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Parody performances are routinely mistaken for sincere commitment to what they mock

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tagsja-picks, deepthinking, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@deluce2014blowjobs, loc. 30

4 min read

Parody performances are routinely mistaken for sincere commitment to what they mock

Evidence

No less characteristic of the regressive musical language is the quotation. Its use ranges from the conscious quotation of folk and children’s songs, by way of ambiguous and half accidental allusions, to completely latent similarities and associations. The tendency triumphs in the adaptation of whole pieces from the classical stock or the operatic repertoire. The practice of quotation mirrors the ambivalence of the infantile listener’s consciousness. The quotations are at once authoritarian and a parody. It is thus that a child imitates the teacher. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 100 (#expands, via linked claim)

Even those mocked online found ways to reclaim their narratives. In 2007, autistic graduate student Adam Nyerere Bahner, a.k.a. Tay Zonday, uploaded an earnest anti-racist song called “Chocolate Rain.” With its repetitive piano hook and idiosyncratic vocal delivery, the video became a meme, initially drawing ridicule on forums like 4chan. But the buzz catapulted Zonday into national fame, proving that even the internet’s targets could turn mockery into opportunity. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 286 (#expands, via linked claim)

This conjoining of political and aesthetic revolution makes it difficult to see the Surrealists as precursors of Postmodernism. For most accounts of Postmodern art tend to emphasize its rejection of revolutionary political change. Lyotard associates ‘the nostalgia of the whole and one, … the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience’ with ‘terror, … the fantasy to seize reality’. The thought is presumably the traditional liberal one that any attempt at total social change will lead straight to the Gulag. One consideration behind the frequent claims’made for Postmodern ‘wit’ and ‘irony’ seems to be that the collapse of belief in the possibility or desirability of global political transformation leaves us with nothing better to do than playfully to parody what we can no longer take seriously. Parody is, however, so pervasively present in the great Modernists — Eliot and Joyce, for example — that any attempt to claim it exclusively for Postmodernism just seems implausible … Jameson suggests that matters have gone a stage further — that while Modernist parody retains some conception of a norm from which one is deviating, Postmodernism is distinguished by pastiche, the ‘neutral practice of mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.’ — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 115 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: The $1.98 Beauty Show deliberately staged amateurish acts for comedy — Dolores DeLuce, Blow Jobs: A Guide to Making It in Show…, 19; Musical quotation is simultaneously deference and mockery of authority — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 100; Pastiche emerges from the loss of individual style and must be distinguished from parody. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 74 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

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