As a media art form, music videos are often conduits for various elements of postmodern culture. Sometimes they also, point a self-accusing finger at themselves for doing so and sometimes the videos and lyrics are about postmodern society too.

Andrew Goodwin, a renowned media theorist sums up the postmodernism of music videos:

1.  Blurs high art and low art – it is media for everyone with no boundaries.
2.  Abandons/challenges grand narratives – incomplete narratives, no sense of resolution, rejection of the overarching ideologies of society/history – love conquers all, men are the breadwinners, god is the answer etc.
3. Intertextuality – borrows from other texts; deliberately, unknowingly, alludes to, knowing nod to – all of which fits with Jameson’s ideas on ‘nothing new, a flatness’ or as he puts it ‘blank parody’.
4. Loss of Historical reality – pastiche and intertextuality blur history and chronology so that conventional notions of past, present and future  are lost in a melange of images, all of which appear to be contemporary.

The Rizzle Kicks – is made in a postmodern fashion but also points the finger at postmodern society.

Lilly Allen, The Fear is also made in a postmodern fashion but also points the finger at postmodern society.

We will be studying in depth some current music videos, one of which you should choose to focus on as your 2nd media text in your essay (the other one will be Nosedive, Black Mirror by Charlie Brooker).

Music Videos are often examples of postmodern media, not only because their place as a recognised art form has come about in the postmodern era but mainly because they evidence a range of ideas about what makes a text postmodern.

Intertextuality

• Pastiche – use of a previous text as the basis for the whole music video – in the style of
• Parody – making fun of a previous text
• Homage and Quotation – sampling
• Weaponised intertextuality – those deliberate Easter Eggs – we will look more closely at Ariana Grande and This is America as a detailed texts later in the term.

Bricolage

•  a melange, mixture of styles – cartoons, animations, dance, drama, acting, documentary, other footage.

Self-referential

• think of Katy Perry breaking the 4th wall at the end of Chained to the Rythmn – let’s draw attention to its own construction.

GENERAL SIGNIFICANCE relating to Music Videos and Postmodernism

• They manipulate time and space – flashbacks, incomplete narratives usually present and they often challenge the grand narratives (more on this later) – there is not always a happy ending, a dominant male, success after working hard for a living.
• Play with the relationship between audience and text – breaking the 4th wall and there is often a presumption they are culturally competent, deliberately playing with their expectations.
• Play with the distinction between reality and representation.
• They blur the lines between high art and what is considered low art.
• This is a little old now but it shows a self-referentiality (this is a music video that we have constructed) but it also points the finger at a wider postmodern scope i.e. the idea that people are lost in their hypereal worlds, unaware of their real lives and surroundings.  We will look more at this later.

Is the inevitable consequence of our postmodern distrust grand narratives: religion, politics, the rule of law, education; a world in which there is no truth? Are we doomed to increasingly acrimonious arguments over our personal truths, which are often simply uninformed opinion and those with the loudest voice (or more dominant media presence)  getting to define the truth for the rest of us, which is the definition of hegemony?

So, What is The Truth in a Post Fact World?

The News and its Gatekeepers

In the past the news was controlled by TV & Newspaper editors who used ethical guidelines developed over time to define news values which were used to decide which stories to run and which stories got the most interest.

The values were defined in a work but Galtung and Ruge in 1965. They showed that stories about the homes of the news outlet took more importance than stories about other people and cultures. So hegemony is certainly not a new phenomena.

However newspapers and TV news are in decline. News is expensive to make and people don’t want to pay for it.

Reuters reported that 28% of  18-24 years olds use Facebook as their main source of news! Who edits the content we receive on Facebook?

Answer: nobody!

Well these days it is algorithms which are the news editors of the 21st Century. These bits of software are designed to predict what we like and promote those preferences based our search history & location on on our feeds.

This leads to…

Filter Bubbles & The Echo Chamber

Click Bait and the Amplification of Fake News

An algorithm can find it very difficult to distinguish fact from opinion. They can’t tell if the story they are promoting in our feeds is irrelevant or massively biased in favour of one groups opinions.

This means that fake news will appear next to genuine news stories that do follow the journalistic imperatives of balance and evidence. It then is down to the audience to use their critical faculties to distinguish the genuine stories from the fakes.

A Post Truth Post Modern World has frightening results like…

• Former education secretary Michael Gove claiming, during the Brexit debate of 2016, that British people, ‘have had enough of experts’!
• Trump claiming that. ‘He has kept more promises than he made!’
• ‘250,000 Syrian refugees had been placed on Native American Indian reservations.’ Was a claim made by satirical site ‘Real News Right Now’, and was picked up and repeated by Fox News and President Trump.
  

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The truth is a hostage to the narratives of the elites. This is HEGEMONY!!!!

The top story is all about the lovely Lorraine Kelly…she is just so genuine, so ‘real’, so cosy’ so authentic and so honest’.  But start to consider how and why many presenters are able to connect to the audience in such a ‘meaningful’ manner.  How real are they?  Are they just a brand? Are they just acting?  Click on the image to go to the story.  What would Baudrillard say about this?

This is a link to a recent video about the Christchurch massacre (scroll down to the video at the end of the article).  It starts to open up the questions that New Zealand, and to be fair most countries in the world, do not want to ask or answer. The idea of ‘white superiority’ is a grand narrative that has permeated society for centuries. It is a hard one to square up to and acknowledge.  New Zealand, have taken claim to the image and idea that they are a peaceful, multi-cultural society where all is good and dandy.  The reality may not be as it seems. The difficulties in race relations between the ‘colonising’ nations and the indigenous Maori population is one they would prefer not to advertise – but it is an issue and one that has to be addressed.  The grand narrative that lurks ominously in the wings is that this idea of entitlement, and ‘white superiority’ is to blame. Lyotard would love this to be tackled – questioned – aired and challenged.  Does it take a tragedy though to make us ‘own’ something we would rather not?

Finally, on the same subject, this is a cartoon that appeared in the Guardian last week.  It again focuses a light on how the new grand narrative of us now living in an anti-racist society.   In other words the narrative is that as the human race, we have questioned the, ‘it’s never ever White people’s fault’ grand narrative that has permeated history, and we have and are successfully challenging this.    Problem sorted. No racism, no inequality – it’s all good.

However, stop and revisit how the press, the media who have a direct impact on our ideologies about racism, Islamaphobia, homophobia, sexism are still reporting issues.  How responsible are they for the grand narratives that may not shape the world – and not in a good way?  Perhaps Lyotard would argue that it takes a tragedy for the world to wake up to its own failings?

The Simpsons’ use of postmodernist techniques, such as fragmentation, serve to highlight the diversity of our culture and the impossibility of establishing moral authority in the pluralism of postmodern society.

It is a sentiment closely related to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s theory of metanarratives, which involves a distrust of totalizing explanations of the world.

In effect, The Simpsons’ stance is the same as Lyotard’s; to reject systems that aim to exert their authority in order to proclaim absolute truths. Lyotard’s view is that these metanarratives, which purport to explain and re-assure, are really illusions,fostered in order to smother difference, opposition and plurality.Through various implicit and explicit methods,The Simpsons essentially takes the same stance, criticizing any and all who perpetuate such metanarratives. One of the ways The Simpsons does this is by making anti-authoritarianism one of its most prominent recurring themes.

Task:

Consider the metanarrative (dominant opinion) that is commonly held about one of the following groups in society:

1. The Police
2. Lawyers / The Law
3. Educators / Teacher
4. Families / Parents
5. Christians/ Muslims
6. Celebrities / The Media
7. Business People

You will then be allocated a character from The Simpsons. You need to research their characters, narratives and how they represent someone that may or may not, help bring about the destruction of the grand narrative. Create a  slide in the shared presentation on google drive that compares the dominant opinion with the one that is actually constructed, conveyed, portrayed in The Simpsons by the various characters.

The Simpsons – A Postmodern Text

Some reading for anyone interested enough in how The Simpson’s can be described as a postmodern text.

Grand Narrative used to refer to the ‘Big Story’ or ‘organising principle’ of a country or religious movement but nowadays this applies to large corporations, especially multinationals by virtue of their size. It also shows how the postmodern world is blurring boundaries as large corporates of today have many characteristics similar to religions and kingdoms.

A way in which identity is expressed (created?) is through stories that underpin the Grand Narrative. The big stories become especially powerful because they are often retold and referred to in the media.

Grand Narrative is vitally important. In the absence of a good guiding story, when the narrative collapses, people become become capable of anything. The media is filled with examples of this every day.

Equally important are the stories told by multinational companies and organisations that make people want to queue to buy the latest iPod, take Prozac, listen to music or even go to war. The Grand Narrative serves to create a collective identity for an organisation or community – a way in which shared values are expressed and within which people do what they do.

In multinationals.and larger organisations identity is expressed in a statement of mission, vision, values, purpose and measures and is told in stories that underline certain key organisational values and aspects of the organisational dynamic such as customer-centricity, integrity, innovation amongst others. These stories are generally told by those in leadership and positions of influence. Particularly good stories in this genre create a sense of meaning and history. This is our collective experience. Or is it? What do you think makes a story motivating? Are you living in a motivating story?

The time has come for us to rise above difference and start telling a story about the future of us: the human species. We have a great common history, but we’re too defensive and fearful to see similarity with our competitors and enemies; the others, the strangers, the foreign and obscure. This belongs in our Grand Narrative: