Using Summer Camp and a band or artist of your choice, explain how some artists can be postermodern.

There is a number of reasons why Summer Camp and Lady Gaga are postmodern, Summer Camp is a 2 person band from London. Their music is very much based on the 80s era, more focused on teenagers on that particular time, this is portrayed through the aesthetics of their videos, blogs and album cover. Lady Gaga on the other hand is very much the queen of postmodernism, she crosses so many boundaries and takes the influences she sees in the world and incorporates into her work to make is appeal to her fans. Postmodernism is not only applied to these two, it is everywhere in the music industry. Artists and groups are always remixing and incorporating past works into theirs,

Postmodernism is a rejection to modernism. Modernism is the belief that we should never look back, we should always look into the future and always create something new. Before modernism, there were such things as the “Grand Narratives”, Science, Religion and Politics coined by Jean Francois Lyotard. It was believed that before modernism everyone fitted or believed in only one thing, you were either, religious, political or scientific. You could not intersect into these worlds because it would counter act your original belief. Like music for example, in the past, if you listened to rock music, that was the genre that you could listen to, you could not like rock and another genre like Hip Hop for example, these two are completely the other end of the scales from one another and it would have been considered as weird or unusual for one to like more than genre of music. Nowadays, everyone is a postmodernist in some aspect, the majority of people with iPods, iPhones or MP3 players have all different genre of music on it. Brian Eno coined the phrase “The Death Of Uncool”, meaning that nothing is uncool anymore, you can have all of these genres in one place and it cannot be considered as uncool in today’s culture as everything is about remixing things together and making something new and unique. To believe in postmodern or to be a postmodernist, you would have to completely go against the idea of a modernist. A postmodernist would acknowledge the past, they would say that without the past, you cannot move into the future because you won’t learn anything from it. It would be like making a mistake over and over again. Postmodernism in today’s culture is very popular; it’s so popular that when we see it, we don’t even recognize it.

There are a number of aspects which makes Summer Camp postmodern, starting off with how they look. By just looking at the aesthetic of their Videos, Blogs and Album covers. You can the impression that they are going to be this cool band who are uncool, which makes them cool. Summer Camp has used hyper-reality to portray who they want to be to the audience through their projected image, but when you actually see a picture of them and watch their videos, you can see that they are a British 2 person group living in London who are obsessed with 80s music, another artist who uses Hyper-reality very heavily is Lady Gaga who has created a character or persona for her music to go along with her music. Lady Gaga the also takes music influences from the past and incorporates it into her work,  an example being that she has taken the influence of the 70s sounds and incorporated it in her second album “The Fame Monster”. Their website is very postmodern, it features a variety of video clips when the user clicks on the links. All of the videos clips are found footage from the 80s, each one of them having a different element to them whether it be humorous, sadness or happiness. The website itself is very postmodern because it’s using footage from the past, and projected through advanced technology we have today. The video for “Round The Moon” was made up of found footage from Swedish film called “Enkarlekshistoria” which came out in the 80s. By using this, they are using Bricolage, because by having young adults doing adult things, like smoking and drinking and kissing. Although at first it seems creepy, but as the song goes with the videos, it makes it sweet and innocent. Summer Camp also follow Kramer’s theory of “is not simply a repudiation of modernism or its continuation, but has aspects of both a break and an extension”, the extension aspect of SummerCamp is that they use "80s synths and ’80s drum-machine sounds" in their music, the break would be to use the of technology we have in the present such as the GIFs they made their video out of 'Down'.

The foundation behind “Lady Gaga” is postmodernism, she is always remixing and re-working past movements and adapting it into her own to appeal to her fans, this is an example of Kirby Ferguson’s theory of “Everything is a remix”.  When thinking about Gaga, you cannot ignore her predecessor, Madonna. Her music, videos, and image is quite similar to Madonna’s back in the 80s when she became a worldwide superstar, and it is through this which has helped Gaga to become the star that she is today. She has focused her career on being unpredictable and outrageous; she is probably doing everything that Madonna has done but amplifying it three times to gather press and new audiences. A clear example of how similar Gaga’s music is to Madonna is with her first single from her album “Born This Way” which sounds very similar to Madonna’s “Express Yourself”. Lady Gaga is a “populist”, meaning that she is mainstream but she also includes “elitist” aspects into her work like with the use of Opera in “Government Hooker” on her latest album “Born This Way”. Another way in which Gaga is postmodern is that she uses Intertextual References in her work, a clear example would be her music video starring alongside Beyonce “Telephone”. This video was one of Gaga’s most unusual and creative videos, throughout the short film, she makes clear intextual references to Quentin Tarantino’s work. Example are spread throughout the film starting right at thy start with the font chosen for the title and credits, the font chosen is a yellow card with reddish drop shadow, this is a subtle reference to Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. Another reference Gaga makes to Tarantino’s work is with Beyonce’s nickname in the video “Honey Bee”, this being a clear reference to the diner robber in “Pulp Fiction” named “Honey Bunny”. Gaga addresses Beyonce as “Honey Bee” before they pull off their poison murder spree in the diner; this seems like a pretty clear reference to “Honey Bunny,” the nickname given to Yolanda, one of the two robbers in the famous diner scene in Pulp Fiction. The clearest reference to Tarantino’s work in “Telephone” is the “Pussy Wagon” that Gaga and Beyonce drive in the video, the car was featured in “Kill Bill Vol 1” which was used for lead actress Uma Thurman to drive in, in the film she stole the car from the male nurse and used it as she drive to her victim’s house “Copper Head”. The video also shows an intextual reference to Andy Warhol’s idea of “Exploration of mass consumer culture and advertising” through his Campbell’s soup studies, in the video Gaga and the video director Akerlund wanted to challenge gender stereotypes of the “perfect housewife” portrayed heavily in the 1950s pop culture by using popular staple American household products like the “Wonder Bread” and “Miracle Whip” as their artistic devices in the video. By doing this, she also uses Bricolage, because in the “Let’s Make A SandWhich” scene, she uses the role of the 50s housewife and changes its meaning by adding poison to the food she makes which ends up killing all of the people in the diner. Gaga uses Hyper-reality to her advantage, she has consumed this character and this is what helps her music sell. When you think about Gaga, you don’t just think about her music, you think about her overall image and aesthetic. When you think of Gaga, you see all of her theatrics, whether it be the choice of Fashion, hair or makeup, whenever you go to see one of her live shows, you expect a show. Without her hyper-real self, her music would not sell as well. This goes with Baudrillard’s theory of that “our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is of a simulation of reality”, meaning that the manner in which the message is mediated becomes more important than the meaning of the message itself.

In conclusion, both of these artists and bands share similarities in how they are postmodern, but they also differ from each other because one is quite niche and the other one is quite mainstream. Similarities which they both share are Hyper-reality, influences of past music and incorporating it into their work.  Although Gaga has amplified this a thousand times more than Summer Camp, I also think that because of Summer Camp’s particular use of hyper-reality, it can confuse the audience about who they are before they see. Comparing them both, they are very different, in similar in a number of ways.