, “I’m told it’s not in good taste to wear blackamoors anymore, but I think I’ll revive them”), or extravagant mythomaniacs like John Galliano, the Dior designer — who plays a pirate one season, a gypsy the next — or even the young celebrity brand pimps who would probably be offering paparazzi a lot more gratuitous crotch shots if designers didn’t provide them with free clothes.

No, everyone means the rest of us, those who scorn fashion outright and those who don’t but who nevertheless have the uneasy sense that this compelling world of surfaces and self-presentation is unworthy of regard.

“There is this suggestion that fashion is not an art form or a cultural form, but a form of vanity and consumerism,” said Elaine Showalter, the feminist literary critic and a professor emeritus at Princeton. And those, Ms. Showalter added, are dimensions of culture that “intelligent and serious” people are expected to scorn.

Particularly in academia, where bodies are just carts for hauling around brains, the thrill and social play and complex masquerade of fashion is “very much denigrated,” Ms. Showalter said. “The academic uniform has some variations,” she said, “but basically is intended to make you look like you’re not paying attention to fashion, and not vain, and not interested in it, God forbid.”

When Valerie Steele, the director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, declared an interest at Yale graduate school in pursuing the history of fashion, colleagues were horror-struck. “I was amazed at how much hostility was directed at me,” Ms. Steele said. “The intellectuals thought it was unspeakable, despicable, everything but vain and sinful,” she added. She might as well have joined a satanic cult.

And that, substantially, is how a person still is looked at who happens to mention in serious company an interest in reading, say, Vogue.

“I hate it,” Miuccia Prada once remarked to me about fashion, in a conversation during which we mutually confessed to unease at being compelled by a subject so patently superficial.

“Of course, I love it also,” Ms. Prada added, and her reason said a lot about why fashion is a subject no one should be ashamed to take seriously. “Even when people don’t have anything,” Ms. Prada said, “they have their bodies and their clothes.”

They have their identities, that is, assembled during the profound daily ritual of clothing oneself; they have, as Colette once remarked, their civilizing masks. And yet, despite its potential as a tool for analyzing culture, history, politics and creative expression; as a form of descriptive shorthand used through all of written history (including the Vedas, the Bible and the Koran); as a social delight, fashion is just as often used as a weapon, a club wielded by those who forget that we are saying something about ourselves every time we get dressed — not infrequently things that fail to convey the whole truth.

Why else was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign moved to attack the fashion critic of The Washington Post for attempting to read the candidate’s clothes? The editorial blitz that followed Senator Clinton’s outraged response to some blameless observations about a slight show of cleavage on the Senate floor was instructive, as was Mrs. Clinton’s summoning up of feminist cant about the sexism of focusing on what a woman wears to the exclusion of her ideas.

But clothes are ideas; to use a fashionism — Hello! Scholars like the art historian Anne Hollander have spent decades laying out the way that costume serves to billboard the self. One would have thought that few people understand this truth as well as the woman occasionally known as Hairband Hillary, who, after all, assiduously recast her image from that of demure and wifely second-banana to power-suited policy wonk, dressed to go forth and lead the free world.

Politicians are far from the only people who act as though the concerns of fashion are beneath consideration. When the Italian film legend Michelangelo Antonioni died recently, film critics and obituary writers went into raptures about his classic “L’Avventura,” a movie few people outside of cinema studies classes are likely, at this point, to have seen. Some remarked that the Antonioni of that early film had already begun losing his edge by the time he detoured into films like “Blowup,” whose plot revolves around the fashion world.

Never mind that “L’Avventura” is a sharply stylish movie and that in Antonioni’s hands wardrobe does the work dialogue would for more talk-prone directors. Absent plot, clothes are used by Antonioni to frame the mood of upper-class anomie and to make graphically his distaste for the Italian neorealists, who all seemed to have costumed their movies using the same set of Anna Magnani’s hand-me-downs.

Like most Italians then and now, Antonioni had a sympathy for the role clothes play in human theater. And while “Blowup” is set in a fashion (or “mod”) milieu, it is less about fashion, really, than about an accidentally photographed murder and the instability of what is seen and known. Even 40 years on, the film’s surfaces remain so stylishly assured and so cool they automatically arouse intellectual suspicion. Trusting in appearances, Antonioni always seemed to suggest, may be a losing proposition.

But investing in them, as Ms. Steele said, can be far worse.

“In our deeply Puritan culture, to care about appearance is like trying to be better than you really are, morally wrong,” she said.

It is to be driven by the dictates of desires and not needs. And yet the appetite for change so essential to fashion is a more culturally dynamic force than is generally imagined. Luxury, and not necessity, may be the true mother of invention, as the writer Henry Petroski observed. This proposition is an easier sell when the luxury in question is an iPhone, and not a Balenciaga handbag, but the same principles hold.

In places like Silicon Valley the quest for newer and better stuff results in technology patents, a clear measure of economic robustness. Fashion innovations may be harder to patent or track, but it seems obvious that huge sectors of the New York City economy would churn to a halt if all the Project Runway types suddenly stopped migrating here in the belief that the world could be changed by the sort of innovation inherent in how a garment is cut.

“Fashion is so easy to hate,” said Elizabeth Currid, a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning and Development and the author of “The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City” (Princeton University Press).

“Cultural industries like fashion are sometimes seen as something only the skinny girls in high school think about,” said Ms. Currid — and less often as a fascinating field for cultural study and also the bill-payers keeping thousands of seamstresses, cutters, pattern makers, truckers, real estate brokers and publicity hacks employed.

Analyzing Bureau of Labor statistics, Ms. Currid arrived at the not-altogether-startling conclusion that the densest concentration of fashion designers in the United States is in New York. A glance at the roster of foreign designers showing at New York Fashion Week, Sept. 4 through 12 — Russia, Turkey, India and Brazil are represented — suggests a good reason for that.

“Even if, on some level, fashion is fantasy, the concentration of events that go into producing it and the resulting social spillover,” as Ms. Currid said, can result in a huge cumulative economic advantage for a city. While the seasonal shows in the tents in Bryant Park, with their enforced passivity and aura of feminine spectatorship, lend themselves to derision, enforcing the sense that all those fops and dandies and flibbertigibbets, all the socialite geishas and second-rate celebrities and editorial priestesses are little more than idlers and dupes, big business goes on. Odds are that the same journals whose critics score easy points off fashion are economically propped up by the life-support provided by advertising for dresses and bags and shoes.

One of the most startling findings of her research, Ms. Currid said, was how powerful something as superficial, girly, bourgeois, unfeminist, conformist, elitist and frivolous as fashion can be in creating the intangible allure that attracts money, talent, beauty and enterprise to cities.

“How does one place make itself different from another in a world where there’s a Starbucks on every corner?” she asked. “People have to believe that this is the place to be.” Fashion has that effect.

‘Originals’ today are yesterday’s same old songs

This article, reprinted in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on August 23, is a quite original take on the question of "originality" in today's pop songs. Is cyberspace threatening to destroy musical creativity, due to rampant sampling, recycling, versioning and cut'n'mixing?

‘Originals’ today are yesterday’s same old songs

BY ANN POWERS, LOS ANGELES TIMES

Elton John’s outburst about the Internet’s effect on pop — he suggested that a five-year cyberspace shutdown might be the only way to renew the music’s creativity — was greeted with eye rolling and the general consensus that he should splurge on an iPod. But his consternation is understandable.

The music industry is in tatters; the noise that amateurs once kept to themselves emanates from every corner of cyberspace, and between the money-obsessed mainstream and the hype-addled underground, there’s no agreement on what will endure. For a traditionalist like John, it’s a scary time — old standards are dying fast.

Consider one of the enduring myths of pop: that originality is paramount. This idea always has been pretty much a lie, given the history of music-making as a borrower’s art.

In an essay on the merits of playing copycat published in the February Harper’s, Jonathan Lethem traced the origins of American pop to the “open source” culture of blues and jazz and noted that recording techniques, which allowed for literal duplication of sounds, have steadily enhanced the artful cribbing pop’s innovators employ.

“As examples accumulate,” Lethem writes, “it becomes apparent that appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production.” (Lethem later reveals that he “stole, warped and cobbled together” his essay, including this idea, which came from the book Owning Culture by Kembrew McLeod. )

Lethem’s point might seem obvious to any sample-chasing hip-hop fan or Dylanologist who has traced the master’s loving thefts over the decades. Yet the idea that a song or a sound can be unique remains potent, especially for musicians.

The financial structure of the music industry, which rewards creativity when it’s copyrighted, has upheld the idea that one person can “own” a song.

ACCUSED Avril Lavigne has been accused of a host of rip-offs, including the chorus of her hit “Girlfriend,” which so closely resembles a 1979 song by the power-pop band the Rubinoos that it has spurred a lawsuit. [You decide!] Lavigne’s former collaborator, Chantal Kreviazuk, subsequently accused her of pilfering ideas (Kreviazuk recanted her accusation after Lavigne threatened to sue her ). And then it surfaced that another new Lavigne song might not be so fresh: The beats and vocal cadence of “I Don’t Have to Try” mirror those Peaches employed in 2003’s “I’m the Kinda.” [Note: check this video and decide for yourself.] One would think a striver such as Lavigne would crumble under this scrutiny, but the very fans who have been tracing her transgressions are beginning to make a case for forgiving her. On YouTube, some videos make the argument that Lavigne is just part of a chain: A new single from High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens sounds uncannily like an older Lavigne hit, and the Rubinoos borrowed their barking chorus from The Rolling Stones in the first place.

The written word is never as convincing as hearing the musical connections themselves, and the huge archive of recordings available online allows for instant comparison. Where once an old blues tune that Bob Dylan borrowed from would be known by only the obsessive few, now anyone can argue about it in voluminous posts on the Expecting Rain (expectingrain. com ) message board.

Hip-hop already had made the patchwork nature of pop obvious years before through the collage technique of sampling. Cyberspace has made everyone a participant in the disc jockey culture of “digging in the crates.” Artists still might want to make music no one has heard before, but they’re forced to admit that even their most creative moments are just part of a long chain.

Even artists who do burst forth with a startling take on pop eventually will find themselves accused of being derivative. Maybe that’s why M.I.A., the British-Sri Lankan polymath who’s as fresh as artists come these days, shouted “This is my song!” as she began “Jimmy,” from her new album, Kala, during a July show in Los Angeles. “Jimmy” is not technically M.I.A.’s song; it’s a cover of a song from a 1983 Bollywood movie Disco Dancer. [check it out on youtube.) M.I.A. can’t pretend she never knew that source — she grew up loving Bollywood music. But her statement of ownership also held an opposite meaning: Past versions be damned; the vigorous new beats and vocals she applies make her “Jimmy’s” rightful owner now.

DISTINCTION MATTERS With the very idea of originality in flux, another trait defines today’s most interesting stars. Distinctiveness is what matters, the ability not to separate from the crowd but to stand out within it. The occasional lawsuit aside, pop stars are now much more willing to wear their influences proudly and make clear how they’re building their music from them.

Pop that aims for distinctiveness acknowledges its influences, tries to do them one better and, at its best, works real transformation. The White Stripes are distinctive because they’re high-concept, putting the blues through an art-school wringer and coming up with a sound that’s so far from “authentic” it finds a different road into truth. Brad Paisley is distinctive because he combines a neo-traditionalist Nashville sound with lyrics that poke gentle fun at contemporary mores. Beyonce is distinctive because her rhythmconscious vocal style updates the approach of the soul divas she emulates.

Some artists seem more beholden to their sources than others; this is where self-awareness comes in. Imitation becomes creative only when it’s acknowledged and truly examined. Amy Winehouse, the young English singer whose work with producer Mark Ronson painstakingly re-creates the feel of 1960 s girl-group soul, offers the most obvious example of how bold imitation can become personal expression.

Sometimes the thrill of the caper gives music that borrows heavily a distinctive ring. Sean Kingston’s debut album is a case in point. The young singer, who was born in Miami and reared in Jamaica, has one of the year’s biggest hits, “Beautiful Girls” — a song that sounds just like a chart-topper by ubiquitous R&B crooner Akon.

In a hip-hop-dominated scene full of mercenary lovers and ghetto businessmen, Kingston projects sweetness. In the end, “Beautiful Girls” isn’t an Akon song, as Kingston is slightly in awe of women. Akon never would sound this vulnerable.

Kingston and producer J. R. Rotem didn’t stop at seizing that Top 40 moment. Like much bubble gum, the CD Sean Kingston has more going on beneath the shiny surface. Mining the rich connections between Caribbean music and hip-hop — and incorporating elements of classic rock, gangsta rap, jazz and vaudeville — the album presents Kingston as a kid roaming through the candy store of popular music.

Best of all is “Got No Shorty,” the song owing the most unexpected debt. Over a hand-clap beat, Kingston sings the melody penned by pioneering black composer Spencer Williams in 1916. It’s “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” one of the 20th century’s most enduring little ditties.

It would have been easy for Kingston and Rotem to reference David Lee Roth’s post-Van Halen version, which brought it to the attention of rock-era listeners. Instead, they reach back to Bing Crosby, pulling out the horns from his 1941 version with the Woody Herman Band. That move makes another connection: “Hey Ya!,” OutKast’s genre-redefining hip-hop hit, used a similar horn sample.

To music fans who still believe that heroic individualism is the essence of great music, the clever juxtapositions within Kingston’s hits will seem shallow. But they are the ones pop is leaving behind. Originality is dead. Long may creativity flower as it rises from the earth of a million songs and sounds that have come before.