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Abstract

This essay contrasts two approaches to the interpretation of wildly popular narratives such as Star Wars. The first is the mythological analysis popularized by Joseph Campbell. Campbell argued that the myths of almost every society are fundamentally similar retellings of a few archetypal stories – in the case of Star Wars, “The Hero’s Journey.” Campbell’s work been appropriated by many filmmakers, including the director of Star Wars, George Lucas, to explain the powerful appeal of the most successful Hollywood films. In the wake of Lucas’s endorsement of Cambell’s ideas, influential screenwriting how-to books such as Chrisopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey: Using Mythic Structures for Writers have shaped how many screenwriters conceive of their craft. The second approach is the ideological analysis pioneered in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. This perspective calls into question Cambell’s and Vogler’s universalizing framework. Instead, for Barthes myths are always about mystifying and naturalizing contingent arrangments of power. The essay will conclude by suggesting ways cultural critics might productively combine the insights of Campbell and Barthes.

Introduction

tk

I: Myth as Spiritual Journey

         George Lucas has often credited Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the inspiration for Star Wars. Lucas read the book in the early 1970s as he was developing the screenplay, and consciously patterned the film’s narrative and characters around the “monomyth” which Campbell describes as a universal story told by societies around the world. After the success of Star Wars, Lucas and Campbell became friends – fans often describe Campbell as “George’s Yoda.” Campbell helped Lucas craft the arcs of the second and third Star Wars films. Lucas returned the favor in 1987, when he furnished his home and production studio, Skywalker Ranch, for the filming of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, a series of interviews with Bill Moyers. Campbell died before the series made it to air, but when it did in 1988, Campbell posthumously reached a rare height of fame for an American intellectual.

         Today, there is a thriving Campbell industry, including his many books and videos, the Joseph Campbell Society, and Mythic Journeys, a lavish conference put together in 2004 by the Mythic Imagination Institute, a nonprofit organization largely funded by the Krispy Kreme donut company, whose CEO believes in bringing Campbell’s ideas into the workplace (Byrne).

         Campbell’s influence on American film has spread far beyond the work of George Lucas. Inspired by The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth, a generation of screenwriters has self-consciously modeled their work after Campbell’s monomyth. In 1985 Christopher Vogler, a newly hired story analyst for Disney’s animation division, distributed a memo outlining Campbell’s ideas. Vogler’s memo became a touchstone at Disney and other firms, forming the basis for films such as 1994’s The Lion King, one of the top-grossing films of all time. Vogler subsequently left Disney to become a freelance screenwriting teacher and consultant, and turned his memo into The Writer’s Journey, a step-by-step how-to for applying Campbell’s ideas to screenplays. The book is one of the most successful screenwriting manuals ever published, and Vogler is now one of the most in-demand of screenwriting teachers. Vogler’s influence is so great that today screenplay outlining software programs such as Power Structure give writers the option of organizing their screenplays around Vogler’s 12 steps, as an alternative to the traditional 3 act structure popularized in Syd Field’s canonical screenwriting text, Screenplay.

         So, what is Campbell’s model, and how well does it fit Star Wars? Campbell argues that all the myths of the globe are versions of one single fundamental story, what he calls “the monomyth.” This “Adventure of the Hero” is divided into three parts: Departure, Initiation, and Return. Each of the parts is subdivided into a series of stages. (Campbell’s version delineates a total of 17 stages; Vogler edits Campbell down to a more tidy 12 steps.) The story is a cycle: the hero leaves his familiar world for a new world of adventure, acquires a “boon” in that other world, then brings that boon back home for the benefit of his own world. Campbell diagrams the structure in this chart:

[Insert chart from The Hero with a Thousand Faces 245.]

         Star Wars is a quintessential Hero’s Adventure. Luke Skywalker leaves his home planet of Tatooine on a quest to rescue Princess Leia. Having rescued the Princess, he returns to destroy the Death Star and ignite the rebel alliance.

         Going deeper into Campbell’s structure, Star Wars fits tightly into the specific steps outlines in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, as do many other popular films inspired by Campbell and Lucas. The chart below, from the fan website Jitterbug Fantasia (2004), matches up the stages of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey with the plots of both Star Wars and The Matrix:

         So, what makes Campbell’s model so appealing to writers, and apparently so effective with audiences? Campbell boiled down his worldview in The Power of Myth to a single catchy phrase: “Follow your bliss.” The hero’s journey, he argued, is the story of an individual who pursues the adventure of self-discovery, facing challenges and dangers along the quest. Not all of us will fight light-saber duels or rescue princesses in our own lives. But we all face the challenges of finding meaning and purpose in our lives. Campbell argued that every life is a hero’s journey, starting with the heroic adventure of just being born: leaving the comfort and familiarity of the womb to cross the threshold into a daunting new world outside. Stories of heroes’ journeys, then, according to Campbell, Lucas, Vogler, and their many followers, are inspiring allegories of personal spiritual struggle and growth.

         A second, related reason for the appeal of Campbell’s vision is its universalism. It suggests that deep down, all societies tell versions of the same story, because we all share the same needs and desires. As Campbell writes in The Hero’s Journey,

There are of course differences between the numerous mythologies and religions of mankind, but this is a book about the similarities; and once these are understood the differences will be found to be much less great than is popularly (and politically) supposed. My hope is that a  comparative elucidation my contribute to the perhaps not-quite-desperate cause of those forces that are working in the present world for unification, not in the name of some ecclesiastical or political empire, but in the sense of human mutual understanding. As we are told in the Vedas, “Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names” (Campbell tk. Cited in Gill).

         This universalism, though, is a core problem for Campbell’s critics, who are many. Although Campbell is by far the most famous American interpreter of myths, he is generally not well-regarded by contemporary anthropologists, classicists, and other academic mythologists. Most argue that his urge to universalize distorts the differences and complexities of the stories he examines. His method in The Hero with a Thousand Faces is to cherry-pick individual elements from a wide range of storytelling traditions to fit each step of his monomyth, without addressing counterexamples that don’t conform as neatly. Even the stories he does use he uses selectively, borrowing pieces for a specific step then dropping the rest of the story in subsequent chapters when it doesn’t fit as well. In fact, you could argue that Star Wars and its self-consciously Campbellian descendants, such as The Lion King and The Matrix, are the only stories to faithfully adhere to every stage of the monomyth, since they were designed in its image. Everything before the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a less tidy fit.

         Campbell’s universalism has consequences. In shoehorning the cultures of the world into a single model, Campbell recast global culture around the worldview of a 20^th Century white American man. The Hero’s Journey, according to Campbell, valorizes individualism. It prioritizes personal fulfillment over social change. Campbell, in fact, dismissed the notion that the purpose of art was to make the world a better place. In The Power of Myth, he told Moyers, “The world is great just the way it is. And you are not going to fix it up. Nobody has ever made it any better.” And while the hero may have 1000 faces, few of them appear to be male; Campbell rarely asks how a woman’s journey might differ from a man’s. Campbell’s monomyth also has little room for destabilizing archetypes such as The Trickster.

         Campbell himself makes for a less than ideal Yoda. Despite the embrace of Campbell’s ideas by hippies, New Agers, and other bohemians, Campbell himself was a strident political conservative. An article by Brendan Gill (1989) in The New York Review of Books shortly after Campbell’s death also outed the scholar as an anti-Semite and casual racist who bemoaned the admission of African-American students to his school, Sarah Lawrence College, and failed any students who engaged in political activism while taking his classes. (See Orr et al 1989.) Even many of Campbell’s defenders in subsequent letters to the magazine were forced to acknowledge what Huston Smith delicately called Campbell’s “shadow.”

[add more here?]

II. Myth as Ideology

         If Joseph Campbell offers one vision of myth, a second is suggested by Roland Barthes classic work of cultural analysis, Mythologies. To Barthes, myth is ideology: culture which hides the underpinnings of power. The purpose of the critic is demystification: to explore how myth distorts our understanding of the world.

         Drawing on this model of myth as ideological mystification, along with the world of the structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Robert Ray in A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 examines the myths underlying classic Hollywood films. He argues that myth functions as an “imaginary resolution of intractable social conflicts” (tk, check quote). Thus, myths allow for the “denial of choice” which represses the realities of conflicts over inequalities of class, race and gender.

         Ray also identifies several other specific aspects to the “thematic paradigm” of classic Hollywood: a focus on individuals which turns social problems into personal melodrama, and a reliance on the “reluctant hero” story, in which the protagonist is slowly won over from a rebel stance to the role of hero. Ray notes in this story the frequent splitting of the hero role into two characters: the “official hero” and the “outlaw hero,” or what literary critic Leslie Fiedler calls “the good good boy” (like Tom Sawyer) and “the bad good boy” (Huck Finn). The official hero is typically the “moral center” the film, the one judged right and virtuous by the values of the film. But the outlaw hero is the “interest center” of the film – the more exciting, compelling character. Mythic reconciliation occurs when the official hero and the outlaw hero join forces for the common good.

         Ray pinpoints “The Culmination of Classical Hollywood” in Casablanca, a classic reluctant hero story. Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, is the bitter, cynical outlaw hero. Laszlo, the resistance leader, is the official hero. Laszlo is the moral center of the movie, the film’s most righteous character. But Rick is the interest center, the most compelling character. The climax of the film comes when Rick is finally persuaded to join forces with Laszlo and help him escape Casablanca.

         If Star Wars fits Campbell’s monomyth smoothly, in some ways it fits Ray’s Casablanca model even more snugly. Luke Skywalker is the official hero, the moral center of the film. But Han Solo is the outlaw hero, the interest center of the film. One could argue that the climax of the film comes when Han, who had appeared to have chosen money over helping the rebel alliance, swoops in on the Millennium Falcon at the last moment to pick off Darth Vader’s Tie Fighter and clear the way for Luke to destroy the Death Star. The reluctant hero has finally saved the day. (Star Wars resembles Casablanca in many other ways, as well, most prominently in the Cantina scene, which is an intergalactic homage to the limnal space of Rick’s cosmopolitan nightclub.)

         Ray’s analysis demonstrates how Campbell’s monomyth shortchanges the role of the reluctant hero in classical Hollywood storytelling. (Campbell admitted that he was never much of a moviegoer.) In Campbell’s model, reluctance is an early stage soon overcome. Luke’s refusal of the call comes when he’s kept home to help with the harvest, but he’s quickly pulled into adventure when the Storm Troopers destroy his home and kill his family. This model, however, assumes that the official hero, Luke, is the film’s only hero, and that Han is just a sidekick. The subsequent careers of Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford, however, attest to the relative charisma of their Star Wars characters. Luke may be the moral center of the story, but Han is the interest center. Star Wars is as much his story as Luke’s.

         The American development of a dual hero model suggests one example of how a society may veer from Campbell’s monomyth. In response to an ideology of individualism which mistrusts official power, American storytellers invented a new kind of rebel hero, one who could serve society while remaining apart from it.

         This angle on the monomyth – that it is not a universal paradigm, but rather a structure that may be reworked and remodeled in different cultural contexts – opens up a way to view not just how cultures differ from each other, but also how individual retellings of myth within a single culture clash. We can examine each version of a myth, not for how it conforms to an ideal monomyth, but exactly for how it differs – how it rings changes off existing patterns as it responds to new social conflicts. This perspective, for example, would highlight the role of Princess Leia as not just another damsel in distress, but as a feminist update of the archetype – an assertive woman who refuses to be a passive victim, responding to Luke’s rescue effort by taking command of their escape from the Death Star. A Campbellian reading would highlight only Leia’s adherence to the monomyth, in line with Campbell’s model of myth as a source of social stability. This feminist reading, on the other hand, would see myth as a site of social struggle, where old stories are reworked in new ways.

III: A Happy Ending?

         I began work on this study conceiving it as an attempt to make Barthes speak to Campbell – to use Barthes’ ideas to disabuse Campbellians of the notion that myth is apolitical and ahistorical. As I’ve worked more deeply on the project, though, I’ve grown more drawn to a second goal: to make Campbell speak to Barthes – to bring questions of personal development and spirituality into the dialogues of cultural studies.

         Cultural studies as it is practiced today takes up the project outlined by Mythologies: demystification. We’ve become very skilled at deconstructing the ideological assumptions behind movies, TV shows, and the rest of our culture. But what’s harder to offer are alternatives – options for moving beyond a hermeneutics of suspicion to new models – new myths, if necessary.

         Campbell, by contrast, offers hope, along with practical advice eagerly soaked up by culture workers everywhere. Compared to Campbell’s monomyth, what can cultural studies offer? How can we make ourselves useful to a group which should be a key target audience of our work: creators?

         As I mentioned above, Campbell’s famous line, “Follow your bliss,” has been interpreted by many critics on the left as a justification for selfishness. As Gill writes in that 1989 New York Review of Books takedown,

. . . what is this condition of bliss, as Campbell has defined it? If it is only to do whatever makes one happy, then it sanctions selfishness on a colossal scale – a scale that has become deplorably familiar to us in the Reagan and post-Reagan years. It is a selfishness that is the unspoken (the studiously unrecognized?) rationale of that contemporary army of Wall Street yuppies, of junk-bond dealers, of takeover lawyers who have come to be among the most conspicuous members of our society. Have they not all been following their bliss?

But Gill willfully misinterprets Campbell. For Campbell, the key is discovering what one’s real, authentic desires are, underneath the social pressures to value more money, a bigger house, a better job, and so on.

Now, the idea of “real, authentic desires” is unfashionably essentialist in cultural studies today. It presumes there’s a “true self” which exists outside of social construction. But this language of authenticity is powerful and resonant, because it speaks to the anomie underlying contemporary American life, and offers a way to envision something more meaningful and true. This seems to me an essentialism worth preserving – not the colonizing universalism of Campbell’s monomyth, but the more basic universalism which values the specificity of every soul.

Fredric Jameson in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” describes popular culture as a continual dialectic between utopian glimpses of a better world, and the reification which blocks and rechannels those hopes into conventional, nonthreatening desires. Jameson, as a good Marxist, identified utopia as a collective desire for a life beyond capitalism. But we can also, drawing on Campbell, think about individual utopianism: a personal fantasy to break free from social constraints and normative values, and follow your bliss. This personal utopianism, too, is smothered by reification, redirected by ideology back into a desire to, say, buy more Star Wars collectibles. But it’s kept alive by the power of the story. Cultural studies, it seems to me, should learn from Campbell to embrace that personal utopianism as well as collective utopianism. Because if we all truly followed our bliss, the Empire would surely crumble.

[expand conclusion?]

Stuff to add:

- Freud vs. Jung – argument for CS moving from F to J

- James Hillman?

- Jenkins, Brooker on SW fandom?

- Brin on SW elitism?

- fantasy vs. SF?

- specific citations of anthro critics of Campbell?

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. tk.

Byrne, Mary. “Mythology and Krispy Kreme.” The Atlanta Journal Constitution. 17 April 2004.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. tk

Campbell, Joseph and Bill Moyers. Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. tk.

Gill, Brendan. “The Faces of Joseph Campbell.” The New York Review of Books 36.14. 28 September 1989. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3906.

Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” tk.

Orr, Carol Wallace et al. “Joseph Campbell: An Exchange.” The New York Review of Books 36.17. 9 November 1989. http://www.nybooks.com/3846.

Ray, Robert. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980. tk.

“Star Wars Origins – Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey.” Jitterbug Fantasia. http://www.jitterbug.com/origins/myth.html.

Vogler, Christopher. The Writer’s Journey. tk

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Most people wouldn't describe the Star Trek shows as politically radical. Compared to the paranoic anti-government edge of '90s creations like "The X-Files," the Trek universe seems a quaint liberal throwback - a safe '60s fantasy of a peaceful future where the Earth lives in racial harmony, and species (usually) cooperate to explore the galaxy. But there's one difference between our own century and the 24th so fundamental we simply take it for granted: there's no money. Nobody ever comes out and admits it, but replicator technology appears to have made capitalism obsolete. When Jean-Luc Picard wants his tea, he doesn't have to fork over any cash—he just tells the replicator, and the machine makes it so. Riker, Data, Dr. Crusher—they don't even seem to have salaries (although they do get vacation time). Nobody ever needs to worry about a bank account, or paying back loans for Starfleet tuition. Sure, the Ferengi still dicker over latinum, but within the Federation, life seems to follow Marx's famous dictum, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

I remember when the full implications of this hit me, while watching "Second Chances," the episode in which Riker discovers a cloned version of himself. The double, "Tom," was accidentally created and abandoned on a deserted planet in a freak transporter accident seven years earlier. Will and Tom bicker over the past, and over Tom's rekindled interest in Deanna. Ultimately Tom decides to leave the Enterprise for another starship. As a going-away present, Will gives Tom his favorite trombone in a moving gesture of reconciliation. But all I kept wondering was, "What do you mean, it's Will's trombone? Why does Will get to keep all the stuff? Isn't everything more than seven years old as much Tom's as Will's? Can't Tom sue or something? How's he going to get by in the world with nothing more than the trombone on his back?"

Needless to say, I was missing the point. Federation citizens don't have "stuff." They have simple, immediate, free access to all the necessities of life. They don't need checking accounts or IRAs. The only things they actually own are objects of special personal value—Picard's volume of Shakespeare, Worf's battleh, and of course, Riker's trombone. So when Will hands over the instrument to Tom, it's not simply a nice gesture. He's giving away one of the few things of value he has to give—he's giving away a pretty large piece of himself.

Of course, there's another explanation for why Will and Tom would have so little concern over their assets: they're in the military. Maybe their room and board are simply taken care of by Starfleet, just as any shipboard troops' would be. But by all accounts, economic arrangements in the rest of the Federation aren't all that different from the way things work on the Enterprise. From what little we've seen of 24th Century Earth, it appears there's a replicator on every streetcorner, and easy, instantaneous transporter access to any spot on the globe. Sure, Picard's brother still runs a traditional French vineyard, while Cisco's dad operates a classic New Orleans restaurant. But these operations seem more like lifestyles than professions; there's no sense that either needs the income to get by. And in fact, both businesses are closer in structure to a feudal system than corporate capitalism—they're small, family run, almost self-consciously archaic affairs, creating handcrafted products for discerning consumers. Like Riker's trombone, the wine of Picard's vineyards is less a commodity in our contemporary sense than a special object of personal significance. If all you want is a drink, you can get free synthahol any time you want it.

So how exactly does one pay for Picard's wine and Cisco's jambalaya? Is there a residual latinum-based trading system? Barter? Or do Picard and Cisco just hand stuff out to all comers? How exactly do folks exchange goods and services in the 24th Century? Here, the details get fuzzy—on purpose. As Gene Rodenberry wrote in his initial guide for Trek writers, "If you want to assume that Earth cities of the future are splendidly planned with fifty-mile parkland strips around them, fine. But for obvious reasons, let's not get into any detail of Earth's politics of Star Trek's century; for example, which socio-economic systems ultimately worked best."

Concentrating on Starfleet, then—along with border outposts like Deep Space 9—is a way to evade extrapolating how the vast changes hinted at must actually work in practice. What do people do with their lives when all of their needs can be taken care of by machines? How do they structure their days when there's no need to seek steady employment? What kind of culture might a people freed from want build? These questions—essentially, what would Utopia look like?—are pretty daunting. And answering them is likely to be less gratifying than simply leaving them tantalizingly open-ended. So instead, Star Trek keeps things within the realm of the familiar by replacing the discipline of the market with the discipline of the military. Why do Riker, Data, and the rest of the crew show up for work every day, listen to their bosses, and do what they're told? Because it's their orders.

Star Trek, then, is an ambiguous kind of Utopia. Following the collapse of communism, in an era in which the capitalist system of labor—what leftists once denounced as "wage slavery"—reigns triumphant over almost all the globe, Star Trek offers the possibility that another, better way of life exists. No wonder so many find its vision of the future so compelling. At the same time, however, it shrinks from imagining a fully fleshed-out alternative, instead replacing one familiar social structure with another, in some ways more ominous one: military hierarchy. Marxist critic Fredric Jameson writes that these days, it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Star Trek comes about as close as anything to doing so in turn-of-the-millenium America.

Free Your…

“Free your mind, and your ass will follow.” -Funkadelic, from the song and album of the same name

George Clinton set forth this founding tenet in his ideology of funk in 1970, as a druggy mantra to a swirling psychedelic guitar jam. While the phrase may originally have been intended as a variation on the solipsistic hippie slogan “Turn on/tune in/drop out” (the line that followed promised, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within”), it took on a very different resonance by the mid-’70s, when Clinton and some of his 20-odd bandmates in Parliament and Funkadelic would rap the phrase, along with other exhortations such as “Think! It Ain’t Illegal Yet!” and “Shit/Goddamn/Get Off Your Ass and Jam,” over a dense groove of horns, synths, and Bootsy Collins’ bottomless bass, while concert audiences in the tens of thousands danced, sweated, and chanted along.

In the years that followed, music critics have more often than not misappropriated the slogan as “free your ass and your mind will follow.” [1] The original phrase resurfaced in popular discourse last year, however, on En Vogue’s dance-rock crossover hit “Free Your Mind,” which bowdlerized the second half of the line to “…and the rest will follow.” And currently, MTV News’ regular public affairs segments are presented under the logo, “Free Your Mind” (as in “this week, in ‘Free Your Mind’ news…”).

This potent epigram’s longevity and adaptability demonstrates the complex ways in which Clinton’s theorization of the relationship between mind and booty continue to influence contemporary ideas about the politics of music. The common reversal of the phrase isn’t exactly a distortion of the P-Funk (short for Parliament/Funkadelic) philosophy, in its implication that the first step toward intellectual liberation is to allow one’s body to be carried away by the communal, physical pleasures of dance music. But this revision of Clinton provides too comfortable a hierarchy, assuming that freeing the “ass” is simply a means to the end of freeing the “mind.” The need to turn Clinton’s phrase inside-out to make it fit demonstrates how Clinton consistently destabilizes conventional distinctions between “body” and “mind,” “music” and “message.” As one critic wondered on hearing the original Funkadelic track, “Is that ass as in ‘shake your ass’ or ass as in ‘save your ass’?” [2] —in other words, is the freed mind followed by the booty or the soul? And how could you tell the difference? Likewise, when Clinton describes his music as “doin’ it to your earhole in 3D,” how can the “mind” itself be understood as anything but another organ? Intellectually rigorous, intentionally “stoopid,” insistently physical, continually abstract, P-Funk demands that you think with your body and, as Greg Tate puts it, “dance with your mind.” [3]

A Brief History of Parliament-Funkadelic

Born in 1941, George Clinton began his musical career in 1955 when he formed The Parliaments, a doo- wop quintet based in Plainfield, New Jersey, where Clinton owned a barbershop. In the early 1960s, Clinton moved the band to Detroit in attempt to land a deal with Motown records. While Motown chief Berry Gordy signed Clinton to a staff writing position, he declined to record the Parliaments, deciding their sound was too similar to the Temptations’. Recording instead for the small Revilot label, the Parliaments had their first hit in 1967 with “(I Just Wanna) Testify.” Reaching #3 on the R&B charts and #20 on the pop charts, it would be Clinton’s biggest commercial success until the mid-70s.

While in 1967 the Parliaments were still a rather conventional soul group in the Motown mold, over the late ’60s the band underwent a radical change as Clinton and the rest of the members began hanging out with hippies, taking drugs, and listening to Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, and white Detroit hard-rock bands like the Stooges and the MC5. Originally a suit-and-tied soul act, they began appearing on stage in ripped bedsheets, diapers, or nothing at all, while playing a loud, trippy, and often intentionally ugly blend of R&B and psychedlic rock.

In 1970 Parliament (the “the” and “s” dropped from their name) recorded Osmium, named after the heaviest metal on the periodic table. Legal troubles with their former record companies, however, made it impossible for the band to continue to record under their name, and so they began recording for a different label under a new name: Funkadelic. Over the early ’70s, Funkadelic released a series of albums that built them a devoted cult following if little mass attention.

By 1974, with the legal battles resolved, Clinton signed Parliament to Casablanca records. (Technically, “Funkadelic” was the backup band, “Parliament” the lead singers, and each group guested on the other’s albums.) While continuing to put out Funkadelic records, Clinton decided to make Parliament lighter and more commercial, with fewer guitars and more horns.

P-Funk’s commercial and conceptual breakthrough came in 1976 with the release of Mothership Connection, the first of a series of science fiction-themed “funk operas.” In the late ’70s, Parliament-Funkadelic staged a succession of spectacular concert tours, each show climaxing with the descent of a giant spaceship from the rafters. As Clinton’s “Parliafunkidelicment Thang” grew, he spun off more and more acts outs of the band’s personnel, writing and producing records for Bootsy’s Rubber Band, the Horny Horns, the Brides of Funkenstein, and Parlet, with each act signed to a different record label. [4]

By the early ’80s, however, Clinton’s end-run around the corporate organization of the record business had left his organization tangled in legal complications, and the Parliafunkadelic dream came crashing down in internal dissension, lawsuits, and creative exhaustion. A 1983 comeback single recorded under Clinton’s own name, “Atomic Dog,” was a brilliant update of the P-Funk sound, but his last big hit.

While Clinton has continued to record and tour over the last 10 years, in the mid-’80s his music seemed to have slipped out of public memory, with many of his classic albums falling out of print. [5] His arrangements seemed too lush, his concepts too cartoon-like, his beats to close to discredited “disco.” [6] For cutting-edge rappers who were working to strip their beats down to a hard edge of rage, James Brown’s more minimal groove was the sample of choice. [7] In 1989, though, when De La Soul ended the reign of the minimalists by bringing to hiphop a psychedelic richness and playful indeterminacy, they turned to Funkadelic’s “(Not Just) Knee Deep)” to provide the groove for the hit single “Me, Myself, and I.” The biggest rap single of the following year was Digital Underground’s “Humpty Dance,” which not only sampled Parliament’s “Let’s Play House,” but in the character of “Humpty Hump” appropriated the villain of Parliament’s late-70s funk operas, “Sir Nose d’Voidoffunk.”

Today, Clinton’s influence on popular music is immesurable. As rap producers have looked to expand the music’s sonic pallette, Clinton’s multi-layered arrangements have become the leading source of hiphop samples. As rock bands have attempted to find common ground with the increasingly dance-oriented pop marketplace, “funk-rock” bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Spin Doctors have looked to Funkadelic for ways to make guitar-rock sound fresh. And for artists and listeners attempting to theorize the relationship between “music” and “message,” Clinton’s ideology of funk has provided a way to talk about the politics of dancing. As Clinton sang on “One Nation Under a Groove: “Here’s a chance to dance our way/ Out of our constrictions.”

Defining “Funk”

A little etymological background: as P-Funk says, “funk used to be a bad word.” Once a term “not mentioned in polite society” [8] meaning “a stink (usually associated with sex),” [9] in the 1950s the word was appropriated by “hard bop” jazz musicians to mean “having an earthy, unsophisticated style and feeling; esp., having the style and feel of the blues.” [10] In the 1960s, it came to describe a certain kind of popular music: “percussive, polyrhythmic black dance music, with minimal melody and maximum syncopation.” [11] First fully realized by James Brown, this music’s sonic possibilites were then refined and expanded in the work of Sly Stone. By most accounts, George Clinton is the third major figure in the history of the genre.

The very history of the term “funk,” then, is a classic example of what Henry Louis Gates calls Signifyin(g)—the “double-voicedness” of African- American discourse which empowers speakers to play with language—“repeat with a difference”—in ways which critique, destabilize and reconfigure dominant meanings. [12] In this case, the signification had an even more explicit element of cultural nationalism than in the redefining of terms like “bad” and “cool.” As Leroi Jones points out, referring to the inital appropriation of the term by jazz musicians:

The social implication, then, was that even the old stereotype of a distinctive Negro smell that white America subscribed to could be turned against white America. For this smell now, real or not, was made a valuable characteristic of “Negro-ness.” And “Negro-ness,” by the fifties, for many Negroes (and whites) was the only strength left to American culture. [13]

Coming to maturity during the late-’60s era of Black Power, funk music, even more than “soul” or “R&B,” has always been associated with African-American pride in cultural difference—as Joe McEwen points out, its first anthem was James Brown’s “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.” [14]

Clinton’s Theory of Funkativity

“Funk” is more than a specific example of Signifyn(g); in Clinton’s universe, it is a rubric for all forms of Signifyn(g), of African-American cultural resistance. Funk is a transformative process—as James Brown would shout to his band, the goal, whatever the tune, is to “make it funky.” Clinton explains to Rolling Stone, funk is a “kind of an attitude….Funk can be anything. Funk is an idea; it’s whatever it needs to be in order to survive. We don’t take nothing as our bag. Everything is our bag.” [15] Or, as he’s put it elsewhere, “Funk means that when you’re in Chinatown you learn to like Chinese food real fast.” [16]

The transformative power of “funk” as can be seen in its effect on language. In Clinton’s lexicon, “funk” colonizes other words, repeating concepts with a difference. “Funk” infests “psychedelic” to create “funkedelic.” “Funkintelechy,” another P-Funk neologism combining “funk,” “intellect,” and “technology,” stands in Clinton’s universe for the “force by which Funk gets stronger.” [17] The power to attatch itself to other words which Clinton invested in the term “funk” has continued beyond his own terms: “techno-funk,” “punk-funk,” and “cyberfunk” have all been coined in the last ten years to explain mutant musical genres.

In “One Nation Under a Groove,” Funkadelic asks,

“Do you promise to funk? the whole funk, nothin’ but the funk.” “Funk” here replaces “Truth” as the fundamental good in Clinton’s utopian society. The relationship between “funk” and “truth” parallels that between “Signifyin(g)” and “signification” in Gates’ schema. “Funk” is truth of the second order, in which language, tropes, and music styles are playfully shuffled, revised, and reconstituted to make a different kind of meaning. The classic Parliament and Funkadelic albums of the late ’70s Signified on everything from nursery rhymes to rock opera, science fiction to spirituals. These appropriations were not simply chaotic celebrations of indeterminacy; as we shall see, they also served to anchor a powerful vision of counter- cultural community and political intervention, all in the name of “The Funk.” Spreading The Funk To supplement Gates’ terminology with a parallel theoretical framework, funk can be described as a version of Ishmael Reed’s “Jes Grew,” the mysterious plague in Mumbo Jumbo which “enliven[s] the host,” leaving people “wriggling like fish…and ‘lusting after relevance.’” [18] The comparison to Jes Grew points out two facets of The Funk not illuminated by Gates’ notion of Signifyin(g): its physicality and its contagiousness. As I’ve already discussed, fundamental to funk’s transformative power is the way it insists on the embodiment of whatever it touches—to make something funky is to make it felt, literally in the sense of shaking the floorboards, rattling the windows, and practically commanding the listener to dance. This physicality, of course, has a lot to do with sexuality; the closeness of the word “funk” to “fuck” is no accident, and Clinton’s Signfications often rest on puns between the two, as in “You should’ve seen the bull when it funked the cow.” But “to funk” never means just “to fuck;” [19] the point of the pun is how interconnected sexuality and music are in the Clinton worldview. The utopian promise of Jes Grew is that everyone will catch it. Likewise, Clinton does not just celebrate The Funk; he prosteletizes for it. The greatest P-Funk songs are propaganda for the funk; as Barry Walters points out, “P. Funk hits are almost entirely reflexive. It’s near impossible to let your mind wander during a P.Funk anthem, as most of the lyrics are about funk iself, funk on the radio, and funk in your earhole.” [20] As the chant to “P-Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up) puts it:

Make my funk the P-Funk I want my funk uncut Make my funk the P-Funk I wants to get funked up I want the bomb, I want the P-Funk Don’t want my funk stepped on Make my funk the P-Funk Before I take it home

The plotlines of Parliament’s late-’70s concept albums allegorize the spreading of The Funk. They involve the battles of the hero, Starchild, against Sir Nose d’Voidoffunk (pronounced “devoid of funk”). Starchild’s goal is never to kill Sir Nose, but to make him dance—to catch The funk, the way unwilling victims catch Jes Grew in Mumbo Jumbo. On Funkintelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome, Starchild “funkatizes” Sir Nose by shooting him with his weapon, the “Bop Gun.” Clinton’s overarching theme is, in the words of Robert Christgau, to show “the forces of life—autonomous intelligence, a childlike openness, sexual energy, and humor—defeat those of death: by seduction if possible, by force if necessary.” [21]

Community in African-American Music

Clinton’s mission is to teach The Funk and spread The Funk, to create a counter-culture of funkateers, “One Nation Under a Groove.” As Reed’s use of Jes Grew as a metaphor for the rise of both ragtime and jazz suggests, this populist aesthetic of community has a long lineage in African-American music. As Simon Frith writes, “At the center of Afro-American music is the performance…. Black music is immediate and democratic—a performance is unique and the listeners of that performance become a part of it.” [22] Paul Gilroy likewise notes,

Black performers aim to overcome rather than exploit the structures which separate them from their audiences. The relationship between the performer and the crowd is transformed in dialogic rituals so that spectators acquire the active role of participants in collective processes which are sometimes cathartic and which may symbolize or even create community. [23]

The hope, in turn, is that this constructed community may live on beyond the end of the performance; as Gilroy continues,

The liberatory rationality which is spelled out in the lyrics, if there are lyrics, is thus manifest in the consumption of the musical culture. The whole dialogic process that unites performers and crowds is imported into the culture’s forms. It becomes the basis of an authentic public sphere which is counterposed to the dominant alternative, from which, in any case, blacks have been excluded. The arts which, as slaves, blacks were allowed instead of freedom, have become a means to make their formal freedom tangible. [24]

As Clinton told one reporter, “I’m a hippie at heart. I’m not anti-establishment in a sense that I want to tear down the structure, but I want to provide the people with an alternative to the structure.” [25]

Black and White Audiences of P-Funk

Clinton’s use of an example from a predominantly white subculture demonstrates that while his vision was rooted in the cultural practices of African-Americans, his utopia of “One Nation Under a Groove” was not a separatist one. The battle in his sci-fi universe was between funky and unfunky, not black and white. Clinton’s models for constructing a mass counter-culture, in fact, were the Beatles, the band that for a while could claim to be “bigger than Jesus.” During P-Funk’s late-’70s heyday, Clinton could tell one writer, “If you know what Liverpool was like when the Beatles hit, you know what it’s getting to be like wherever we go.” [26] His goal, as one writer puts it, was “Beatle-size fame,…funkmania.” [27]

Clinton wanted it all: mass popularity among blacks and whites, while never compromising his African-American roots. He frequently criticized other artists attempting to “cross over” for “fakin’ the funk.” Explaining Funkadelic’s attempts to get played on FM “rock” radio in the late ’70s, he told Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman, “We ain’t crossin’ over; we just gonna sneak behind enemy lines.” [28] In the face of white radio’s racist resistance to a black rock band, however, Clinton never managed to attract a large white listenership. In P-Funk’s late ’70s heyday, the concert audiences were almost entirely black, and as Barry Walters points out, “as radio turned departmentalized and segregated, P.Funk became the ultimate black FM signifier.” [29] Like Jes Grew, The Funk was overcome before it could infect the entire nation; as Ken Tucker wrote in 1984, “the dream—of Beatle-size fame, of funkmania—is over.” [30] This should hardly be considered a failure; indeed, the disappointment voiced by some white critics in the ’70s that P-Funk hadn’t attracted a mass white audience often seemed to assume that their millions of black fans somehow didn’t count. [31] Clinton’s music created and continues to create a powerful, implicitly political sense of community among his fans; and in any case, his influence among musicians and listeners of all colors today is inescapable.

Creating Community

The P-Funk albums of the late ’70s were examples of what One Nation Under a Groove could sound like. They embraced and expressed a liberating aesthetic of community with individuality. Carefully arranged yet open to each artist’s individual improvisation, P-Funk’s jams blend horns, guitars, synthesizers, percussion, and an array of voices in arrangements of astonishing richness and complexity, with the depth of the groove only enhancing one’s appreciation of each performer’s individual expression. And because Clinton had assembled a collective of astounding talent and diversity — including former James Brown band members William “Bootsy” Collins on bass and Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley on horns, classically-trained Bernie Worrell on keyboards, and vocalist Phillip Wynne, former lead singer of the slick soul band the Spinners — the music never collapsed into chaos.

Clinton’s vocal arrangements alone are powerful models of community-with-individuality. No one individual functions as the “lead singer;” Clinton himself only shows up for a few raps on the P-Funk albums of the late-’70s. Often, five or six vocalists may sing “lead” on different songs on one album, with still other voices, sometimes altered by studio effects, popping up to offer commentary or cary along the album’s plotline. Group choruses skewer the tight soul harmony the Parliaments once practiced; voices in Clinton’s arrangments go off at odd angles, spread across octaves, and range from nasal squeals to gospel bellows, yet still cohere to create a sense of unity more powerful for the diversity it encompasses.

The practical actualization of P-Funk’s idealized community, in turn, occurs at the P-Funk concert, which centers around the active participation of fans, dancing in the aisles and chanting the P-Funk slogans along with the band on stage. At the P-Funk show I attended a few years ago, the shared love of the music among fans was so powerful that for the hour before the band even took the stage, the crowd spontaneously joined together in a series of a cappella chants — something I’ve never seen at any other concert.

Once the fans have gone home, the challenge is to keep the sense of community alive through more mediated forums of communication. For P-Funk fans, the primary forum for this alternative public sphere in the 1970s was black radio, which, as I have already discussed, in part found its own self-definition through P- Funk’s music. Clinton directly addressed how radio creates this mass-mediated community in a series of raps on Parliament records in the voice of a DJ for the mythic radio station “WEFUNK.” These raps solidified Parliament’s status as emblematic of black radio, and helped Parliament fans to think of their records as not just isolated commodities, but as nodes in a communication network linking together fans across the globe more powerfully than any single radio station could. And by taking on the voice of a DJ, Clinton was able communicate directly to his audience without the barriers of stage or song. (Not surprisingly, many rappers have borrowed this conceit in their quest to find more direct modes of expression.) As Barry Walters points out,

Appropriately, the best Parliament records were about black radio and its ability to unify its audience through the airwave differentiation…By parodying the slick black jock rap style, Clinton addressed his audience directly…while choirs of harmonized voice burst forth like idealized listeners demanding the kind of funk only Clinton could deliver.” [32]

Afrocentric Science Fiction

If black radio offered the possibilty of a limited real-life alternate public sphere, Clinton’s vision also held out the possibility of something more sweeping: a futuristic Black Nationalist utopia.

Parliament’s concerts in the late 1970s would begin with a strange monologue, spoken in the manner of the opening narration to a science fiction epic. One version was recorded as the “Prelude” to The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein; a slightly different version is reprinted in the liner notes to Tear the Roof off the Mother: 1974- 1980, a Parliament retrospective album:

Funk upon a time, in the daze of the Funkapus, the earth was on the One. Funk flowed freely and freedom was free from the need to be free. Even Cro-Nasal Sapiens and the Thumpasorus Peoples lived side by side in P(eace).

But soon there arose bumpnoxious empires led by unfunky dictators. These priests, pimps and politicians would spank whole nations of unsuspecting peoples — punishing them for their feelings and desires, constipating their notions and pimping their instincts until they were fat, horny and strung-out. The descendants of Cro-Nasal Sapiens fell in line, for their credo was “Get over by any means necessary.” They slicked their hair and lost all sense of the Groove.

The descendants of the Thumpasorus Peoples knew Funk was its own reward. They tried to remain true to the pure, uncut Funk. But it became impossible in a world woo’d by power and greed. So they locked away the secret of Clone Funk with kings and pharoahs deep in the Egyptian pyramids, and fled to outer speace to party on the Mothership and await the time they could safely return to refunkatize the planet. [33]

This narrative, a sci-fi variant of the story of Osiris and Set in Mumbo Jumbo, outlines the universe of Parliament’s concept albums. The climax to P-Funk’s concerts of the late ’70s was the landing of the Mothership, signifying the return of the exiled Thumpasorus Peoples to earth. As the giant mock- spaceship was slowly lowered, the band would play the title track to Mothership Connection, which transforms the dream of returning to the Motherland of Africa into a journey across the galaxy. Signifyin(g) upon the spiritual “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” the band chanted, “Swing down sweet chariot-stop/And let me ride.” Science fiction supplants religion, as “The Funk” becomes a new kind of deliverance.

Clinton’s Signifyin(g) on science fiction, long one of America’s most lily-white preserves, was a bold and original critical step. (Also a trend-setting one; Mothership Connection appeared a year before Star Wars. [34] ) In the mid-’70s there existed to my knowledge only one published black science fiction writer, Samuel Delany. (There did, however, exist one other black musician who dealt in sci-fi themes: jazz giant Sun Ra, who claims to be from Saturn and is a major influence on Clinton’s style, music and persona.) Most sci-fi universes, as Greg Tate points out, are “full of a zillion species of extraterrestrials and only caucasoid humans.” [35]

The particular power of science fiction for African-Americans, as Delany critic Robert Elliot Fox points out, is that blacks especially have a critical stake in future worlds. They constantly have had to struggle to transform dreams into realities, to redeem, as it were, the core of possibility within fantasy. [36]

As Delany himself told Greg Tate, “We need images of tomorrow…and our people need them more than most.” [37] Tate goes on to point out parenthetically, “That Delany was for so long the only black science-fiction writer reminds me of Eugene Genovese’s observation that black Americans have tended toward pragmatic rather than prophetic leadership.” [38] Clinton’s outrageous scenarios offer both a critique of white America’s vision of the future (as one critic writing on Clinton in the late ’70s paused to wonder, “exactly why were all the main characters in Star Wars and Close Encounters white?” [39] ) and a prophetic vision of African-American possibility — of Jes Grew infecting not only America, but the galaxy.

Funkintelechy

Clinton’s sci-fi storylines also served to thematize one way in which P-Funk was already charting a course into the future: through the use new musical technology. Cornel West points out,

Parliament ushered forth the era of black technofunk — the creative encounter of the Afro-American spiritual- blues impulse with highly sophisticated technological instruments, strategies, and effects. [40]

Bernie Worrell’s synthesizer squeals, Sir Nose’s distorted vocals, and Clinton’s multitracked mix put African- American musicians at the cutting edge of musical technology, and set the stage for, as Greg Tate puts it,

Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa, the Teller and Truman of hiphop’s Manhattan Project (inasmuch as they engineered and advocated war and peacetime use of the fusion funkbomb Einstein Clinton’s theorems made possible). [41]

Flash’s and Bambaataa’s discoveries, in turn, brought on the culture of sampling which has now returned Clinton’s actual recordings to the musical mainstream; while Parliament never charted a Top Ten record, the current third-best-selling album in the country, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, contains copious P-Funk samples. As Mumbo Jumbo concludes, “Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around.” [42

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DISCOGRAPHY

1967 The Parliaments. “(I Just Wanna) Testify.” Reviliot Records

1970 Funkadelic. Funkadelic. Westbound Records. Funkadelic. Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow. Westbound Records. Parliament. Osmium. Invictus Records.

1971 Funkadelic. Maggot Brain. Westbound Records.

1972 Funkadelic. America Eats Its Young. Westbound Records.

1973 Funkadelic. Cosmic Slop. Westbound Records.

1974 Funkadelic. Standing On the Verge of Getting It On. Westbound Records. Parliament. Up for the Down Stroke. Casablanca Records.

1975 Funkadelic. Let’s Take It to the Stage. Westbound Records. Funkadelic. Funkadelic’s Greatest Hits. Westbound Records. Parliament. Chocolate City. Casablanca Records.

1976 Bootsy’s Rubber Band. Stretchin’ Out In Bootsy’s Rubber Band. Warner Brothers Records. Funkadelic. Tales of Kidd Funkadelic. Westbound Records. Funkadelic. Hardcore Jollies. Warner Brothers Records. Parliament. Mothership Connection. Casablanca Records. Parliament. The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein. Casablanca Records.

1977 Bootsy’s Rubber Band. Ahh…The Name Is Bootsy, Baby! Warner Brothers Records. Funkadelic. The Best of the Funkadelic Early Years. Westbound Records. Parliament. Parliament Live: P-Funk Earth Tour. Casablanca Records. Parliament. Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome. Casablanca Records. Fred Wesley & The Horny Horns. A Blow For Me, A Toot To You. Atlantic Records.

1978 Bootsy’s Rubber Band. Bootsy? Player of the Year. Warner Brothers Records. The Brides of Funkenstein. Funk or Walk. Atlantic Records. Funkadelic. One Nation Under a Groove. Warner Brothers Records. Parliament. Motor-Booty Affair. Casablanca Records.

1979 Bootsy’s Rubber Band. This Boot Is Made For Fonk-n Funkadelic. Uncle Jam Wants You. Warner Brothers Records. Parliament. Gloryhallastoopid (Or Pin The Tale On The Funky). Casablanca Records.

1980 Bootsy. Ultra Wave. Warner Brothers Records. The Brides of Funkenstein. Never Buy Texas From A Cowboy. Atlantic Records.

1981 Funkadelic. The Electric Spanking of War Babies. Warner Brothers Records. Parliament. Trombipulation. Casablanca Records.

1982 George Clinton. Computer Games. Capitol Records. William “Bootsy” Collins. The One Giveth, The Count Taketh Away. Warner Brothers Records.

1983 George Clinton. You Shouldn’t-Nuf Bit Fish. Capitol Records. P-Funk All-Stars. Urban Dancefloor Guerrillas. Uncle Jam/CBS Associated Records.

1984 Parliament. Parliament’s Greatest Hits. Casablanca Records.

1985 George Clinton. Some of My Best Jokes Are Friends. Capitol Records.

1986 George Clinton. R&B Skeletons in the Closet. Capitol Records. George Clinton. The Best of George Clinton. Capitol Records. George Clinton/Parliament-Funkadelic. The Mothership Connection (Live from Houston). Capitol Records.

1988 The Incorporated Thang Band. Lifestyles of the Roach and Famous. Warner Brothers Records.

1989 George Clinton. The Cinderella Theory. Paisley Park/Warner Brothers Records. 1990

P-Funk All-Stars. Live at the Beverly Theater in Hollywood. Westbound Records.

1992 George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars. Go Fer Your Funk: George Clinton Family Series Volume One. AEM Records. Funkadelic. Music For Yer Mother. AEM Records. Trey Lewd. Drop the Line. Reprise Records.

1993 George Clinton Family Series Pt. 2. Castle Communications/Essential! Records. Parliament. Tear the Roof Off: 1974-1980. Casablanca/Mercury Records.

A P-FUNK SAMPLER SONG LISTING

Side A

1. “Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow” (excerpt), Funkadelic, Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow, Westbound Records, 1970.

2. “Prelude,” Parliament, The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, Casablanca Records, 1976.

3. “P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up),” Parliament, Mothership Connection, Casablanca Records, 1976.

4. “Mothership Connection,” George Clinton/Parliament- Funkadelic, The Mothership Connection: Live from Houston, Capitol Records, 1986. Original version on Parliament, Mothership Connection, Casablanca Records, 1976

5. “Sir Nose d’Voidoffunk (Pay Attention-B3M),” Parliament, Funkintelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome, Casablanca Records, 1976.

Side 2

1. “One Nation Under a Groove,” Funkadelic, One Nation Under a Groove, Warner Brothers Records, 1978.

2. “Tales of the Funky,” Digital Underground, Sons of the P, Tommy Boy Records, 1991. (Digitial Underground are Clinton’s most self-conscious heirs in hip-hop; the “P” in the album title stands for “Parliament-Funkadelic,” and “Tales of the Funky” is a tribute to Clinton and a reminiscence of P-Funk’s heyday. The song also samples several P-Funk classics, including “One Nation Under a Groove” and “Mothership Connection.”)

3. “The Signifying Monkey,” Dolemite, from the film Dolemite, 1975. (This doesn’t have anything in particular to do with P-Funk, but I’d mentioned it to you earlier, and thought you might want to hear it.)

NOTES

1. Some examples: “…if your ears say you’ve heard some of these grooves before, don’t tell your ass about it and your mind’ll never be the wiser” (Robert Christgau, Christgau’s Record Guide: The ’80s (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), p. 94). “…you gotta accept Clinton’s funk with your ass, or else your mind ain’t never gonna follow” (Barry Walters, “George Clinton: Learning to Funk the Bomb,” Village Voice, August 6, 1993, p. 63). “BDP may not succeed in freeing my ass every time, but my mind’s almost always ready to follow” (Ted Friedman, Review of Boogie Down Productions’ Edutainment, Spin, October 1990). All of these cases could imply that the authors actually misremembered the phrase, or might simply demonstrate how critics have chosen to reformulate the phrase into a more explicit distinction between cause and effect. (In my own case, I admit that I sometimes get the phrase confused.) Less excusable is The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock’n’Roll, which claims to be an authoritative source on the history of rock’n’roll, getting the quote backwards in its entry on Parliament/Funkadelic: “One of its many mottoes was: “Free your ass and your mind will follow.” (“Parliament/Funkadelic,” in The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock’n’Roll, eds. Jon Pareles and Patricia Romanowski (New York: Rolling Stone Press/Summit Books, 1983), p. 417.

2. Robert Christgau, Rock Albums of the ’70s: A Critical Guide (New York: Da Capo Press, 1981), p. 144.

3. Greg Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk (New York: Fireside, 1992), p. 41.

4. I should point out that while, for the sake of convenience, I am writing as if Parliament-Funkadelic were the product of a single man’s vision, P-Funk has always been a collective endeavor. The contributions of numerous musicians were critical, and most P-Funk songs were collectively written. In addition, many of the overarching concepts may have been dreamed up by Pedro Bell, the artist reponsible for the sci-fi scenarios and critical commentary on Funkadelic’s album covers and inside liner notes from 1973 on. Credit must also go to Overton Lloyd, who drew a series of comic books packaged with the Parliament albums which dramatized the battles between the hero “Starchild” and his enemy, “Sir Nose d’Voidoffunk.” Exactly who deserves credit for what remains a subject of bitter dispute among P-Funk alumni. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this paper it seems more important to discuss the P-Funk concept in its totality than to try to sort out individual contributions. (For more on these disputes, see Pedro Bell, “Pedro Bell: Drawnamic Maestro of Optical Infotainment,” interviewed by Rob Michaels, Motorbooty, 1989.)

5. Parliament’s records for Casablanca and Funkadelic’s for Westbound have now been rereleased on CD. However, Funkadelic’s later albums for Warner Brothers, along with the Bootsy’ Rubber Band, Horny Horns, Parlet, and Brides of Funkenstein albums, all remain out of print.

6. See below for a more extended discussion of P-Funk’s complex relationship to disco.

7. This isn’t to suggest that Clinton’s influence ever disappeared completely; much of Prince’s music of this period, for example, is inconceivable without Parliament- Funkadelic.

8. Joe McEwen, “Funk,” in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, ed. Anthony DeCurtis, James Henke, and Holly George-Warren (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 521.

9. Leroi Jones, Blues People (New York: Morrow Quill Paperback, 1963), p. 219.

10. Eric Partrige, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, tk), p. 436.

11 . Pareles and Romanowski, eds., p. 208.

12 . See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). I should point out here that my purpose in using Gates, as well as Ishmael Reed, to discuss George Clinton is not an attempt to “legitimate” or “elevate” a popular discourse to the level of literary theory. Nor am I seeking to “impose” Gate’s theory on Clinton’s music. To do either, I think, would be to engage in condescension similar to that Gates describes as the mistake of attempting to mechanically apply “European” theory to African-American literature. Of course, Gates’ theory, rooted in studies of African- American language use, has much to offer; but it remains self-consciously a theory of literature; I agree with Greg Tate that “Gates’ notion of a black tradition built only of figurative language seems a bit text-bound and bookwormish…” (Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk, p. 147). Funk not only has its own tradition; in Clinton it has its own theorist, and my purpose is simply to use Gate’s and Reed’s formulations to better illuminate Clinton’s.

13 . Jones, pp. 219-220.

14 . McEwen, p. 521.

15 . George Clinton, from interview with David Fricke, Rolling Stone, September 20, 1990, p. 75.

16 . George Clinton, quoted in Greg Tate, “George Clinton: The Genii in the Genome,” Village Voice, May 20, 1986, p. 75.

17 . “Funkencyclo-P-dia,” liner notes to Tear the Roof Off: 1974-1980, Casablanca/Mercury Records, 1993.

18 . Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (New York: Atheneum Press, 1972), p. 4. This similarity hasn’t gone unnoticed; as Joe McEwen writes: “Like the amorphous and liberating plague “Jes Grew” in Ishmael Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo…funk…aimed to put its audience in the grips of a new fever…” (McEwen, p. 521). Clinton himself has also expressed his admiration for Reed.

19 . Except perhaps for cases like Prince’s “Erotic City,” in which, in order to get the song played on the radio, Prince claimed the chorus’s hard-to-discern lyric was “funk so pretty you and me,” rather than, as it seemed, “fuck so pretty you and me.”

20 . Barry Walters, “George Clinton: Learning to Funk the Bomb,” Village Voice, August 5, 1985, p. 63.

21 . Christgau, Rock Albums of the ’70s, p. 292.

22 . Simon Frith, Sound Effects (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), p. 17.

23 . Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 214. I should point out that I find Gilroy’s statement, as well as Frith’s, much too broadly generalized; Miles Davis, certainly one of the very greatest black performers, sometimes played with his back to the audience. In addition, “overcoming” and “exploiting” the separation between performer and crowd are not the simple polar opposites Gilroy suggests them to be; I would argue that the slick dance routines and elaborate costumes of Motown-style soul acts (including the original Parliaments), for example, serve to highlight the staginess of the performance while at the same time embodying a cosmopolitan ideal with which the audience may strongly identify. The point is that the relationship between artist and audience need not seem transparent to create a sense of community; as Tom Carson points out about Clinton’s extravaganzas, “ritualistic stylization, no matter how novel (and tongue-in-cheek) Clinton’s uses of it, has never implied a lack of direct feeling in black music, with its passion for showbiz conventions” (Tom Carson, “Keep Rolling,” Village Voice, April 5, 1983, p. 59).

24 . Gilroy, p. 215.

25 . “Man Who Makes Millions Pushing P-Funk,” Jet, December 7, 1978, p. 22.

26 . Clinton, interviewed by Ken Tucker, “George Clinton’s Message: Don’t Fake the Funk,” New Times, August 5, 1977, p. 62.

27 . Ken Tucker, “The Walrus is George,” Village Voice, January 24, 1984, p. 65. “The Beatles are my all-time favorites,” Clinton told Greg Tate. “They were at the right place at the right time, and they made the best out of it” (Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk, p. 39).

28 . Clinton, quoted in Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman, “Funk at the Temple,” Village Voice, October 22, 1979, p. 77. In an earlier interview explaining Funkadelic’s moving from the independent Westbound label to Warner Brothers Records, he explained,

The thing that sold me on Warners was their promotion. All a promo man has to do is visit the FM station and convince ‘em, like they gotta do with any rock group that’s a little different. Now, if they play Kiss on FM stations, they’ll play anything on FM stations, but as it is, they’re fakin’ the funk” (Ed Ward, “The U.S. Funk Mob: ‘We Can Be As Bad As We Need To Be,” Village Voice, July 25, 1977, p. 39.).

29 . Walters, p. 63. The almost all-white rock critical establishment, as well, largely ignored P-Funk at their peak, despite the fact that Clinton’s “funk operas” and concept albums exhibited the kind of “experimental” scope and audacity that critics’ darlings like David Bowie and the Who were being praised for during the same period. (The stage and set for the Mothership Connection tour, in fact, was designed by Jules Fischer, who had orchestrated much-lauded extravaganzas for Bowie and the Rolling Stones.) As Robert Christgau, one of the few white critics who did pay attention, pointed out in 1983, Clinton is “a master of such supposedly Caucasian specialties as stance and persona and pop mind-fuck” (Robert Christgau, “Pazz & Jop ‘82: Funkintelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome,” Village Voice, February 22, 1983.) Nevertheless, none of P-Funk’s late-’70s masterworks placed anywhere near the Top 10 of the Village Voice’s “Pazz & Jop” poll of rock critics. Not until the mid-’80s did most critics begin to look back and realize what they’d missed. And even today, when Clinton is praised, it’s often with backhanded compliments which seemed to suggest that as opposed to white “art-rockers,” Clinton’s claim to the high conceptual ground was only a put-on: “So what if George Clinton…is a ripoff artist” (Jimmy Gutterman, The Best Rock’n’Roll Records of All Time (New York: Citadel Press, 1992), p. 85.) “If the Parliafunkadelicment Thang sometimes seemed like a scam…” (Dave Marsh, The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made (New York: Plume, 1989), p. 347.) Clinton remains outrageously on the margins of the rock’n’roll canon: Gutterman’s book places The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, its lone P-Funk representative, at #42, Marsh’s highest listing of any P- Funk song is at #524, and Clinton still does not merit his own chapter in the newly revised edition of The Rolling Stone IIllustrated History of Rock & Roll.

Like white rock critics’ belated recognition of Clinton, the current success of white funk-rock bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers can in large part be seen as a classic example of white America’s discovery and appropriation of an African-American style years after its creative peak — c.f. the white blues bands of the 1960s. Many of the hip-hop songs which use P-Funk samples, in fact, function less as recontextualizations than as rereleases — raps which simply piggy-back on P-Funk songs which should’ve been hits the first time around, but remain unknown to most white listeners (and perhaps many black listeners as well, as the “Urban Contemporary” stations of today, even more conservative than their late-’70s counterparts, rarely play P-Funk oldies).

30 . Tucker, p. 65. I say “overcome” rather than “dissipated,” because P-Funk was engaged in a struggle; as Greg Tate puts it,

On black radio they functioned as active opposition to a form of record industry sabotage dubbed “disco” — or as I like to pun it, disCOINTELPRO, since it destroyed the self- supporting black band movement which P-Funk (jes) grew out of” (Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk, p. 156).

I would moderate Tate’s point by arguing that disco itself was a powerfully liberating movement subverted by a racist (and heterosexist) power structure. Clinton’s own criticisms of disco were always somewhat disingenuous; much of Parliament’s best music sounded a lot more like disco than Clinton, anxious to distinguish his band as purveyors of the “pure, uncut funk,” wanted to admit. To a large extent, in fact, Clinton’s attack on disco (the slogan to “(Not Just) Knee Deep” was “let’s rescue dance music from the blahs”) was probably in the spirit of friendly competition and self-assertion rather than outright distaste; as Clinton himself somewhat more generously acknowledged in 1986, “Disco itself was funk. But all they did was take one funk beat and sanitize it to no end. It’s irritating. I loved Donna Summer’s records. But too much of it…” (Clinton, interviewed by Fricke, p. 77.) Nonetheless, Tate is certainly right that the industry- hyped disco boom of the late ’70s killed many independent funk bands, and allowed record companies to take tighter control of black music by putting creative control in the hands of behind-the-scenes producers who could never develop the clout and autonomy of world- famous performers. (For an excellent discussion of the politics of disco, see Tom Smucker, “Disco,” The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, pp. 561-572. See also Richard Dyer, “In Defense of Disco,” On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), pp. 410-418.

31 . See, for example, Ed Ward’s 1977 profile of P-Funk: “Still, the key to mass acceptance for Funkadelic lies with the white audience” (Ward, p. 39). Likewise, Tom Smucker worried in 1978 that P-Funk was “wearing out and getting boring, just when white people had a chance to discover it.” (Tom Smucker, “Parlentelechy v. the Bullshit Syndrome,” Village Voice, February 6, 1978).

32 . Walters, p. 63.

33 . Untitled, from the liner notes to Tear the Roof off the Mother: 1974-1980. My guess is that this text was initially printed in the liner notes to Mothership Connection, but as the reissue I own does not include all the original packaging, I cannot tell for sure.

34 . This point is made by Nelson George in his “Chronicle of Post-Soul Black Culture.” (Nelson George, Buppies, B- Boys, Baps and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 13.

35 . Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk, p. 160.

36 . Robert Elliot Fox, Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 94.

37 . Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk, p. 165.

38 . Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk, p. 166.

39 . Smucker, “Parlentelechy v. the Bullshit Syndrome,” p. 49.

40 . West, p. 287. West’s use of the word “technofunk” is somewhat confusing, as music critics usually use the term to refer to the synthesizer-dominated dance music of the early ’80s. But his point remains valid.

41 . Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk, p. 186.

42 . Reed, p. 218.

In the summer of 1990, the American music industry performed a bizarre ritual. At a press conference, it was announced that the winners of that year’s ‘Best New Artist’ award, Milli Vanilli, had had their prize revoked for misrepresenting their contributions to their own music; it had been discovered (though there was never much of a secret about it) that the group’s putative members, Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, had not performed any of the vocals on their album. (The vocals were actually performed by Charles Shaw, John Davis, and Brad Howe.) Vanilli quickly became a running joke in mass culture. Rob and Fab appeared in a self-mocking chewing-gum commercial, lip-synching the Care-Free jingle. A class-action suit was filed, and eventually purchasers of Girl You Know It’s True were given the opportunity to mail off for a rebate for fraud damages. And in 1991, Rob Pilatus attempted suicide by jumping out of his Beverly Hills Hotel suite. Milli Vanilli today are little more than a fading joke and a trivia question. (A comback album last year by Rob and Fab, featuring their own voices, predictably sank without a trace.) Although they’d sold ten million albums and scored five Top Five singles (including three Number Ones), their hit songs have been erased from the oldies playlists of radio stations across the nation. The only place I’ve come across any trace of Milli Vanilli in the past few years was on a recent episode of Beavis and Butthead, where the dazed metalheads could only stare in utter incomprehension at the two dancing, dreadlocked men on the screen.

But if Milli Vanilli’s songs have been expunged from the collective memory, their disgrace remains a critical episode in the narrative contemporary popular music tells to explain itself. That 1990 press conference came in the midst of crisis in the shared assumptions about authenticity in popular music. A New Jersey congressman was proposing a law banning unannounced lip-synching at concerts. The cross-over of hip-hop represented by Milli-Vanilli’s pop-rap fusion was introducing Top 40 audiences to remixing and sampling strategies that called into question assumptions about songs’s originality. Synthesizers, originally exploited for their plastic, unnatural sound in the early 80s, had become the sonic norm, as familiar as amplified guitar strings. And sophisticated recording techniques had emerged which could filter and modify any voice into a radio-ready instrument.

Pop music-making in the 1990s has more to do with filmmaking than jamming in a garage: every song is a collection of tracks laid down by assorted musicians, edited together by producers, and fronted by charismatic performers. But while most viewers recognize the complex division of labor in moviemaking — nobody gets upset that actors don’t do their own stunts — pop music hangs on to the folk-era image of the individual artist communicating directly to her or his listeners. Milli Vanilli became martyrs to this myth of authenticity. They were the recording industry’s sacrifice meant to prove the integrity of the rest of their product — as if the music marketed under the names U2 or Janet Jackson WEREN’T every bit as constructed and mediated, just because the voices on the records matched the faces in the videos.

The sacrifice worked. Paula Abdul faced down a lawsuit from a former backup singer claiming Abdul’s voice was barely audible on several of the tracks from her hit Forever Your Girl, and established her artistic credibility by singing ballads on the follow-up Spellbound. Rapper Biz Markie was successfully sued for unliscensed sampling, and now every hip-hop appropriation is contractually accounted for. Gangsta rap and grunge rock emerged as mass genres which laid special claims to authentic expression, and nobody smirked. Sure, the rules had changed somewhat: the hard-rockin’ earnestness of Bruce Springsteen’s comeback records in 1991 sounded painfully out of touch; in place of those plodding electric guitars, aging rockers discovered that they could shed the burden of their years and regain intimacy with their audiences by going acoustic — or at least ‘Unplugged’, which quickly developed to mean anything except electric guitars. Soon, post-Vanilli diva Mariah Carey was performing live on MTV just to prove her multi-octave range was an honest freak of nature, and not just a studio trick. Which begs the question, what the hell difference does it make whether Carey’s dog-whistle-pitched shrieks are live or Memorex? The answer is that the only reason that painful noise impresses in the first place is because it demonstrates Carey’s technical skills, the same way an Eddie Van Halen guitar run is supposed to wow us with his fingering prowess. We’re asked to be impressed by the artists’ mastery of their instruments. But that shriek at the end of Carey’s “Emotions” is a ruse — the worst part of the song — and I’ll take David Lee Roth over Eddie Van Halen any day.

In explaining the pleasures of mass culture, the aesthetic criteria that go along with the rubric of ‘authenticity’ — designations like ‘talent’ and ‘quality’ — are pretty useless standards of judgement — after-the-fact rationalizations, often, for more inexplicable attractions. Why do I love Milli Vanilli’s Girl, You Know It’s True? I can go on all day long about its neo-soul songcraft, its soaring synth-strings, its shimmering percussion. But do I think it’s great because the people involved were ‘talented’? Who the hell cares? It’s not like I’m inviting them to dinner. Plenty of the greatest music ever made has been created by hacks, slackers, and no-names, who for whatever reasons stumbled into a little bit of genius. I should point out that just because Rob and Fab didn’t have much to do with the creation of Milli Vanilli’s music, it’s not like nobody else did. The genius behind the Milli Vanilli sound, if you want to know, is producer Frank Farian, also responsible for disco pioneers Boney M. There was probably some specific mastermind behind the image and marketing of Milli Vanilli, as well, whose name is lost to history because of the biases of what gets to count as ‘art’ and what as ‘packaging’. In any case, dividing up the responsibility for the bundle of sound and images known as Milli Vanilli may be a significant historical task, but it does little to make sense of the pleasures of the text. We can explain Farian’s contribution to the bundle of sound and image known as ‘Milli Vanilli’ in terms of valorized technical skills. But how much credit should we give Rob and Fab for their wonderful, slightly off-base charisma? For their enormous pecs? For their great hair? These may be ‘superficial’ attributes, but they have AS much to do with aesthetic effect as rhythm tracks. To classify some qualities as ‘talents’ and others as ‘superficial’ may work for judging friends, but they have nothing to do with the play of images that makes up the art of mass culture.

None of this is to say that this art need be seen as in any way ‘compromised’ by its commodity status. That play of images can still create powerful resonances, provoke intense desires, and connote complex politics. Actually, what really blew my mind when Milli Vanilli first showed up was how appealingly, subversively goofy they were. I knew something was up when they could barely pronounce English in their few interviews (they’re both from Germany). They had these huge pectoral muscles, but had none of that Schwarzenegger uebermensch belligerence; they might’ve looked muscle-bound, but they could dance. Actually, their costumes highlighted the irony of their gentle-giant appeal: they wore those power-shoulder jackets as if they didn’t realize that with those bods, they didn’t need them. They were big men wearing the drag of big men. And the weird dynamic they had going was so interestingly, almost incestuously (given how similar they looked to each other) queer — in the “Baby, Don’t Forget My Number” video, for example, there’s a woman who’s the putative object of their interest, but they’re obviously much more interested in each other.

Of course, that queerness goes a long way toward explaining why Milli Vanilli were picked out as the scapegoats for the music industry’s ‘authenticity’ problem. It’s no surprise that two effeminate-seeming men were attacked for failing to play a ‘productive’ role in the making of their music. In the gender scheme of capitalism as traditionally envisioned by capitalists and Marxists alike, where productive masculine workers create goods for passive, feminized consumers, the role of commodification gets coded as queer. Packaging, marketing, fashion, image-creation — long gay-associated cultural roles — are seen as parasitic, wasteful, non-reproductive, fetishistic mediations blocking an unalienated, ‘authentic’ relationship between producer and consumer. What this story leaves out — represses — is the physical and intellectual labor — the art — that goes into associating goods with cultural meanings. And what it can’t explain are the undeniable pleasures of commodification.

The disgracing of Milli Vanilli didn’t return popular music to a golden age of direct communication between artist and fan. I’m not sure I’d want such a relationship, if it ever existed — most rock stars become a lot less interesting when you learn what they’re ‘really’ like. But in demarcating the ’90s’ boundary line between ‘art’ and ‘image’, what THIS DISGRACING may have inadvertently helped usher in is the era of the Supermodel. Cindy, Naomi, Linda and their cohort can’t be unmasked as talentless frauds, don’t need to sing, dance, or act to be stars. They’ve given up any claim to creating anything other than images of themselves. Does this mean they produce nothing that can be of any value to their millions of fans? Not according to the most thrilling media phenomenon to come along since Milli Vanilli, RuPaul, who in “Supermodel” asks us to reimagine image-modelling and gender-construction as the archetypical form of postmodern labor: “You’d better work it, girl.” You know it’s true..

Milli Vanilli and the Scapegoating of the Inauthentic

Pop music hangs on to the folk-era image of the individual artist communicating directly to her or his listeners. Milli Vanilli became martyrs to this myth of authenticity.

Bad Subjects, Issue #9, November 1993

In the summer of 1990, the American music industry performed a bizarre ritual. At a press conference, it was announced that the winners of that year’s ‘Best New Artist’ award, Milli Vanilli, had had their prize revoked for misrepresenting their contributions to their own music; it had been discovered (though there was never much of a secret about it) that the group’s putative members, Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, had not performed any of the vocals on their album. (The vocals were actually performed by Charles Shaw, John Davis, and Brad Howe.) Vanilli quickly became a running joke in mass culture. Rob and Fab appeared in a self-mocking chewing-gum commercial, lip-synching the Care-Free jingle. A class-action suit was filed, and eventually purchasers of Girl You Know It’s True were given the opportunity to mail off for a rebate for fraud damages. And in 1991, Rob Pilatus attempted suicide by jumping out of his Beverly Hills Hotel suite. Milli Vanilli today are little more than a fading joke and a trivia question. (A comback album last year by Rob and Fab, featuring their own voices, predictably sank without a trace.) Although they’d sold ten million albums and scored five Top Five singles (including three Number Ones), their hit songs have been erased from the oldies playlists of radio stations across the nation. The only place I’ve come across any trace of Milli Vanilli in the past few years was on a recent episode of Beavis and Butthead, where the dazed metalheads could only stare in utter incomprehension at the two dancing, dreadlocked men on the screen.

But if Milli Vanilli’s songs have been expunged from the collective memory, their disgrace remains a critical episode in the narrative contemporary popular music tells to explain itself. That 1990 press conference came in the midst of crisis in the shared assumptions about authenticity in popular music. A New Jersey congressman was proposing a law banning unannounced lip-synching at concerts. The cross-over of hip-hop represented by Milli-Vanilli’s pop-rap fusion was introducing Top 40 audiences to remixing and sampling strategies that called into question assumptions about songs’s originality. Synthesizers, originally exploited for their plastic, unnatural sound in the early 80s, had become the sonic norm, as familiar as amplified guitar strings. And sophisticated recording techniques had emerged which could filter and modify any voice into a radio-ready instrument.

Pop music-making in the 1990s has more to do with filmmaking than jamming in a garage: every song is a collection of tracks laid down by assorted musicians, edited together by producers, and fronted by charismatic performers. But while most viewers recognize the complex division of labor in moviemaking — nobody gets upset that actors don’t do their own stunts — pop music hangs on to the folk-era image of the individual artist communicating directly to her or his listeners. Milli Vanilli became martyrs to this myth of authenticity. They were the recording industry’s sacrifice meant to prove the integrity of the rest of their product — as if the music marketed under the names U2 or Janet Jackson WEREN’T every bit as constructed and mediated, just because the voices on the records matched the faces in the videos.

The sacrifice worked. Paula Abdul faced down a lawsuit from a former backup singer claiming Abdul’s voice was barely audible on several of the tracks from her hit Forever Your Girl, and established her artistic credibility by singing ballads on the follow-up Spellbound. Rapper Biz Markie was successfully sued for unliscensed sampling, and now every hip-hop appropriation is contractually accounted for. Gangsta rap and grunge rock emerged as mass genres which laid special claims to authentic expression, and nobody smirked. Sure, the rules had changed somewhat: the hard-rockin’ earnestness of Bruce Springsteen’s comeback records in 1991 sounded painfully out of touch; in place of those plodding electric guitars, aging rockers discovered that they could shed the burden of their years and regain intimacy with their audiences by going acoustic — or at least ‘Unplugged’, which quickly developed to mean anything except electric guitars. Soon, post-Vanilli diva Mariah Carey was performing live on MTV just to prove her multi-octave range was an honest freak of nature, and not just a studio trick. Which begs the question, what the hell difference does it make whether Carey’s dog-whistle-pitched shrieks are live or Memorex? The answer is that the only reason that painful noise impresses in the first place is because it demonstrates Carey’s technical skills, the same way an Eddie Van Halen guitar run is supposed to wow us with his fingering prowess. We’re asked to be impressed by the artists’ mastery of their instruments. But that shriek at the end of Carey’s “Emotions” is a ruse — the worst part of the song — and I’ll take David Lee Roth over Eddie Van Halen any day.

In explaining the pleasures of mass culture, the aesthetic criteria that go along with the rubric of ‘authenticity’ — designations like ‘talent’ and ‘quality’ — are pretty useless standards of judgement — after-the-fact rationalizations, often, for more inexplicable attractions. Why do I love Milli Vanilli’s Girl, You Know It’s True? I can go on all day long about its neo-soul songcraft, its soaring synth-strings, its shimmering percussion. But do I think it’s great because the people involved were ‘talented’? Who the hell cares? It’s not like I’m inviting them to dinner. Plenty of the greatest music ever made has been created by hacks, slackers, and no-names, who for whatever reasons stumbled into a little bit of genius. I should point out that just because Rob and Fab didn’t have much to do with the creation of Milli Vanilli’s music, it’s not like nobody else did. The genius behind the Milli Vanilli sound, if you want to know, is producer Frank Farian, also responsible for disco pioneers Boney M. There was probably some specific mastermind behind the image and marketing of Milli Vanilli, as well, whose name is lost to history because of the biases of what gets to count as ‘art’ and what as ‘packaging’. In any case, dividing up the responsibility for the bundle of sound and images known as Milli Vanilli may be a significant historical task, but it does little to make sense of the pleasures of the text. We can explain Farian’s contribution to the bundle of sound and image known as ‘Milli Vanilli’ in terms of valorized technical skills. But how much credit should we give Rob and Fab for their wonderful, slightly off-base charisma? For their enormous pecs? For their great hair? These may be ‘superficial’ attributes, but they have AS much to do with aesthetic effect as rhythm tracks. To classify some qualities as ‘talents’ and others as ‘superficial’ may work for judging friends, but they have nothing to do with the play of images that makes up the art of mass culture.

None of this is to say that this art need be seen as in any way ‘compromised’ by its commodity status. That play of images can still create powerful resonances, provoke intense desires, and connote complex politics. Actually, what really blew my mind when Milli Vanilli first showed up was how appealingly, subversively goofy they were. I knew something was up when they could barely pronounce English in their few interviews (they’re both from Germany). They had these huge pectoral muscles, but had none of that Schwarzenegger uebermensch belligerence; they might’ve looked muscle-bound, but they could dance. Actually, their costumes highlighted the irony of their gentle-giant appeal: they wore those power-shoulder jackets as if they didn’t realize that with those bods, they didn’t need them. They were big men wearing the drag of big men. And the weird dynamic they had going was so interestingly, almost incestuously (given how similar they looked to each other) queer — in the “Baby, Don’t Forget My Number” video, for example, there’s a woman who’s the putative object of their interest, but they’re obviously much more interested in each other.

Of course, that queerness goes a long way toward explaining why Milli Vanilli were picked out as the scapegoats for the music industry’s ‘authenticity’ problem. It’s no surprise that two effeminate-seeming men were attacked for failing to play a ‘productive’ role in the making of their music. In the gender scheme of capitalism as traditionally envisioned by capitalists and Marxists alike, where productive masculine workers create goods for passive, feminized consumers, the role of commodification gets coded as queer. Packaging, marketing, fashion, image-creation — long gay-associated cultural roles — are seen as parasitic, wasteful, non-reproductive, fetishistic mediations blocking an unalienated, ‘authentic’ relationship between producer and consumer. What this story leaves out — represses — is the physical and intellectual labor — the art — that goes into associating goods with cultural meanings. And what it can’t explain are the undeniable pleasures of commodification.

The disgracing of Milli Vanilli didn’t return popular music to a golden age of direct communication between artist and fan. I’m not sure I’d want such a relationship, if it ever existed — most rock stars become a lot less interesting when you learn what they’re ‘really’ like. But in demarcating the ’90s’ boundary line between ‘art’ and ‘image’, what THIS DISGRACING may have inadvertently helped usher in is the era of the Supermodel. Cindy, Naomi, Linda and their cohort can’t be unmasked as talentless frauds, don’t need to sing, dance, or act to be stars. They’ve given up any claim to creating anything other than images of themselves. Does this mean they produce nothing that can be of any value to their millions of fans? Not according to the most thrilling media phenomenon to come along since Milli Vanilli, RuPaul, who in “Supermodel” asks us to reimagine image-modelling and gender-construction as the archetypical form of postmodern labor: “You’d better work it, girl.” You know it’s true.

Let me begin with a personal example of what I want to talk about. When I was a college radio DJ, I'd occasionally get to interview independent-label acts who'd drop by the station before playing a local club. I remember one particularly awkward conversation with the band Yo La Tengo. My co-interviewers and I had these wonderful artists, whose music we all loved, in the studio with us, and all we could think to ask was, "um . . . do you think your video will get played on MTV? How's the distribution for your current record? Would you like to get signed by a major label?"

The band, who certainly had more of a personal - and financial - stake in these issues than we did, nonetheless grew exasperated at our philistinism. They wanted to know, "Don't you have anything to ask about our music?"

Well, no, we didn't. We knew why we liked their music - Ira Kaplan's a great guitar player, Georgia Hubley has a wonderful voice - but we really didn't need to know much more about it.2 What we wanted to know was where Yo La Tengo stood in the big culture game. How many fans listened to them? How many records did they sell? What were the chances they'd turn into rock stars?

This seeming obsession with commerce over culture is typically dismissed as the crassest sort of bottom-line, lowest-common-denominator cynicism. It's the perspective I saw Siskel and Ebert bemoaning just the other day, complaining about how the news these days is only interested in reporting the top grossing movies of each week, rather than on highlighting artistic accomplishments. An affront to critical respectability, it's the antithesis of the "art-for-art's sake" attitude identified by Bourdieu as the "Kantian aesthetic." At the same time, as I'll discuss further in a minute, it doesn't coincide with most of the descriptions and justifications of fandom I've seen in Cultural Studies. It's not a subversive act of "textual poaching" - it's a kind of allegiance, a kind of loyalty. It's not so different from rooting for a sports team, or a political candidate. You develop an investment in a particular band, movie star, or TV show, and you want to see it do well against the competition.

I should point out that the flip side - the subculture's fear that their heroes will "sell out" and become huge - is just as much defined by this dynamic. Either way, the response is determined by the artists' commercial reception, rather than by intrinsic qualities of the artists' texts.

But in scandalously ignoring artistic content, this form of appreciation is often perceived as a guilty pleasure, even by those engaging in it. It remains haunted by the specter of the Kantian aesthetic, which remains the legitimating mechanism for most pop culture claims to "authenticity." I knew as I asked my questions to Yo La Tengo that they were a fan's indulgences, the idle chit-chat a band might make before getting to what's really supposed to matter: the music.

But looking back on that conversation, I'm not so sure I had anything to feel guilty about. Music is music, but when you start talking about record sales and MTV airplay, you're getting closer, I think, to the meat of cultural politics. I want to take some of the stigma away from these conversations - I want to recognize the way this form of pleasure is distinctly useful. Like Bourdieu's "popular aesthetic," it's an attitude which radically challenges the Kantian isolation of "art" from life. It insists on grounding aesthetic appreciation - and pleasure - in a knowledge of the conditions of cultural production and consumption. But at the same time, it's not simply, as Bourdieu defines the popular aesthetic, "the affirmation of the continuity between art and life." It's more self-consciously mediated than that.

Let me explain what I mean in terms of ideas about commodification - one of the alternate vocabularies to Bourdieu's suggested by Professor Jameson last night, but which I think has problems of its own. The relationship I'm describing between fan and cultural commodity can certainly be considered a form of fetishization. The commodified object - the record album, the baseball card, the comic book - is invested with seemingly magical properties. But at the same time, the fan's knowledge in a sense demystifies the commodity - it situates that fetishized commodity within its material conditions of production, distribution, and marketing. I'd argue that the fan's pleasure is a fetishization without mystification. This model of consumer pleasure, I think, is crucial for cultural critics to understand and learn from, because it offers the possibility of recognizing and critiquing the injustices of capitalism and the vagaries of the market without insisting on an ascetic renunciation of the pleasures of commodity culture. It offers the hope, I think, for a commodification without illusions.

Let me clarify my point with an example of one kind of fan behavior: baseball card collecting. In the last twenty years, baseball card collecting has grown from a childhood pleasure rarely noticed by adults, into an industry selling over $1 billion of cards every year.

In the process, many critics have complained that collectors have lost sight of the purpose of collecting - that they seem more interested in the market value of their cards than in the players they represent. But the irony here is: if the fans put so much thought and effort into understanding and following the baseball card market, so that they know as much about the economics of baseball cards as any executive at Topps, how can you describe their relation to the commodity itself as mystified? Fetishized, certainly - these so-called "investments" mean something more to their owners than simple stock certificates would. After all, there are easier ways to make money. Baseball cards are commodities of deep personal and mythic resonance, nostalgically evoking the childhood practices of card collecting and the many years of baseball history. But when the collector follows every turn in the baseball card market, conscious of every reason for a rise or fall in a card's price, the cards are no longer, I think, mystified commodities - or at least, they're mystified in a new, importantly different way.3

Let me give another example from sports fandom of the tension between Kantian and materialist perspectives. The typical baseball fan's complaint during the strike was, "why do I have to hear all about how much money baseball players are making? Baseball should be a game, not a business" - a perfect example of a desire to divorce cultural appreciation from its economic context. The irony, however, is that it's the logic of being a baseball fan which makes following players' salaries so interesting. Even while protesting a disdain for the economics of baseball, fans invariably, obsessively return to questions of who's making how much, where free agents will go, and so on. The reason's simple to see: it's not much of a step from following batting averages and player trades, to following salary negotiations and free agent signings. This materialist interest in the inner workings of baseball is built into the pleasure of being a baseball fan. Indeed, baseball simulation games and Rotisserie leagues often include economic models as part of the gameplay, with drafts, trades, free agent signings, team budgets, the works. All this suggests the extent to which the supposed distraction of business may actually be part of the fun. But again, the shadow of the Kantian aesthetic hangs over this interest - it seems like a guilty pleasure to follow the business of baseball, when what's really supposed to matter is the game for the game's sake.

I want to move, now, to a more general discussion of fandom and cultural struggle. As many Cultural Studies theorists have recognized, to be a Yo La Tengo fan, or a Barry Bonds fan, or a My So-Called Life fan, or all three, is to choose sides in ongoing cultural conflicts.4 What's equally important to understand is how those conflicts are waged and followed by fans. Responding to the long-standing derision of mass culture consumers as "cultural dupes," most Cultural Studies analyses of fandom have understandably begun by insisting on the active, productive roles of fans. In Henry Jenkins' influential formulation, fans are "textual poachers" - bricoleurs who reappropriate hegemonic discourse for their own purposes. This model sees mass culture on one side, the people on the other, and "subversion" as the quintessential act of semiotic struggle.

But fandom isn't only about subversion and recontextualization - it's also about allegiance and loyalty. The model I'm suggesting here reconfigures the Gramscian paradigm, viewing the struggle not as mass culture versus the people, but as mass culture against itself - Roseanne taking on Home Improvement, Snoop Doggy Dogg battling Eric Clapton, with fans on either sides invested in the outcome, following the struggles in the Nielsen ratings and the Billboard charts. Or, recognizing mass culture's complexity and ability to accommodate plural perspectives, perhaps it's better to see each cultural artifact struggling against the field, fighting to stay on the air, to make the top ten, to have an impact.

This model, perhaps, is too top-down; it makes all the action happen in the cultural arena, and returns fans to the status as spectators. But I think it helps describe the way fans look to culture to represent them, in a consensual process similar to the way politicians are expected to represent those who voted for them, and sealed by the fan's voting with their pocketbooks. Of course, neither the cultural nor the electoral markets often do a very good job of responsibly representing their constituencies. But I think what I'm describing does help explain the very mediated process of cultural struggle as it occurs - and I think the materialist aesthetic I'm describing, with its detailed interest in the market processes in action, can help fans find the most effective, least exploitative representation.

Let me give a final example of fan behavior from my very favorite fanzine: Between the Lines, a monthly Debbie Gibson newsletter available now over the Internet. (Debbie Gibson, for those who don't remember, was a teenage pop star in the late 1980s.) I should point out that my own Debbie Gibson fandom is an intensely personal story, having to do with growing up in suburban New York with many of the same influences as my contemporary Gibson - Brill building pop, Billy Joel, show tunes; with first hearing "Only In My Dreams" on the car radio at a time when I really needed a good pop song; with encountering a group of friends in college who, at a turning point in my intellectual life, taught me not to be afraid to love what is often denigrated as "teenybopper pop." The personal nature of my relationship to Debbie Gibson's music should not be surprising; every issue of Between the Lines opens with a series of confessionals from Gibson fans, who want to talk about how they first came to care about her.

What I want to talk about here, though, is my favorite part of Between the Lines, "Debwatch," where the editors for seven years have kept readers up-to-date with the chart status of each current Gibson single. Of recent years, this has been a somewhat less rewarding affair, as Debbie's popularity has dwindled. But true fans keep the faith. Let me quote from "Debbie Gibson on the Billboard Charts," an article by Rob Polinsky from a 1993 issue. "Losin' Myself," the first single from her last album, Body, Mind, Soul, had just been released a few weeks before, and after looking good for a couple of weeks, it had lost its "bullet" on the charts - meaning its sales were starting to peter off. Polinsky writes:

[A]s you can tell, Deb does not have a bullet on any one of these charts this week. How can you make a song's point total improve? The only possible way is through sales and airplay. As a fan, all you can do is BUY BUY BUY and REQUEST REQUEST REQUEST. It's very important that you do this. For BMS you can pick up extra copies and give them to your pals. Or if you know someone who is interested and wants the album, but doesn't feel like going to get it, buy it for him or her and then tell that person to pay you back.

The author goes on to suggest more specific strategies for getting your friends to buy the album, for getting the single played on the radio, and so on. This sort of fan activism is the kind highlighted often by cultural studies scholars to emphasize the productive, engaged role of fans. The die-hards who succeeded in getting the original Star Trek brought back for a third season are one oft-cited case; the petition writers trying to keep My So-Called Life on the air would be a current example. I want to make a different point here, though. Whatever impact the hundred-odd recipients of Between the Lines had on Debbie Gibson's Billboard numbers was negligible; both the single and the album quickly dropped off the charts. This isn't surprising; I doubt many readers had much sense that they were personally making a difference in buying her record, any more than you expect your one vote to matter in a national election. What matters, instead, is the sense of engagement - the sense of Debbie's entry up there on the charts representing you, making what you care about visible - and audible, in this case, especially if it makes Casey Casem's Top 40.

I don't want to say, by the way, that the fact that the record flopped means that the experience was simply of failure - there's a certain bittersweet pleasure in remaining loyal to stars past their prime - like being a Chicago Cubs fan. But being a fan is also always about hope: as the Between the Lines Article concludes, quoting another Debbie Gibson song: "Anything is possible -- if you just put your mind to it!!!"5

Footnotes

1 . I should point out here that my paper leaves the definition of "fan" purposefully vague. I think of fandom as a continuum - almost everybody's a fan of something, to greater or lesser degree. Watching Seinfeld every week, for example, is enough in my book to make a viewer at least in some sense a Seinfeld "fan." And so, most mass culture consumers are likely to be "fans" to greater or lesser degrees of many different cultural products and genres. The mode of fandom I'm talking about here, of course, is only one form of fan practice, but I think it's something engaged to some extent by many if not most mass culture consumers at one time or another.

I should acknowledge that my sense of who gets to count as a "fan" differs somewhat from other cultural studies writers'. Henry Jenkins, for example, who writes about very specific, highly developed forms of fan practices (fiction writing, fanzine publishing, etc.), concludes Textual Poachers with the qualification that "fan culture differs in a qualitative way from the cultural experience of media consumption for the bulk of the population." (I, on the other hand, would describe "the bulk of the population" as fans of one thing or another.) This difference leads Jenkins to insist that "the fan audience is in no sense representative of the auidence at large, nor can we go from an understnading of a specfic subculture to an account of the active spectator" (Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers (Routledge, 1992), p. 286).

Jenkins is writing about a very elaborate fan culture, and one with rigid rules of exclusion; science fiction fans often refer to outsiders as "mundanes," and an easy way to start an argument with a Star Trek fan is to refer to "Trekkies" rather than the preferreed "Trekkers." Most experiences of fandom, I'd argue, are much more open and fluid - in fact, beyond the "Trekker" community, there are many more folks who also consider themselves Star Trek fans, but aren't even aware of the expression, and are happy to call themselves "Trekkies." This is the kind of fan experience that's much harder to talk about. Jenkins ends his book with a call to ethnography, for a more detailed understanding of the experiences of actual fans. But it's obviously a lot easier to do an ethnography of a distinct, self-defined, deeply dedicated fan group, than to study the more ambivalent, mediated, nebulous, multitudinous practices of everyday consumer preference, loyalty, and identification.

This isn't a flaw in Jenkins' work; all any one study can attempt to do is to show one slice of consumer culture, and then attempt to relate it to the whole. (The alternative - the God's-eye persepctive of Bourdieu's Distinction - runs into problems of its own.) Jenkins' work pinpoints one spot along the range of fan practices, to demonstrate one way in which mass culture is consumed. I consider this paper as pinpointing a different spot, to show mass culture consumption from a different perspective which may perhaps reveal different things.

2. Or at least, we thought we knew why we liked their music. Or, more specifically, we knew all we wanted to know about why we liked their music. How we became Yo La Tengo fans - through whatever combination of agency and interpellation - and how Yo La Tengo's music and image produced their affects on us, are important questions in their own right. But I want to suspend those issues for the length of this paper, to ask the questions that follow.

3. Of course, there's more than one story to tell about the market. I doubt the collector's knowledge of the baseball card business extends to a knoweldge of the conditions of labor in baseball card factories. The sensibility I'm describing could certainly be described as a fetishization of the market - a crass glorification of the bottom line which reifies the complexities of capitalist exploitation into the laissez-faire myth of the "invisible hand." This was a critique made, for example, of the New York art market in the 1980s, as John Guillory recently noted. But I would argue that there was something "subversive" about the '80s art market. The legacy of Warhol was to lay bare the functioning of art as cultural capital, so that by the 1980s, collectors could no longer hide behind any other pretenses. Revealed as naked capital accumlation, the market inevitably had to crash.

In the long run, I'd argue, fetishizing the market is a definite improvement over disguising it. Once the market's visible to all, its contradictions aren't so easy to hide. For example, several recent studies have made baseball card collectors aware of the disparity in prices between cards for comparably talented black and white ballplayers - puncturing the myth that the market is color-blind.

4. Of course, how much "choice" is involved is a question in itself - exactly the kind Bourdieu's most useful in trying to answer.

5. One last qualification I should throw in is the degree to which the sensibility I'm describing is the result of a specific habitus. One thing I didn't even notice when originally wrote my introduction to this paper is that in the Yo La Tengo anecdote, I'm not just a fan, but a DJ; a member of the media, not just a consumer. To some extent, the sensibility I'm describing is a process of identifying with the producers of the culture industry; of following the Billboard charts as if one were a record executive. It wouldn't be surprising, then, if those apt to enjoy culture in this ways are those who were educated alongside this media elite - roughly speaking, the oft-invoked "professional-managerial class." This is the point where ethnographic research would be the most useful, to see to what extent the sensibility I'm describing is linked to class, education level, gender, generation, race, and other factors.

For those of you not familiar with Hootie and the Blowfish, they're a multi-platinum rock band almost universally reviled by critics as bland, unoriginal, and just too damn successful. "Hold Your Hand," "Let Her Cry," and "I Only Wanna Be With You" are their biggest hits, about which I'll have much to say in a little while.

The reason I want to celebrate bands like Hootie and the Blowfish is that I'm wary of a move I'm sure will be common at this conference: elevating a certain group of cultural texts to the status of "high art," while denigrating all the rest of culture as junk. Now of course, at a conference on the politics of culture, I know the terms will be different: the art we approve of will be called "subversive" or "resistant" or "radical" rather than simply "beautiful"; the stuff we don't like we'll label "hegemonic" rather than simply "lousy." But I don't think these politicized labels fundamentally change the categorization process going on. Sorting culture into little piles of "good art" and "bad art" may have other putative goals, but its primary effect is to set up two groups of audiences: the "good audience" which consumes good art, and the "bad audience" that consumes junk.

This system of distinction, as Pierre Bourdieu tells us, is the aesthetic hierarchization which naturalizes a host of other forms of elitism, most basically the class structure itself. Most of the people who listen to, say, rap music are young African-Americans. Most of the people who listen to heavy metal are young and working-class. The familiar complaint that rap music is "just noise," or that all heavy metal songs sound the same, is implicitly political. It's part of a cultural hierarchy that says that what these fans listen to isn't real music, what these fans enjoy isn't real art, that these fans' tastes don't really matter. It's the most insidious part of the hierarchy, because it's so naturalized - the music just "doesn't sound good" to the outsider listener.

The politicized language of radical aesthetics, I'd argue, doesn't escape this elitism. That, in fact, is exactly why radical art is so easily assimilated into the high culture canon - because it doesn't fundamentally challenge the existence of high art as such. In the world of music, what happens is that political claims become justification for extensive border-policing. Debates over who's in and who's out - in rock'n'roll terms, who's authentic and who's a sell-out - quickly overwhelm the ostensible ideals behind the distinctions. Fans of indie-label bands may claim that their distaste for major label artists is a political critique of hegemonic culture. But the nasty, personal tone of the way, say, a Fugazi fan mocks those saps who listen to Pearl Jam, suggests that what really going on is just another form of snobbery. Or, for a more historical example, take another look at the astonishingly ignorant and arrogant way that Adorno writes about what he thinks is "Jazz."

While being critical of this sort of avant-garde elitism, I'm not convinced that most academic attempts to celebrate the resistant qualities of mass culture escape this dynamic of distinction, either. The typical Cultural Studies approach to rethinking the politics of mass culture is to pluck out a particular artist, such as Madonna, and discover the ways in which her music, rather than simply reinscribing hegemony, is profoundly subversive. But all this does is redraw the canon one more time, now with sufficiently "subversive" mass artists on one side, and all the rest of pop culture still on the other.

Actually, what's happened is that this gesture - identifying the subversive artist within the mainstream - has recurred so many times that resistance seems to be everywhere you look, causing many to question just how resistant such ubiquitous subversion can really be. Everything can't be resistant, after all, or hegemony wouldn't have much to go on.

Or can it? I think both sides here miss the point. Resistance, I'd argue, isn't a quality of specific cultural texts: it's a subtext in any cultural text, the residue of the cultural contradictions of capitalism. Crack open any piece of cultural expression, and you'll discover the subterranean dreams and desires within. No wonder you can find resistance anywhere you look; every audience demand a least a dollop of utopia to go along with its reification. It may bubble up to the surface more quickly in Madonna than in, say, Debbie Gibson, but it's in there, too.

The mistake, then, is to look for resistance piecemeal, in specific subversive texts which are then assimilated into a new canon of politically useful art. Rather, the pressing critical task is to understand and appreciate the patterns of resistance all around us - not just in the exceptional artists, but the everyday artists. Not just the Madonnas, but the Debbie Gibsons, the Hootie and the Blowfish.

This isn't just a political task. It's an aesthetic one. Because recognizing the resistance in art means recognizing what's compelling about that art. That means learning how to appreciate it; learning to enjoy it. It's when discover you love a song that you realize how much more there is to it than the rest of the world sees.

So I think the most compelling critical project of Cultural Studies isn't to sort out what counts as subversive and what doesn't - to replicate the process of distinction all over again, with an ostensibly politicized aesthetic - but rather to break down distinctions altogether. In the place of these value judgements, I want to argue for an inclusive, radically democratic aesthetic - one which recognizes that every cultural text has power for its audience, and that the critic's failure to recognize that power is the failure of the critic, not the text or the audience.

I should acknowledge how tricky this can be. Simon Frith, in his new book Performing Rites, suggests that it's impossible to escape the process of distinction; arguing over value, he insists, is at the root of the pleasure we get out of being fans. My fantasy of transcending those debates, of embracing everything, then, is just an academic pose; back in the real world, I continue to like some songs more than others, some bands more than others. I continue to sort the culture I engage into those piles of "art" and "junk."

And I have to admit, he's basically right. I can't pretend that, for example, the current radio hit "Counting Blue Cars," by Dishwalla, doesn't set my teeth on edge every time I hear it. And I'd be loathe to give up the pleasure of mocking the song every time it does come on the radio.

The simplest way out of this bind is to argue that yes, there are distinctions to be made, but only from within genres. Every genre has its own standards of excellence. Judging a specific band's ability to meet those standards, then, is not an attack on the fans of that genre, but only on that particular band's failure to do what it set out to do.

But I should admit that even this compromise leaves me uneasy. Even the bands that, by my judgement, fail to meet their genres' standards have some fans, after all. What makes their tastes invalid? I'm not proud of myself for hating Dishwalla. I'd rather learn to love Dishwalla. In fact, I have to admit, sometimes I find myself humming along distractedly to a tune in the car, and suddenly realize, hey, I've been singing along to Dishwalla! So I guess I'd like to propose, at least as a utopian goal, a world where we can all love Dishwalla, without prejudice.

With a recognition of the difficulties of this radically democratic aesthetic in mind, then, let me get back to my main point: That Cultural Studies' primary project be not to categorize art as "resistant" or "hegemonic," but rather to upend distinctions altogether - to puncture audiences' prejudices, and teach them how to enjoy new texts.

Actually, that's what the best Cultural Studies work does already. The flip side to the Madonna Studies angle is Cultural Studies' ethnographic approach to genre. Here, the prototypical strategy is to take a genre that many dismiss as shallow, lightweight, uninteresting - the romance novel, or heavy metal - and demonstrate the incredible resonance and complexity that this genre holds for its fans. To use another term from the avant-garde, it's a strategy of defamiliarization - the response is, "I thought I knew what romance novels were, but suddenly, I realize much more is going on than I'd noticed."

Now, so far I've been using examples like romance, heavy metal, and rap music to describe the virtues of a radically democratic aesthetic. There's a more obvious political justification to appreciating the complexities of these texts, because their primary audiences are subaltern. It's less simple to justify this approach to Hootie and the Blowfish, who have been mocked by critics as "the ultimate frat guy band."

The archetypal Hootie fan is an ESPN-watching, beer-drinking, backward-baseball-cap wearing straight young white man. It's claimed that Hootie's music is a trite, cheerful, unthreatening soundtrack for these frat guys' lives - they may have gone along with the more putatively "alternative" grunge trend of the early 1990s exemplified by bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but are now relieved to enjoy the less challenging, familiar rock sound of Hootie.

So why bother to appreciate, and attempt to empathize, with these tastes? Well, first of all, because a democratic aesthetic means opening oneself up to all music experiences, even those of comfortable white kids. The music of comfortable white kids, in fact, can be seen as a litmus test for whether this aesthetic can really be as expansive as I want it to be. I should also point out that this stereotype of the Hootie fan is somewhat exaggerated; Hootie's music isn't quite as white - or as straight - as presumed.

And most basically, I think there's a political use to appreciating Hootie for the sake of better understanding straight white frat guys. The structures of domination which enmesh us all - patriarchy, racism, capitalism - limits the possibilities of happiness for straight white guys, too, and in their art, we likewise find resistant, utopian impulses, dreams of a way out of the straightjackets of masculinity, whiteness, and middle-class life. A radical democratic politics seeks to make common cause with all who struggle under hegemony, even frat guys. Learning to love Hootie and the Blowfish is a way to understand those dreams, a way into what I'll call the "frat guy unconscious."

Let me first describe the band's appeal on the most explicit level. Hootie appeals to frat guys with easily accessible music, the warm vocal tones of lead singer Darius Rucker, and an image that plays up the band's everyday-guyness. Their first video featured them performing in the living room of what very well could have been a frat house; a later video, after their big breakthrough, showed them acting out their fantasy of appearing on ESPN Sportscenter. In interviews, they're modest and friendly; they continue to dress in sweatshirts, jeans, and baseball caps.

Pop music songcraft is often said to be about including the telling detail, the simple image that provides a quick picture of an entire way of life. For Hootie, that image is sitting on a couch with a beer. Not one but two references to sitting show up in "Let Her Cry," my favorite Hootie song; one couplet goes, "She went to the back to get high/ I sat down on my couch and cried"; a later continues, "So I sat right down and had a beer and felt sorry for myself." In the vibrant world of rock'n'roll, I can't think of any other song as sedentary as "Let Her Cry." Given the lifestyle of a graduate student, it's no wonder I have little trouble identifying.

As the sadness in the lyrics I quoted suggests, Hootie's music isn't just about the everyday life of frat guys; it's specifically about the emotional life of frat guys, the emotional undercurrents that are the hardest for frat guys to vocalize. It's no surprise that Hootie's primary influence outside of traditional rock'n'roll is country; their songs often have a kind of "tear in my beer" sentimentalism, in which music opens up a safe space for masculinity to admit deep emotion. But actually, Hootie's songs have less bluster than most country songs; they're more dazed, befuddled. In the sweetness and vulnerability of the men in Hootie's songs, the band recalls the "sensitive doormat" songs of 1970s soul artists like the Chi-Lites. "Let Her Cry" is typical. It starts out as if were somewhat condescending to the girlfriend, in the tradition of that song that goes, "Let her cry/ Cause she's a lady/ Let her laugh/ Cause she's a child." But Hootie's show at pity turns out to just be a way to cover his own pain; by the time Rucker gets to that killer couplet I quoted before, "She went into the back to get high/ I sat down on my couch and cried," it's clear who's really doing most of the crying.

Actually, lead singer Darius Rucker claims he wrote "Let Her Cry" about a relationship in which he was the jerk, then reversed the genders. I'm not sure whether to believe him, but the gender instability in that anecdote shows in the song. The chorus goes "Let her cry/ Let her tears fall down like rain." But since it's the male singer does all of the crying in the verses of the song, the chorus seems to be about him, too, despite the female pronoun.

The gender instability of "Let Her Cry" gets closer to queer in the video for the band's subsequent single, "Only Wanna Be With You." Putatively a male-female love song, the video dramatizes its lyrics exclusively with episodes of male bonding. (This is the one where they pretend they're on SportsCenter.) The highlight is a section in which Rucker and his lead guitarist sing a few lines in duet; halfway through, the guitarist impetuously kisses Rucker on the cheek.

I guess I should mention around this point the name of Hootie's breakthrough album, Cracked Rear View, and their follup-up record, Fairweather Johnson. For such a putatively straight band, Hootie can seem awfully campy at times.

The queer subtext of Hootie's music is even more interesting given the racial composition of the band. Rucker is black; everyone else in the band is white. Most critics have commented on this mix by making nasty remarks about how Hootie proves that rock'n'roll has reached a level of racial equality where now a black man can become a star making whitebread music. But the racial composition of Hootie can't just be dismissed. First of all, it underestimates just how rare racially integrated rock bands have been. Often, a predominantly white band may include a black side musician or two - Clarence Clemons in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, for example. And in the '70s, several funk-rock bands, such as Sly and the Family Stone, included both blacks and whites. But funk is recognized as a predominantly black subgenre of rock'n'roll. Only rarely has a mainstream, middle-of-the-road rock band been led by a black man: The Jimi Hendrix Experience is the only one to ever reach Hootie's level of prominence.

Hootie's first single from their breakthrough album, "Hold My Hand," is an implicit acknowledgement of that status. It's the kind of "everybody get together/ try and love your brother right now" song that Nirvana parodied on Nevermind.But coming from a racially integrated band, it was just a little more than a cliché.

Returning now to "Only Wanna Be With You," it becomes clearer, I think, what the subtext is which gives "Hold My Hand" its resonance; the homoerotics of black and white men making music together. That kiss in "Only Wanna Be With You" has long lineage in American cultural history, from Bruce Springsteen kissing Clarence Clemons onstage to Queeqeg and Ishmael sleeping together: it's the dynamic of interracial male desire Leslie Fiedler identified in "C'mon Back to the Raft, Huck Honey."

As in the novels analysed by Fiedler, what's going on in "Only Wanna Be With You" is a fantasy of boundary-crossing - across race, across sexualities. It's the attempt to imagine a utopian national space in which everyone can hold everyone else's hand, in which each of us can fully and without reservation "try and love your brother right now." This is a compelling fantasy. It's an inspiring fantasy. It suggests that there's something in the frat guy unconscious, something at the heart of mass culture, something in Hootie and the Blowfish, worth appreciating, worth appealing to, worth loving.

Ted Friedman Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15:3 (September, 1998).

Introduction

The Newseum, “the world’s only interactive museum of news,” opened its doors in Arlington, Virginia in April of 1997. Combining historical exhibits, high-tech spectacle, and the manic ambiance of a busy shopping mall, the Newseum is state-of-the-art “edutainment.” Built at a cost of $50 million (Freedom Forum, 1998b), the Newseum is free to the public. It’s the project of the Freedom Forum, a nonprofit foundation with close ties to the Gannett Company, one of America’s largest media corporations.

In an era when, according to one survey, “two out of three members of the public [have] nothing or nothing good to say about the media” (Times Mirror Center for People and the Press, 1995)(1), the Newseum aims to spruce up the image of journalism. As founder Al Neuharth puts it, “By taking visitors behind the scenes, we hope to forge a deeper understanding of the role of news and a free press in our lives” (Freedom Forum Online, 1998). What exactly that role is supposed to be, however, is a tricky question to answer, and the frenzy with which the Newseum assaults the visitor attests to the ongoing legitimation crisis in American journalism.

The professional status and public authority of contemporary American journalism is grounded in the doctrine of “objectivity.” Objectivity insists that facts can be separated from values, and that the proper role of the media is to sort, verify, and deliver those “unbiased” facts to readers. A critical function of the ideology of objectivity is to render invisible the press’s power to shape and reinforce public opinion and cultural standards. Objectivity asks us to think of the media not as an independent influence on American life, but only the transparent transmitter of already-existing information. As with baseball umpires, you shouldn’t notice reporters as long as they’re doing their jobs right. As Michael Schudson (1995) has pointed out, this accounts for the invisibility of journalism in conventional American historiography.(2) Most narratives of American history assume the role of the news is simply to transmit information; the real historical actors are supposed to be the subjects about whom reporters write.

This helps explain why the United States has never has a major press museum before the opening of the Newseum. It’d be like an umpires’ museum - what would you show besides the mistakes? But it’s not hard to see why the Freedom Forum concluded a press museum is now needed to bolster journalism’s sagging cultural capital. At this point in our information-saturated age, ignoring the media is like ignoring the elephant in your living room. The very success which has made the media so ubiquitous - and financially lucrative - has eroded its claims to professional authority. It’s no longer credible to treat the press as simply an invisible messenger. Postmodern culture trains viewers to notice the medium as well as the message. Take, for example, the celebritization of network news. The high profile of superstar newscasters like Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer has made them more marketable, but at the same time less credible as “objective” reporters who can be relied upon to subordinate their individual opinions to a depersonalizing professional method. It’s no wonder, then, that the fantasy of objectivity is under siege from all sides, as the press is regularly accused of “bias” from both the left and the right. The legitimizing narrative of journalism is breaking down. Viewers may still watch, read, and listen to the news, but they respect it less (McAneny & Saad, 1997; Fallows, 1996).

In the face of this predicament, any relegitimation project has two options: to refurbish objectivity so that it can stand the scrutiny of a media-savvy public, or to move beyond objectivity altogether. The Newseum attempts both strategies.

The Newseum’s version of objectivity gives up on the ideal of invisibility, acknowledging that the press is a large, influential institution in American life. Rather than mystifying the press by hiding its work, it mythologizes the press by turning reporters into heroic freedom fighters (Reese, 1997). That’s still kosher under the values of objectivity, because the process of transmission remains transparent and “value-free.” What’s heroic is the act of transmission itself. There’s a contradiction to this fantasy of heroic objectivity, though. Systems of objectivity are designed to subordinate individual autonomy to depersonalizing professional technique, in order to guarantee standardized, reproducible results. The Newseum attempts to gloss over this problem by highlighting the achievements of exceptional figures such as Woodward and Bernstein. But, as we shall see, when the Newseum’s focus shifts from mythic history to the ordinary experiences of everyday reporters, the contradictions in the heroic model of objectivity begin to seep through.

In the age of satellites and the Internet, of course, the mechanics of transmission are changing rapidly. The proliferation of instant, globally accessible news sources, in fact, offers the utopian promise of a way out of the compromises of objectivity. As the cramped column space of the newspaper is replaced by the unlimited bandwidth of the World Wide Web, perhaps univocal objectivity can give way to a polyphonous public sphere. Rather than journalists sorting through information to cull kernels of fact, viewers and readers could become empowered to more directly engage and assess information. As the Newseum struggles to transcend the constraints of objectivity, it offers occasional glimpses of this vision of a free, unmediated flow of information, what it calls “the news stream.” But, we will discover, this utopian vision runs into its own problems.

The Newseum is a dazzling, disorienting, and self-contradicting institution. What lends this confusion a modicum of coherence is the narrative imposed by the building’s design. Visitors can’t simply wander from room to room, as in a traditional museum. Instead, new arrivals are quickly deposited on the top floor of the museum, and must follow a single path weaving through each exhibit in order to get back to the entrance. The path is roughly chronological: after an introductory video, the tour begins with the News History Gallery, representing journalism’s past. From there, it’s on to the Video News Wall, which captures the immediate present with live feeds from an array of all-news channels. Finally, you end up in the futuristic Interactive Newsroom, a riot of multimedia computers and participatory activities. The chronological development of the Newseum roughly coincides with its ideological development, as well: while the early sections lay out the model of heroic objectivity, the high-tech exhibits move on to the utopian vision of the news stream. To capture the experience of stumbling through the Newseum, this essay will follow the building’s structure, walking through each exhibit in order. The Newseum is jam-packed with information, so this analysis will be far from complete. But I’ll try to hit all the highlights.

The Freedom Forum and the Gannett Company

Before beginning our walkthrough, a little more background is in order. The Newseum’s sponsor, the Freedom Forum, is a nonprofit foundation “dedicated to a free press, free speech, and free spirit for all people” (Freedom Forum, 1998a). Formerly the Gannett Foundation, the Freedom Forum is now an independent organization, but close ties remain. The Forum and the Newseum were founded by Al Neuharth, inventor of Gannett’s USA Today, and the Newseum’s directors are all Gannett veterans. The Newseum building itself sits just across the street from the twin towers housing the offices of Gannett and USA Today.(3)

In addition to USA Today, Gannett runs a chain of over 90 daily newspapers, 20 television stations, and assorted other multimedia properties throughout the United States (Hoover’s Online, 1998). In a time when, out of the approximately 1700 newspapers in the U.S., 1600 operate without direct competition from another paper (Motley Fool, 1997), Gannett’s predatory business practices have clearly contributed to the demise of the multi-paper town. A favored Gannett strategy is to buy one newspaper in a two-paper market, then use its deep pockets and leverage with advertisers to drive the smaller paper out of business (McCord, 1996).

The Freedom Forum, unsurprisingly, takes a sunnier view toward media monopoly. As we shall see, the rhetoric of the news stream suggests that American information sources have never been more diverse. A display in the news gallery titled “TV giants go global” more precisely explains, “Critics fear conglomerates will boost profits by cutting news quality or using their news outlets to promote their other businesses. Executives say the size of their corporations helps them stand up to governments that would control news.” Left unasked is the question of who will be able to stand up to the corporations, especially in a one-paper town. In addition, the global scope of media corporations may in fact have the opposite effect on their international coverage, encouraging them to avoid criticism of any country in which they may wish to do business. The seems to be the case in several recent controversies over Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp’s coverage of China.(4)

A second controversial aspect of the Gannett Company is its labor practices. Employees at the Detroit News, alongside workers for Knight-Ridder’s Detroit Free Press, recently ended a bitter 19-month strike, although litigation continues. Recent court rulings have blamed Gannett and Knight-Ridder for provoking the strike through unfair labor practices (AP, 1997a). Inside the Newseum, coverage of the tumultuous history of labor relations in the news industry is almost entirely absent. The technologies of news reproduction are proudly displayed, but the workers behind these processes - pressmen, delivery drivers, fiber-optic cable layers - are made invisible. At the opening of the Newseum, however, labor made itself visible, as Teamsters picketed the building, chanting “Sanitized! Anesthetized! Homogenized!” (Featherstone, 1998) The literature they passed out questioned the lack of media coverage of the Detroit strike, asking, “Does Gannett Buy Silence?” (Featherstone, 1998) Their questions, perhaps, were answered the next day: almost all coverage of the Newseum’s opening ignored the protests.(5)

Entering

With a sense of the museum’s institutional context, then, let’s now look more closely at the site itself. Somewhat like the Gannett Corporation itself, the Newseum is an amorphous entity, difficult to cognitively map. From the outside, its principal recognizable feature is a white dome, titled at an angle to suggest an astronomically accurate globe. But the globe does not actually enclose the entire museum, only a giant-screen high-definition TV theater. The bulk of the Newseum actually spills over into the lower floors of an adjacent 18-story office building, which dwarfs the four-story high globe. While the Newseum’s exterior looks pretty impressive in promotional close-ups, in person it seems awkwardly shoehorned into the corporate neighborhood.

The globe motif continues inside the Newseum. From the entrance lobby, you catch your first glimpse of the News Globe, a giant mesh sphere made up of the interconnected logos of 1,841 newspapers from around the world. A globe, of course, is a traditional newspaper icon, from the Boston Globe to Superman’s fictional Daily Planet. The twist in the News Globe is that it’s a patchwork of many papers; rather than suggesting that one single paper “covers the globe,” it represents the decentered, worldwide process of newsgathering - an early hint of the ideal of the news stream. The internationalist message is echoed along the back wall of the lobby’s information desk, where the word “news” is translated into over 50 languages. As we shall see, however, this internationalism is whittled down in scope as the visitor walks through the Newseum.

Behind the information desk sits the News Bytes Cafe, a “cybercafe” and snack shop serving a limited menu of coffee, hot dogs, and Web sites. The six available computers are installed with custom browsers linking the user to “selected news sites on the World Wide Web.” The custom Freedom Forum mousepads carry the foundation’s slogan, “Free Press, Free Speech, Free Spirit.” The surfing experience, however, tells a different story. Not only is no keyboard available to enter web addresses, but all sites beyond the sanctioned news areas are disabled, so that you can’t click on hyperlinks to explore futher information on other web sites. Presumably, the Newseum is afraid of randy visitors browsing pornographic sites, but the irony is telling. Throughout the Newseum, the cry of “Freedom” is a constant refrain, the value in the name of which journalists so heroically struggle. But the museum’s definition of “freedom” is strictly circumscribed to mean “freedom from government control of the press.” Broader understandings of freedom - such as concern over the ability of powerful non-governmental institutions to restrict access to information - are beyond the purview of the Newseum.

“What’s News?”

From the first floor lobby, escalators lead up to the Newseum’s second level. Guides encourage visitors to begin their trip with a visit to the HDTV theater. The introductory videos play every 20 minutes; between showings, visitors can browse in the adjacent Newseum store. The theater is the interior side of the giant globe. The design is similar to that of the many IMAX theaters that have become popular tourist spots in recent years, and as at IMAX theaters, the film is designed to highlight the spectacle made possible with this cutting-edge technology.

As the film designed to introduce visitors to the Newseum, you might expect “What’s News” to summarize the history of journalism, or perhaps to introduce the basics of “the five Ws.” The video, however, takes a much more impressionistic approach, using a montage of news footage arrayed in various split-screen combinations to illustrate “timeless” news subjects. These include Firsts, War, Peace, Breakthroughs, Life, Death, Love, Hate, Sacrifice, and Freedom. Death, for example, is illustrated by snippets of JFK and Martin Luther King; Hate, by Hitler and the KKK. As Stephen D. Reese (1997) notes, “the film depicts news as part of the never-ending cycles of war and peace, love and hate, life and death. By inviting the viewer to regard news within a context of natural cycles, news becomes an organically necessary and unproblematic feature of society - as natural as life and death and the basis for all else (p. 17).(6)

The final two categories are particularly significant. When the narrator gets to “Sacrifice,” a subtle shift occurs. From news topics, the focus changes to news gathering. The subjects of the “sacrifice” section are not heroic figures in general, but specifically journalists who risk their lives to bring you all the images the video’s been displaying. This emphasis on the courage of journalists is a pervasive theme at the Newseum, reiterated most forcefully at Freedom Journalists’ Memorial in Freedom Park, which honors journalists who have died in the line of duty, listing each reporter’s name in the style of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial. What is it that these journalists have sacrificed for? “Freedom,” the final category of “What’s News,” symbolized by a giant image of the Statue of Liberty.

The video isn’t exactly “objective” in the traditional sense, as images are arranged to serve a message of uplift rather than to provide value-free information. But the video gets away with its proselytizing, because the virtue it ultimately celebrates, “freedom,” is presented less as an independent value than as the necessary condition to make value-free reporting possible. Freedom, then, is a kind of meta-value, and can be celebrated without compromising journalistic objectivity. But the Newseum vision of freedom is not as independent from other values and judgments as “What’s News?” implies. Freedom can be defined in more than one way - and, as we have seen, the Newseum’s definition distinctly constricts the notion of freedom. It’s also no accident that “What’s News?” ends with the image of the Statue of Liberty, identifying freedom not just as a universal value, but as a distinctly American one. This nationalistic undercurrent runs beneath the internationalist rhetoric of the Newseum, suggesting that while the news may be global, America deserves pride of place as first among equals.(7)

The News Gallery

The HDTV Theater deposits exiting visitors on Level III, the top floor of the Newseum. Here begins the News Gallery, a collection of artifacts and exhibits documenting the history of news. At the entrance to the gallery appears this introduction: “News, ancient and universal, fills a basic human need: the need to know.” Following this universalist dictum, the gallery emphasizes the continuity between early information-gathering practices and what we know as “news” today. Customs as diverse as drumming, smoke signaling, and griot storytelling are all collapsed into a single, uniform process: “Around campfires, our earliest ancestors trade stories. At ancient crossroads, they spread the word. News - spoken, sounded, written, printed - helps early societies grow into civilizations.”

Of particular interest are a series of displays in which, as the Newseum puts it, “a timeless question is posed for each era designed to challenge visitors to examine current news issues in a historical framework” (Freedom Forum, 1998c). In the 1920s section, for example, the story of a reporter who snuck a camera into an execution to photograph the moment of electrification is presented under the heading, “Do tabloids go too far?” The problem with this approach is that it breaks the first rule of historiography: it judges the past by the standards of the present, rather than attempting to understand the past on its own terms. While the questions themselves are admirably probing - “Is seeing believing?” “Whose news is it?” and so on - their critical edge is dulled by the simplistic equation of the past with the present.

This ahistoricism is particularly egregious in early displays: under the heading “What Makes News?,” 15th Century accounts of Columbus’s voyage are used to explain what makes a contemporary story newsworthy. The “newsbooks” of the era, the display claims, “carry the same news we see today: war, crime, and lives of the royally famous.” This universalizing, essentialist definition of news - this assumption that there is some Platonic form of “news” which remains unchanging in any social formation - elides the radical differences between contemporary news media and earlier forms of information distribution. In its effort to shape 15th Century practices into 20th Century norms, the Columbus display downplays the information that what the newsbooks contained were not independent accounts of events, but reprints of Columbus’s own letters (Stephens, 1997). Journalism simply hadn’t been invented yet.

In fact, as Schudson (1995) convincingly argues, the very category of “news” as Americans know it today did not exist until it was invented by the penny press in the 1830s. Before then, “newspapers” operated under very different assumptions of purpose and audience. Schudson gives compelling examples of how alien to our sensibilities earlier standards of “news” seem:

The first paper to last any length of time in America was the Boston NewsLetter published by John Campbell. Campbell … had a sense of his project quite different from our own sense of news. He saw his task as the recording of recent history. He wanted to keep his reports in chronological order, but because of little space and occasional suspension of publication, he could not print all the news he received from London. He got further and further behind. By 1718 he was printing news that was a year old, and he began to print more frequently to make up for this. The idea of skipping to the most recent events did not occur to him. Nor, certainly, did he think to focus on local, rather than London, news (Schudson, 1995, p. 45).

Another early paper, Samuel Keimer’s Pennsylvania Gazette, planned to print serially Ephraim Chapber’s Cyclopaedia, from A to Z. When Ben Franklin bought it a year into the project, it was still on the A’s (Schudson, 1995). The Newseum’s essentialism robs the past of this kind of strangeness and specificity, making every historical era a simple precursor to our own.

Essentialism does have its pedagogic advantages. Fitting unfamiliar forms to a common template encourages visitors to make the imaginative leap of picturing themselves in another era. But more significantly, essentialism is a powerful legitimizing strategy, casting the contemporary news media as the logical culmination and rightful inheritor of a rich historical legacy.

The history of information-gathering, however, is too unruly to easily fit into such a neatly teleological narrative. And so, the News Gallery does contain moments of contradiction. Occasionally, the question displays serve to highlight the differences rather than the continuities between past and present. A display on the press during the American Revolution, for example, asks “Should journalists take sides?” The text explains, “Patriot journalists don’t tell both sides of the story. They tell one side - their side. They are not ‘objective’ journalists. They are revolutionaries.” In this case, the historical example effectively uses the difference of the past to interrogate the present; if advocacy journalism was good enough for the American Revolutionaries, maybe it still has something to offer. The text quickly reincorporates this implicit critique of objectivity into its teleological narrative, however. Advocacy journalism is destined to move off the front pages on to more appropriate forums: “This mix of news and opinion … will eventually find its way into editorial pages, talk radio and the Internet.” This language loads the display’s original question, “Should journalists take sides?” by assuming that “news” and “opinion” are independent, separable qualities. Left unasked is the question, “Is it possible for journalists not to take sides?”

Other contradictions rise to the surface as the gallery nears the present. For the most part, the gallery follows a familiar narrative, what has been dubbed “the Whig theory of the history of technology” (Segal, 1994; Staudenmaier, 1985; Kranzberg, 1990), which automatically equates technological progress with social progress. The gallery comfortably treats each technological advance, from papyrus to the printing press to the linotype, as another blow for freedom. But when we reach the age of television, a note of anxiety creeps into the triumphal rhetoric. A display on news in the 1960s defensively asks, “Is TV really superficial?” Within the framework of heroic objectivity, the News Gallery can only answer with a qualified no. While the text below the question explains how “moving pictures add drama [and] impact,” it also warns us, “Even top anchor Walter Cronkite advises viewers to read newspapers.” This isn’t surprising advice from a media corporation that owns even more newspapers than TV stations. But it does suggest the difficulty of fitting television into a comfortable narrative of progress. The values of objectivity - even heroic objectivity - are rooted in a model which takes the newspaper as the archetypal news form. It is print’s anonymity and distance from the events it describes which allows it to transform raw data into “objective” information. Image-oriented journalists can mimic the codes of objectivity, but their ability to directly record information narrows the opportunity for critical distance. The Newseum’s way out of this problem, we shall see, is to move beyond the print-oriented standard of objectivity, to an ideal that celebrates the immediacy of unmediated information.

The News Video Wall

The News Gallery questions end on a note of exhaustion, asking of the information-rich 1990s, “Is it all too much?” While the text below seems hard pressed for a reassuring answer, around the corner, the next section of the Newseum responds in a giddy affirmative, in the form of the cacophonous, colossal News Video Wall, a 126-foot row of nine giant television screens tuned to an array of news channels. A caption on a side wall explains the ideal behind the display in rhapsodic postmodern language:

Every few seconds, millions of words, sounds and images flash around the globe. This is the news stream, the endless flow of fresh data, events, issues and ideas, that give us our picture of the world. In the digital age, the news stream is growing beyond measure. News comes faster, from all directions. The video news wall lets you look into the news steam to see today’s news as it happens.

The wall is the Newseum’s technological centerpiece, a vision of the public sphere as panopticon, in which all the world seems to be at your fingertips. Al Gore, speaking at the Newseum’s unveiling, remarked, “I feel like I’m standing on the captain’s deck of the Starship Enterprise” (AP, 1997b), but the wall even more closely resembles that quintessential fantasy of high-tech surveillance, the villain’s lair in a James Bond movie. The difference here is that the video news wall promises that everyone (or at least everyone with cable) can share Goldfinger’s privileged vantage point, viewing all the important events of the world, unmediated, as they happen.

I should clarify that the Newseum does not explicitly distinguish this ideal of the news stream from traditional objectivity. The wall’s caption suggests there has always been a “news stream”; the difference in the digital age is only one of degree. The very metaphor of a news stream, in fact, naturalizes the historical and contingent processes of information delivery. But it’s important to emphasize how different this vision of the news is from the traditional ideal of objectivity. Objectivity is univocal: it delegates to media institutions the job of sifting through myriad and conflicting sources of information to develop a single version of the truth. The ideal of the news stream, however, suggests that the greater bandwidth of new information technologies can allow the media to simply deliver unmediated information, and let the viewer sort through it all by flipping channels - or even watching them simultaneously, on the video news wall.

Of course, what the video news wall offers is only the fantasy of total surveillance. What’s actually striking, on observation, is how similar the channels are. On the day I was watching, the channels on display included Fox News, CNBC, C-SPAN, MSNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, the All-News Network, Telenoticias, and a German news channel. Out of nine channels, seven were English-language American networks, and those seven were the products of only four different media companies. During my visit in February of 1998, the Lewinsky scandal was in full swing, and dominated coverage on the majority of the channels. The perspectives among the channels didn’t vary much, either: each channel displayed the familiar cast of pundits and spokespersons, repeating the same information and analysis.

The vision of a news stream clashes with journalism’s continuing standards of objectivity. Because each individual network continues to strive for “balance,” they all end up looking much the same. As Bruce Springsteen (1992) put it, there’s 57 channels and there’s nothing on. Rather than a truly polyphonous public sphere, the Video Wall is an exercise in overdetermination. In its claim to survey the whole world, it effaces the choices which so drastically limit its scope. Nonetheless, the vision of a news stream does offer the utopian hope of a way out of the traps of objectivity. Staring at the news wall, you can imagine a future in which news institutions, freed from the responsibility of having the first, last, and only word on every subject, might specialize and diversify, and viewers really could be provided with a truly broad range of information sources.

The Interactive Newsroom

At the ends of the walkway across from the Video Wall, stairs lead down to the final section of the Newseum, the Interactive Newsroom. “Interactivity” entails two kinds of activities at the Newseum. Touchscreen computer systems allow visitors to make choices and observe the outcomes. And hands-on activities allow visitors to record newscasts and weather reports in front of studio-quality blue screens, then watch themselves just like they were really on broadcast TV.

As with many “interactive” computer games, the problem with these activities is the narrow range of options they provide.(8) At the “Interview a journalist” kiosk, for example, at which figures such as Ben Bradlee and Linda Ellerbee answer questions about their work, you can’t just formulate any question you want; you have to choose from the limited menu of questions for which answers have been recorded. Likewise, the “Be a reporter” and “Be an editor” adventures provide only a limited set of possible forking paths. The non-computer activities are even more constrained. Playing the role of TV newscaster means simply sitting in front of the camera and reading from the tele-prompter. There’s no room for improvisation, let alone reporting. Even the “Be a sportscaster” activity, in which you can announce historic sports events, discourages off-the-cuff improvisation by providing a play-by-play script.

These constraints on the role-player’s freedom to act strike an odd note after the mythologizing of “What’s News?” The heroic journalist, of course, is supposed to be “objective,” yet at the same time individualistic, showing personal initiative and courage in the pursuit of the story. But in a funny way, the limited choices available to mock-journalists in the interactive activities are ironically appropriate. The technical limits to your range of action in “Be a reporter” parallel the institutional framework which constrains actual reporters’ autonomy. And requiring mock-newscasters to read from a teleprompter is much more realistic than the more typical pretense that anchors actually write their own lines.

The weirdest part, then, is that most visitors don’t seem to mind being turned into talking heads. The interactive section is the most popular part of the Newseum. Friends flock to watch each others’ performances. The floor has the giddy feel of a karaoke bar; even strangers laugh and comment on each reporter’s delivery. After the somber moralism of “What’s News,” the crushing teleology of the news gallery, and the daunting technology of the video news wall, the more limited pretense of the interactive newsroom is oddly reassuring, cutting the grand claims of the Newseum down to size. Journalists aren’t always freedom fighters, or voices of the future. Sometimes, they’re just entertainers.

Footnotes

1. For another perspective on “Why We Hate the Media,” see Fallows, 1996. Surprisingly, in the annual Gallup survey (McAneny & Saad, 1997) in which respondents rate 26 professions for “honesty and ethical standards,” journalists, TV reporters and commentators, and newspaper reporters (the three groups are treated as separate occupations) all come out in the middle, below pharmacists and clergy but (slightly) above politicians and lawyers, and comfortably ahead of used-car salesmen. This to some extent demonstrates the more general erosion of American faith in professions and institutions. The numbers do show a significant drop-off from 1976, when Gallup began the survey. In 1976, 33 percent of Americans judged journalists to be of very high or high integrity; by 1997, the number was down to 23 percent.

2. I should point out that I am lumping together here the notion of objectivity with what Schudson, following James Carey (1988), calls the “transmission” model of communication. Although Schudson does not explicitly make the point, I am arguing here that the assumptions of the transmission model are critical to the ideology of objectivity, and that, conversely, the rival “ritual” model, which looks at the role of communication as “the symbolic production of reality” (Carey, 1988), is an implicit critique of the ideal of journalistic objectivity. In my view, Schudson understates the ideological function of objectivity. Objectivity is not simply a method for systematically processing information, but a strategy for effacing the social functions of news and mystifying the role of capital. (For examples of this more Marxist critique of objectivity, see Gans, 1979; Hartley, 1982.) I should also acknowledge that Schudson elsewhere (1978) distinguishes the 20th Century ideology of objectivity from 19th Century “naive realism.” The ideal of objectivity, Schudson argues, was formulated as a self-conscious reaction to an increasing sense of relativism, not out of a naive faith in “the facts.” While Schudson is no doubt correct in ascribing this sophisticated epistemological position to the originators of the notion of objectivity, I would argue that in practice today the distinction between objectivity and “naive realism” is often blurry. If anything, the Newseum’s move from heroic objectivity to the news stream is a return to a kind of naive realism; it responds to our even more relativistic times not by promoting an even more rigorous system for weighing competing versions of reality, but by imagining that a technological fix will make objectivity unnecessary by facilitating the unmediated flow of information.

3. USA Today, of course, has been heavily criticized since its debut in 1982. Its light coverage of international affairs, emphasis on celebrities, and preference for bite-sided “factoids” over lengthier analysis has been criticized as “fast-food journalism,” and earned it the sobriquet “McPaper” (see Prichard, 1987). In recent years, however, its journalistic reputation has improved, though perhaps only in comparison to the declining fortunes of newspapers elsewhere. As journalist David Remnick puts it,

USA Today no longer seems as shocking or ridiculous [as it did ten years ago]. It is true, the paper has gotten a little better, a little more attentive to the news, but what makes it seem almost stately is that so many big-city papers have declined so quickly. Papers form Miami to San Francisco have willfully eroded in a mad scramble to please the stockholder; in their attempts to be more “user friendly,” they betrayed themselves and the readers. There are precious few cities now where USA Today is not the best paper in town. God help us (Remnick, 1997).

1. In February of 1998, News Corp “dropped plans to publish a book by Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, because of complaints from the company’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, that it took too negative a view of China. Murdoch … has extensive holdings in China and ambitious plans to expand them.” (Hodge, 1998a). The incident appears to be part of a larger pattern. In 1994, “to avoid irritating the Chinese Government, [Murdoch] removed the BBC news service from his Hong Kong-based satellite system, Star TV, after Beijing protested its documentaries on China and its coverage of Chinese dissidents” (Hodge, 1998a). And the former East Asia editor of Murdoch’s Times of London, Jonathan Minsky, stated in a speech in January of 1998, “The Times has simply decided, because of Murdoch’s interests, not to cover China in a serious way” (Hodge, 1998b). 5. Out of the many pieces on the opening of the Newseum I surveyed, only a review in the online magazine Salon (Featherstone, 1998) mentioned the protest.

2. Reese’s analysis of the Newseum in many ways parallels my own. But while Reese emphasizes the seamlessness of the way the Newseum “frames . . the news as an unproblematic commodity,” I’m more interested in the gaps and tensions which, I believe, point to the underlying contradictions - and utopian possibilities - implicit in the Newseum’s vision of journalism.

3. A perfect example of this nationalistic globalism can be seen in the structure of the News Gallery, as well. The early historical exhibits are impressively international (though essentializing), surveying information gathering techniques from around the globe. Once the Gutenberg Bible appears, however, the focus narrows to Europe and North America. And when the narrative hits 1776, the rest of the world’s press disappears. The international media doesn’t resurface until the exhibits reach the 1980s, in a section triumphally titled “The Global Village is here.” Once the American media has reached the rest of the world, the rest of the world starts to matter again.

4. For a more extended critique of the “forking-paths” model of interactivity, see my essay, “Making Sense of Software: Computer Games and Interactive Textuality” (1995).

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