For the past few years, I’ve been fascinated by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.  I’m not a Christian Scientist (or religious at all) but both of my grandfathers were raised as Christian Scientists.  There’s a really amazing biography of Eddy by Gillian Gill (available at the Evergreen Library!).  Christian Science is in a lot of ways a rejection of the body.  It doesn’t acknowledge materiality as real.  Healing is done through prayer – the concept is that sickness is the result of wrong thought.  If you think correctly, you can transcend material illness.  Mary Douglas has given me a way of thinking about this.  Christian Science strongly strives for being “disembodied spirits.”  Illness, then, is another “irrelevant organic process” to be screened out.  However, the attitude of Christian Science to the body is very complicated.  Gill mentions something about how obstetrics was an underdeveloped field when Eddy founded Christian Science.  A Christian Science birth was in many ways actually safer than giving birth in a hospital.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find this passage through using the book’s index, and it’s a good 700 pages long (including the essential endnotes), and I could be remembering it wrong.  However, while looking, I found a really interesting section where Gill discusses the first edition of Science and Health, Eddy’s book about Christian Science.  Gill writes about how it is nonlinear, and similar to work by Lacan and Derrida.  She draws parallels to work by Luce Iragaray, a French philosopher and feminist.  Gill happens to be one of Iragaray’s translators.  In an endnote, Gill writes, “There are interesting correlations to be made, on the level of feminist theology, between Mary Baker Eddy and Iragaray.”  This could be an exciting subject for a future project.

Here, belatedly, is my exam design assignment . . .

Here's my proposal . . .

Here is my (hypo)thesis: rap is Brechtian.

What I think is Brechtian about rap is that it creates an alienation effect.  Brecht talks about the alienation effect in acting as the actor presenting herself playing a character.  The point is that the audience shouldn’t get swept up in the character, but should always realize the character is a specific person in a specific place and time being played by another specific person in a specific place and time.

Rap music, in my view, is more centered around persona than other forms of popular music.  Generally, there are a handful of people who were involved in the production of the song.  There’s the rapper, the producer, maybe a featured rapper, maybe a featured singer for the hook, and that’s about it.  And you know who these people are.  Often they even introduce themselves at the beginning of the song.  For example, Ayo Technology by 50 Cent, which Emily wrote a great blog post a few weeks back, starts with 50 saying “So special. Unforgettable. 50 Cent. Justin. Timbaland. God damn.”  Even when not introduced in this way, rappers generally are speaking to the listener about themselves, not just expressing emotions for us to be moved by.  Guests rappers are common on tracks by pop or R&B singers, and they almost always are speaking as a separate persona from the singer.

I like to think of Brecht as offering us a way of noticing universalist discourses in productions of art.  Dramatic theater, in his view, provokes us to say, “Of course, that is exactly how it is, there was no choice” about every decision a character makes.  Epic theater forces us to realize that characters are located within history and within discourses, and there is nothing universal about their decisions. 

Other forms of music, such as rock, tend to present emotions.  They also tend to erase their technological production/mediation.  We are encouraged to feel along with the singer.  Rappers, like Brechtian actors employing an a-effect, present themselves playing a character.  So I would argue that rap is like the epic theater.  It rejects universalism.

As a sidenote, hip-hop music has had a huge effect on pop and R&B music (and vice versa, of course).  The three are often combined in specific songs, and these are often the songs that have the biggest success.  I would argue that the Brechtian aspects of rap that I am writing about here are part of what transfers to pop and R&B music as they co-mingle with hip-hop.

• SLIDE 1
• SLIDE 2
• We are all, to various degrees, fans of Britney.  This presentation is not about criticizing Britney, though it also isn’t about defending her behavior.  We simply want to critically examine one of the cultural discourses about Britney – specifically, about Britney and Cheetos.
SLIDE THREE
• Mostly a gossip blog phenomenon
• Clearly, she does like to eat Cheetos, but it’s become a phenomenon where many discussions of Britney on the internet have to mention Cheetos in some way.  For example, as a possible name for her son.
• SLIDE FOUR
• Here’s one example, from a blog called The Gallery of the Absurd from January 2006.
• The text:
Look, I realize this is pandering to the lowest common denominator of cesspool gossip, but my mission is to illustrate gossip...and so I do what I must.  My inspiration comes from the fact Britney Spears and Cheetos have become so synonymous that one term is rarely mentioned without the other. Just take a look at what the bloggers are saying. In addition, Star magazine has been monitoring Brit's weight gain over the past month and even ran a cover photo screaming "Brit Gains 20 lbs. MORE!"  Our investigative team has just uncovered Frito-Lay's plans to expand their product line by offering Cheetos Britney, an even cheesier, greasier and more unnatural shade of orange crunchy snack.
• SLIDE FIVE
• Paraphrased from Julia

• Cultural anxiety about Britney’s body is symptomatic of cultural anxiety about bodies in general.
• SLIDE SIX
• Celebrity as image
• Someone opposed to Britney creating part of the image (literally)
• Britney as cyborg – her image is created by any number of people, similar to Obama Girl
• Britney as cyborg – monstrous compilation of images coming from her, her management, her label, her producers the paparazzi, bloggers, magazines and more (including us)
• Cyborgs adapting part of their body to space, celebrities fortifying their body to extreme environment of celebrity culture – Britney’s refusal to do so
 

I was devastated to find that the amazing interview with Pauline Pantsdown and Vanessa was not available on YouTube. However, I was able to find mp3s of I Don't Like It and Backdoor Man.

Backdoor Man

(you should be able to save this as an mp3 from this page)

I Don't Like It 

(this link will take you to a page with a link you can use to download the mp3 right near the top.  WARNING: this site has swastikas as the background, I think as a critique of Pauline Hanson's racist politics.)

http://idolator.com/tunes/the-final-countdown/artificially-intelligent-guitar-able-to-tune-itself-destroy-human-civilization-322554.php

I just found the following blog post about a new electric guitar that tunes itself.  The photo accompanying the post is of the Terminator (I think).  The post jokes about this guitar being evil and wanting to destroy the world.  I think there’s this underlying concept of this guitar as a cyborg, which goes back this cultural idea that a guitar is natural, a natural means of expressing yourself in a way that, say, an 808 or a vocoder is not.  This is a theme of my project, so I was excited to see this post.  I think the author is clearly sarcastic (i.e. they are mocking anxieties about cyborg guitars, not engaging in anxieties about them) but that what they are joking about gets at all the discourses surrounding guitars.

“this dude turns from werecat to zombie then in real life he turns into a woman and this dude was black then he bleached his skin cuz he wanted 2 fit in like what the hell”

- YouTube comment on the video for Thriller (accessed Monday night)

I love this comment.  When I first read it, it immediately struck me as almost a synopsis of Mercer’s article.  Mercer is talking about Jackson’s boundary crossings in the Thriller video as standing in for his boundary crossings in real life, which cause a lot of anxiety.  Though this commenter clearly still holds the anxiety about these boundary crossings, he or she has made the same connection as Mercer between the transformations in the video and the transformations in life. I feel that there is a real danger when examining popular culture of feeling that, as scholars, we understand and can make connections that others in the audience don’t or can’t make.  What I like about this quote is that it shows how someone watching music videos on YouTube for fun, and commenting on them in the informal (no capitalization or punctuation) manner that is standard for YouTube comments, can make the same connections that Mercer makes in his article.  This is not to criticize Mercer’s article by any means (which is far more complex, obviously), but just to say that we can’t pretend the average consumer of popular culture is not thinking about what they consume and making connections between things.

Body Image

“Not only the highlighters but the gallery staff, the Media Arts receptionists, even the people who build the frames and stretch the canvases know Kinkade's biography by heart: … That when he was twenty he experienced a Christian awakening, and that it changed his art--it stopped being about his fears and anxieties and became optimistic and inspirational, with themes like home towns and perfect days and natural beauty, and millions of people responded. It's as good a story as you could hope for if you want to make a point about perseverance and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and appreciating life's bounty; even the bad parts of the story are good, because it's easier not to begrudge Kinkade his fortune when you are reminded that he was a poor kid who had to struggle, who rejected the smarty-pants liberal establishment to follow his heart, and who is proud of having earned his way into the ultimate American aristocracy of successful entrepreneurs.”

An essential part of the Thomas Kinkade biography is about his Christian awakening.  His biography is a part of his persona, which is obviously very important to the paintings.  They’re sold in galleries named after him, after all.  His art is intended to inspirational.  It’s religious.  Also, he markets his art through the old Horatio Alger story – everyone in America can become successful if they try hard enough!  That must be very reassuring to the people who can afford to spend over a thousand dollars on a Thomas Kinkade print . . .

“People like to own things they think are valuable, and they are titillated by the prospect that the things they own might be even more valuable than they thought. The high price of limited editions is part of their appeal: it implies that they are choice and exclusive, and that only a certain class of people will be able to afford them--a limited edition of people with taste and discernment. "I created a system of marketing compatible with American art," Kinkade said to me recently. "I believe in 'aspire to' art. I want my work to be available but not common. I want it to be a dignified component of everyday life. It's good to dream about things. It's like dreaming of owning a Rolex--instead, you dream about owning a seventy-five-thousand-dollar print." In fact, a lot of limited- edition art is about dreaming; so many of the paintings portray wistful images of a noble and romantic past that never was, or the anti-intellectual innocence of fairies and animals, or mythical heroes who can never fail and never fade.”

The whole structure of how his art is sold and thought about glorifies upward mobility, another part of the pull-yourself-up-from-the-bootstraps myth of America.

“Last month, Taylor Woodrow Homes and Media Arts Group opened The Village, a Thomas Kinkade Community, a gated development in Vallejo, California. According to promotional material, it is a "magical community" featuring "meandering sidewalks, benches and water features, which are designed to enrich homeowners' lives with endless visual surprises and delights." There are four house models available, and they are named after Kinkade's four daughters--Chandler, Merritt, Everett, and Winsor--and will be priced from four hundred thousand dollars up.”

Kinkade has made a physical copy of his ideal America, and it’s a gated suburb!  Note the use of “homeowners” instead of, say, “community members.”  There’s an emphasis here on private property ownership and safety from the outside world (which certainly doesn’t live up to Kinkadian ideals).

A quote from Kinkade: “See, I have faith in the heart of the average person. People find hope and comfort in my paintings. I think showing people the ugliness of the world doesn't help it. I think pointing the way to light is deeply contagious and satisfying.”

What would Brecht say?  I think choosing to cover up “the ugliness of the world” so people don’t have to see and think about it is definitely a political decision . . .