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Is Jenny Still from the block? Jennifer Lopez's "My World" TV Commercial for Fiat

Recently, a standard, celebrity endorsement TV commercial started a mini-firestorm across the blogosphere, twitter and even mainstream media.

In the spot, Jennifer Lopez seemingly drives through the Bronx in a Fiat and describes how much her old hood means to her:

 

It turns out, as exposed by The Smoking Gun and other blogs, when JLo tells us how the Bronx neighborhood where she grew up inspires her "to be tougher, to stay sharper, to think faster", she is actually in L.A. doing a voiceover -- and the person we see in the Fiat is a body double.

To make matters worse, reporter Ed Morales witnessed the shoot (it took place close to his home), and took a photo that showed that the car in the commercial actually broke down.

If this weren't enough, the graffiti artists who created the giant heart you see at the beginning of the spot, also cried foul.  Their work, which Fiat used without permission, is copyrighted (Fiat ended up settling with them out of court).

And then, in the midst of all this, during Lopez's performance at the American Music Awards a Fiat appeared suddenly in the middle of her act, offering an instance of product placement so blatant, a fellow performer questioned her integrity.   The Fiat appears a little over a minute in...

 

The Authenticity Dilemma

Amusing as all these exposes are, initially I came away wondering, as Anderson Cooper did, what all the outrage was about.

After all, part of advertising's mystique has to do with the whole real or fake dilemma ads pose.  This is a genre of communication that delights in ambiguity. Think of the iconic headline that launced Clairol in the U.S.: "Does she or doesn't she?"

You could even argue that one of the thrills consumer goods provide is the tantalizing possibiity that they allow you to try out and even adopt new identities.

But with a little reflection, I could see why people got irked.  Lopez has built her brand around the image of a superstar who keeps it real by staying in touch with her roots.  Who can forget those lines from her most famous song:

"Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got
I'm still, I'm still Jenny from the block."

And it's this aura of authenticity that Fiat wants to associate with its cars.  Here is Fiat's marketing guru, Olivier Francois:

"Jennifer fits perfectly with the brand not because of who she is but because of what she is -- authentic, passionate, modern, and a fighter determined to stand out from the rest.  As you look at her career path, she embodies the Fiat philosophy, 'Life is Best When Driven.'"

Francois has reason to be confident with such a strategy.  He used the "authenticity" sell in his remarkably successful re-launch of Chrysler -- with TV spots starring blue-collar heroes like Eminem and others (covered on this blog here and here).  And an earlier viral video ad connected with the Lopez campaign ranked 4th most popular of its genre this year.

Nevertheless, you can see the contradiction contemporary ideas of authenticity often entail.  Francois praises Lopez for her driven, competitive personality.  She is authentic because, despite the odds against her, she fought for her individual vision.

Yet, the spot isn't so much about her individuality, but her loyalty to her community.  In fact, it's her "street cred" that affords her, as a performer, much of her bravado, swagger and authority.

Perhaps, then, the source of irritation with this spot drives from an issue Michael Lally (from Lally's Alley) has brought to my attention recently -- that of co-optation.

The fact that Lopez and Fiat simulated her cruise through the Bronx, appropriating its urban art, street scenes and people for their own uses, no doubt seemed to offer a particularly ungraceful example of cultural co-optation.

All of which makes me wonder if questions of authenticty become particularly acute for celebrities with working class roots.  On the one hand, they've got to transcend, even betray, their backgrounds to get over.

On the other, they've got to stay loyal to their cultural milieu in order to use it credibly -- especially if their artistic personas draw on their class or ethnic identity.

In any case, Fiat must be hoping the accusations about the ad's fakery don't reflect upon their car.

For in the past, Fiat has had its own problems with authenticity.  I've read that the last time the brand made a push for the U.S. market, instead of a hip, urban ride, it got a reputation as a car that broke down a lot.

The brand's name, in fact, became an acronym for "Fix It Again, Tony." Thoughts? 

Repetition or Renaissance? Jeff Beck and Imelda May vs. Simon Reynolds and Retromania

I've just started reading Simon Reynolds' widely reviewed Retromania, and I can already see where I both agree and disgree with his argument.

His book valuably documents a phenomenon that's so pervasive you sometimes accept it without a second thought.  That's the fact that everything from movies to ads to pop music (his focus) often seem like some sort of remake.

The retro has been embraced with such relish and abandon that Reynolds' wonders if, like oil or some other natural resource, we will soon run out of the past.

Boredom, of course, is often the result of all this repetition.  Do we really need to see remakes of flicks like Friday the 13th or endless installments of Final Desitination?  (Of course we do,  if the we in question is a studio looking for a quick score, but that's another story...)

At the same time though, there's repeating and then there's repeating. 

One of the things that's made pop and indie music listenable to me again is precisely the sophistication with which some artists now allude to past motifs and styles -- achieving an effect that makes the music simultaneously familiar, yet strangely original.

Much of the newer music (you can include varieties of jazz here too), informed by archives like YouTube and countless other sources, sounds more complex to my old ears -- simply because it seems to mix layers of music history together,  and so speaks with a wider stylistic vocabulary.

As a result, when I listen to groups like Outcast, Gnarls Barkley, Fleet Foxes or MGMT, I hear more than I used to in older pop music. 

Not ony that, but this knowing quality can make even nearly note-by-note tributes to the old sound fresh -- because the music is presented in a very different moment, one whose values and sense of style have little to do with the past. 

See what you think.  Here's an example of classic rock guitar maestro Jeff Beck teaming with the exciting, Dublin-based neo rockabilly singer Imelda May, doing a scrupulous rendition of Les Paul and Mary Ford's "How High the Moon."  I've included a vintage Paul/Ford clip for comparision:

 

 

The Newness in Nostalgia

One of Reynolds' problems with all this "archive fever" is the fear that music is becoming so swallowed up in nostalgia, that it's difficult to make way for the new.  Again, he's partly right.

When I hear the beautifully double-tracked vocals in both versions of "How High the Moon", I do get a nostalgic feeling.  I associate this sound with the music tracks to cartoons and TV commercials I saw when I was very young.  In my mind's eye, I even see a smiling moon dancing over a mountain.

On the other hand, the style of this music -- jazzy but pop (with a very light "Hit Parade" touch), is not something you hear a lot of on  today's pop scene.  Only artists with a sense of music history, like Jeff Beck and Imelda May, it seems to me, would even be hip enough to see that it was worth re-introducing.

And seeing as this is such an unfamiliar sound for today's context, isn't it essentially new (especially when presented by such stylish artists)?  Might not awarenss of it lead to strange permutations, where this sound is recombined with something unexpected?

That's why what's been going on in pop music (and jazz) in the last few decades reminds me of something art historian Arthur Danto pointed to in painting and the fine arts way back in the 80s/90s.

Danto commented on how artists no longer paid attention to the Modernist narrative of "art's progress", where aesthetic style evolved to culminate in the triumph of abstract art.  In the old orthodoxy, unless one showed allegiance to this tale, one would simply not be considered important.

Now, Danto wrote (back in the 90s), artists looked at the styles of the past and the museum itself "as filled not with dead art, but with living artistic options."  As a result, the fine arts were flooded with a wild range of approaches, many of which departed from the austere abstract orthodoxy.

And as far as pop music goes, it's worth remembering that many creative breakthroughs arrive via a kind of revivalism.  Wasn't Punk, for all its brash newness, also a return to rock's more stripped down, garage band sound?  You could almost say it represented a renaissance of rock's minimalist side.

So before completely trashing the retro, we should be aware that repeating a part of the past -- or drawing attention to forgotten traditions -- can be a way of announcing something new.  Thoughts?

 

 

What's the Rap on Rap Today? Ideas from B.o.B. and Poet Saul Williams

The other week on Charlie Rose, Sasha-Frere Jones (pop music critic for the New Yorker), pointed to a fascinating trend in the world of hip-hop.

Usually we associate rap with "bragging and boasting"; now "it's full of this strange kind of self-loathing self-doubt," where the artist asks, "what does it mean to be famous..."

Frere-Jones was speaking about new releases from Drake and Eminen.  But the same mood is one of the things that makes the hit collaboration between B.o.B. and Halyley Williams (of Paramore) interesting.  The self-doubt here lends a bittersweet, haunting quality to this cut.  Check it out:

The key stanza in this rap for me is the one that begins:

Somebody take me back to the days
Before this was a job, before I got paid
Before it ever mattered what I had in my bank
Yeah back when I was tryin' to get into the subway
And back when I was rappin' for the hell of it
But now a days we rappin' to stay relevant

"Relevant" here could mean more concerned with a "message."  But I take it to mean competitive in the marketplace (as this collaboration with a mega-watt pop star keeps B.o.B.).  In either case, the act of rapping is no longer an "art about nothing" ("for the hell of it"), i.e., rap-for-rap's-sake -- as it's lost a bit of its joy and freedom -- on the practical road to making buck.

Poets Vs. Rappers

This trend in hip-hop self-critique reminded me of a much earlier one, offered by rap's first cousins: slam poets.  People who know about the history of that movement will tell you that a common theme for slam poems has been the idea idea that hip-hop was once great, but that now it has sold out.

Where such a complaint becomes really interesting is when it's put out there by someone adept at both hip-hop and literary poetry.  Such poems use the conventions of hip-hop verse to speak against the genre's cliches.  A fascinating example of this is The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip-Hop (2006), by poet and slam innovator Saul Williams .

The book reinvents the tale of the discovery of such texts as the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library, only as urban legend.  Williams mythologizes about finding a lost scripture beneath the subway tunnels of NYC, apparently written by an ancient poet (in an almost indecipherable graffiti-like script). His book is a "translation" of this mysteriously coded text into several poetic sequences.  

The visionary speaking through the Scrolls was apparently omniscient; he was there at the birth of the form and has predicted its demise, as in these lines:

Hip-hop is lying on the side of the road
half-dead to itself.  Blood scrawled over its
mangled flesh like jazz.  Stuffed into an over-
sized record bag.

Tuba lips swollen beyond recognition.  Diamond
studded teeth strewn like rice at karma's wedding.
The ring bearer bore bad news.  Minister of
Information wrote the wrong proclamation.  Now
everyone's singing the wrong song. (p. 37)

The problem with the genre is specified in a manifesto-like piece later in the book:

Statements such as, "keep it real," especially
when punctuating or articulating modes of
ultra-violence inflicted psychologically or
physically or depicting an unchanging rule
of events, will henceforth be seen as retroactive
and not representative of the individually 
determined IS. (p. 101)

Commercial (gangsta) rap is criticized here not only for its sensationalist violence, but its "realism." This trait makes for "an unchanging rule" (i.e., a sort of hopeless determinism).  In this sense, its message -- only describing the social rather than changing it -- isn't ambitious enough.  The way forward is to be found in the visionary rather than the so-called "real":

MTHRFCKRs better realize, now is the time
to self-actualize.  We have found evidence that
Hip-hop's standard 85 RPM when increased
by a number at least half the rate of the standard
or decreased by 3/4's of its speed may be a 
determining factor in heightening consciousness.
Studies show that when a given norm is changed
in the face of the unchanging the remaining
contradictions will parallel the truth.  (p. 102)

Two Ways to Criticize Commercial Art

You could say B.o.B.'s complaint about the rap business criticizes from within: if you're worried too much about hits, you lose the pleasure of spontaneity by serving the practical.  Williams uses the non-commercial standpoint of the visionary poet to critique the genre from the outside, with not only an aesthetic, but ethical protest.  He suggests commerce has weakened the message.

From both there's a complaint about the loss of autonomy -- about artists not being able to say what they want or should.  It's an objection that goes back to the beginning of modernism.

And often the sign that a genre is going to take a whole new turn.
  

              

     

    

   

A Poet or "Just Another Rock Star"? Jim Morrison and The Doors on American Masters (PBS)

Toward the end of When You're Strange: a Film About the Doors (a recent documentary from PBS's American Masters series), narrator Johnny Depp intones these lines in a deep voice:

"To some, Jim was a poet, his soul trapped between heaven and hell.  To others, he was just another rock star who crashed and burned.  But this much is true.  You can't burn out if you're not on fire." (Source: Unclebarky)

It's well-known, as commentators to this blog have pointed out, that, especially toward the end of his life,   Morrison wanted to be considered a poet.  The documentary tells us that Pamela Courson, his lifelong mate, urged him to quit the rock star life altogether and devote himself to his second love.  Michael McClure and a number of scholars have considered his writings important.

I myself am no expert on his poetry; you'll have to check it out for yourself.  (Perhaps comments can enlighten me?)

But the issue the film brings up for me isn't whether he was a "good" poet or not.  It's why his literary status seems important in the first place.  Couldn't he be a key 60s figure on the strength of his music alone?

Can't 60s Rock Stars Just Be Rock Stars?

There is, in fact, a whole genre of "60s-rockers-who-are-called-poets" (by critics, other writers, fans and the press).  Morrison joins the ranks of troubadours such as John Lennon and Bob Dylan (and later, others). As featured in an earlier post, Dylan especially has been subjected to "poetic recitations" of his lyrics. Why, I wonder, can't we just let rock stars be rock stars?

The answer, I think, is that that for many their music so vividly captures the feelings of the era that these individuals are seen to embody the era itself.  So much so, that judging them becomes a way to judge the 60s.

I am reminded in connection with this of Alain Badiou's observation that in France, a common way to explain away the trauma of "May 1968" is to "reduce" it "to a student stampede for sexual liberation." If Morrison and The Doors, Dylan and Lennon, were just about "sex, drugs and rock n' roll" -- very well.  They were right.  We were all too uptight.  Now let's get back to business as usual.

 But if Morrison was more like, say, William Blake (who is invoked often in the film) than "the American version of the Rolling Stones," his legacy, and by extension the 60s, can be seen as more than just a big frat party.  And the visions of the era of enduring value (like canonical texts) and perhaps even sustainable -- rather than simply evanescent drug hallucinations.

Then there's the fact, as Bourdieu pointed out, that poetry, since Modernism, has presented itself as the art form least interested in values such as money, power and even popularity.  Calling these figures "poets", then, suggests they may not have been sold on the mainstream ethos of "if-you're-so-smart-how-come-you-ain't-rich (or powerful or popular)".  It's a way of saying, in other words, that they, and the era they symbolize, were sincerely (as we think of Blake) rebellious.

Why Does Johnny Depp Sound Over-Dramatic?

Of course, no single rock band or singer (no matter how cool), can bear the weight of such historical importance.  That's why the deep, at times hushed tone of Johnny Depp's narration seems overdone, at times even unintentionally funny.

It's also why I think the script of this documentary sounds so similar to other 60s rock docs.  It seems in films like these, the trauma of the era is not only displaced onto its rockers -- but reduced to a question of their legitimacy.  As such, these films may help sweep the era under the rug.  For, it's a lot easier to endorse or dismiss a band, or a singer, than a whole period of social shake-ups.

But the irritation surrounding the 60s is unlikely to go away--no matter what people decide about The Doors.      

 

  

      

Rockers Vs. Poets: Who Wins?

Reading Joanna Fuhrman's wonderful Pageant recently, I came across these lines in a poem titled "The Summer We Were All Seventeen" (which begins "It was 1968."):

Dear Radio,

we love you

even though

we all know

you're a big-time phony--

we call you

the secret hiding place

of rock and roll,

but we all know

the real

rock and roll

invented

by Arthur Rimbaud

with flaming tabourines

and multi-breasted albino

oranges

you crushed

years ago,

destroyed with your

beautiful

fangs.

These lines struck me because, as someone who once sang for a number of bands and then switched to poetry, I wonder about the relation of rock to its non-commercial, separated-at-birth twin, the modern poem.

Early on in my poetry life, like a lot of young poets I suppose, I was concerned about poetry reaching out to a wider audience, like music did -- pop, indie or otherwise.  In a review (Parnassus, Spring/Summer 1981) that included one of my early books, poet/critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote:

"When Taylor Mead, the veteran New York underground zany, first heard Bob Dylan perform at a Village coffeehouse in the early Sixties, he is supposed to have said, 'The Poets have had it.'  It was true.  With the rise of intelligent pop songwriting, the art of unaccompanied language lost its purchase on social reality; the reality people live and need to have feelings about -- feelings that require articulation.  The contretemps was sudden, because in the early Sixties the prospect of poetry as a public medium had been growing in America and internationally as never before.  All the air went out of that in a hurry.  (I recall with pain the recurrent spectacle of Allen Ginsberg -- our Allen -- paying obsequious court to Dylan.)"

The point Schjeldahl made here is that the more public aspects of poetry were being threatened, not by bad pop music (the old dumbing-down argument), but by good.  Rock intellectuals, as it were, had replaced poetry intellectuals on the public stage.  Is this because, as Fuhrman's lines suggest (in my reading at least) that rockers/radio fed on the rebelliousness of the poem, commercializing  its thunder?

In any event, Schjeldahl's ideas back then proved pretty prophetic.  The 80s and 90s were filled with debates about whether "poetry can matter" (to paraphrase Dana Gioia).  The whole Slam/Spoken Word/Performance scene seems in some ways to have arisen out of an effort to make poetry speak, once again, to a more socially expansive idea of "the people."

And, the great seriousness with which rock lyrics were now taken produced some hilarious moments. Before populist performance poetry, an earlier version of what was classifed as "Spoken Word" involved celebrities reciting (rather than singing) rock lyrics.  Here's one of the gems of the genre by William Shatner. (Note: This is audio only.)  I think you'll agree it offers the signs of the greatness that was to come in his career:

William Shatner on (Bob) Dylan

Elaine Equi on "Kansas City"

In the spirit of keeping the dialogue between rock and poetry going, here's Poet Elaine Equi's (my better half), take on the older Spoken Word tradition.  When she performs this poem (from her upcoming book, Click and Clone), she reads it with all the solemnity of The Masters (who in this case are Mr. Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and the immortal Sebastian Cabot):

Emerald City

after Wilbert Harrison

I'm going to Emerald City, Emerald City here I come
I'm going to Emerald City, Emerald City here I come
  They got some crazy little wizards there
      And I'm going to get me one.

     Well I might take a plane
I might use a cane, but if I have to crawl
   I'm gonna get there just the same
I'm going to Emerald City, Emerald City here I come
     They got some crazy little wizards there
          And I'm gonna get me one.

Might anyone out there like to share favorite (or wacky) poem/rock collaborations?