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This year has seen the birth of many, many side projects for me. There’s the fake British New Wave band, the revisionist, ragtime-infused history of one of our nation’s founding fathers, the mobile busking unit that travels through New York City…the list goes on (note: these are NOT to be confused with the commercial side projects I do, which result in actual income). One such project that I am anxious to continue is something I like to call “Postmodern Jukebox.” Its unofficial home is on my YouTube page, but I’ve recently begun to implement its aesthetic into my live performances, as well.
Postmodern Jukebox is, at its core, simply the process of taking contemporary pop songs and transforming them in some manner. One could call the Jukebox’s output a “cover song,” but I feel that doing so ignores the fact that said transformation has some concrete, ideological underpinnings. In other words, I want to make this sound profound, so just humor me a bit.
I have long had a love/hate relationship with pop music: I loved to hate it. As a music school kid and jazz snob, I wasn’t interested in listening to anything that might appeal to those that I deemed to possess a less refined palette of musical taste. This willful ignorance continued for some time; it was not until I began making YouTube videos (and subsequently receiving requests for modern pop songs) that I decided to check out what the kids are listening to these days.
What I found is that, despite my initial aversion to the stuff I was hearing, I was unable to truly categorize this as “bad music” without first defining a set of arbitrary, culturally-defined criteria. Furthermore, the fact that such a rigorous vetting process exists for the output of major labels indicated that these songs and artists certainly RESONATED with the culture of our times–no easy feat, in and of itself. As a relentless devil’s advocate, I then found that by simply altering the context of the creation of such songs, I could EVEN find some artistic merit inside of them.
To demonstrate this, I now present my argument that Kesha-with-a-dollar-sign COULD be considered an “artist”:
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Suppose that Ke$ha was actually a product of an underground group of Luddite artists that spent their evenings lamenting the soul-crushing alienation from all things true and beautiful that modern technology had imposed upon them. Attention spans had withered, sophisticated news items were condensed into 140 characters or less, and the youth of the country had shunned a sense of purpose for outrageous displays of hedonism. A country founded on ingenuity and investment in the future had regressed to an unruly mob of pleasure seekers.
Enter their protege, Ke$ha (an acronym for, “Kantian Ethics [dollar sign placeholder for symmetry] Hold Authority”). An Ivy League philosophy major-turned-recluse, she nonetheless possessed the looks and necessary lack of social grace to appeal to such a constituency. It was soon decided that she was the only hope to revive the braindead from the lulling glow of instant gratification . But how?? By pulling a bait-and-switch–attracting a fan base with a facade of vapidness, then preaching important truths about the human condition??
No. She would force a paradigm shift by simply giving them what they wanted–an overload of insipid, thoughtless material that seemed to affirm a hedonist lifestyle beyond the point that most would dare desire. The most reliable route to reach the masses? Pop music. And so, the prophetizing began, and the party did not start until she walked in.
Such an effective ruse it was that even her detractors failed to see the multiple levels of irony contained within the lyrics, and the music production that commented on the manufactured, synthetic nature of a consumer society by taking its cue from early 8-bit videogames. As with most types of overindulgence, the sickeningly sweet overload of poor taste triggered a backlash that spread through the ranks of her legions of supporters, which eventually demanded an end to the forcefeeding of superficial culture to which they had grown accustomed…and an end to auto-tune and other technological enhancements of music, as well. The Luddites rejoiced; Ke$ha was a success.
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Now, if this was indeed the story of Ke$ha, I would have to concede that this was an artistic venture that managed to simultaneously indulge, satirize, and transform a culture–pretty high praise for any post-Enlightenment figure. Obviously this is a fabrication, but if we allow that Ke$ha is self-aware enough to see her work as a caricature of popular culture, then she’s probably not THAT much worse than Andy Warhol. Well, Andy Warhol with an auto-tune plugin, anyhow.
So, realizing that a parable involving Ke$ha is a pretty oblique way to explain Postmodern Jukebox, I will further elaborate on what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to get people to stop thinking of songs as rigid, ephemeral objects, and more like malleable globs of silly putty. Songs can be twisted, shaped, and altered without losing their identities–just as we grow, age, and expire without losing ours–and it is through this exploration that the gap between “high” and “low” art can be bridged most readily. Using popular music as source material is nothing new, but it had fallen out of favor somewhat as the era of the standard went the way of the Victrola. Now, with Radiohead songs being covered by multiple jazz artists, we seem to have arrived at an era ripe for such a blurring between taste and genre distinctions. As something of a capitalist, I’m happy to throw my hat into the ring. Perhaps, in the future, it will become common practice for the lyrics of popular songs to change over time, as well. I can imagine the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” appended to reflect issues of arthritis and regularity (well, maybe not). This would be a big step in defining a new type of fluid, changing, differentiable music, as opposed to the static, fixed model we have taken for granted. The times they are a-changing. Tik Tok, indeed. -SCB
