may the giant be with you, twin peaks, david lynch

devo on yo gabba gabba

Sorry this one is a day late, and a little shorter than usual.  It has been a week.  I will not elaborate on what that mean.  Anyway, piggy-backing on last weeks essay, here is another essay that discusses transgression, fashion, and pop culture.  Throughlines!  They are establishing themselves!:

    Paris Hilton is one of my heroes.  I say this only half-ironically.  Paris Hilton is punk.  I say that entirely un-ironically.  That doesn’t make sense you say?  Well, allow me to retort.

What do you mean by punk?

    Punk, for the sake of this essay and as far as a cultural criticism is concerned, is a “cultural challenge to hegemony…expressed obliquely, in style.” (Hebdige 17)  Punk’s trademark themes are the violent overthrow of authority figures, the outright rejection of any and all social norms, and most characteristically the “disgust so boundless that any positive utopian impulses in their work exist only in the freedom offered in death or pure chaos.” (Gregory 652)   Punk’s rebellion operated through violence and all-out rejection of anything popular delivered through “angry, absolute demands (on society, art, and all the restrictive structures governing everyday life),” (Gregory 652).  Punk’s lyrical and musical themes were hostility and anger.  Punk, as a movement, also has a care for unity, even if it is unity against an ultimately amorphous authority, a unity originally created by the “continuing unemployment [that] led to the alienation of an increasingly large proportion of teenagers, especially working-class teenagers,” (Wicke 140) in the late 1970‘s.  Punk focused on an “aggressive cult of the ugly” (Wicke 145).

But that doesn’t sound like Paris!

    Be patient, dear reader.  Let me continue.  It is not nuanced, clever, or even daring to say that punk is dead and that it has been almost entirely consumed and disseminated into mainstream culture.  Evidence?  “Punk Rock” t-shirts at Target or the American Idiot musical.  Need I say more?  This is to be expected of any subculture, and, as Hebdige says: “Each subculture moves through a cycle of resistance and defusion[…]Stripped of its unwholesome connotations, the style becomes fit for public consumption,” (130).  Punk has finished this cycle.  It is no longer that shocking to see a green haired twenty-something, nor to see that be-pierced youth with his proud parents, as he holds his guitar with his tattooed hand.  In a world where wielding a guitar makes you a hero, how can one transgress stylistically?  In fact, being a punk rocker is probably more admirable than being, dare I say it, an heiress?  Paris Hilton is more punk than most punks because being punk really isn’t even that offensive any more.

    What I mean to say is, there is nothing in our contemporary culture, more deplorable or despicable to a parent than watching their child grow up to be a spoiled, unappreciative brat.  Paris Hilton exaggerates all of these features in her celebrity persona: she talks in a (totally put-on) baby voice, her various TV shows expressly point out her wealth and her misunderstandings of middle and lower classes, and she repeatedly (probably purposefully) fails to be grateful or charitable.  In fact, she has repeatedly failed to show up for charity events she had agreed to promote, preferring, instead, to party.  She is more disgusting, more useless, more talentless, than the punk rockers who wanted to be thought of as having those qualities.  She is what society thinks of as more despicable than the smelly riff raff who hang out on St. Marks street.  No parent wants to see their child grow up to be Paris.  Sid Vicious is a saint in comparison.
    While Paris’s semiotic weapons of choice are certainly different than punk (I’ve never really seen her get angry or yell or curse) the message is often the same.  Paris has a contempt for mainstream culture because mainstream culture is really poor-people culture.  Her songs are purposefully mundane and stupid (Choice lyric: “boys, boys, boys they be fightin’ over me!”) in the same way that songs like “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” by the Ramones are.  They are self-reflexive exaggerations of a bratty, stupid, and blasé persona.  Her color palette switches out the blacks and reds of punk for pinks and purples, but their over-exaggeration and emphasis on prissy femininity, because of their exaggerated proportions, evokes the grotesque (see last weeks essay!) similar to the fake blood stains on a punk t-shirt.  In the same way that punks used pornography and vulgarity in their imagery to shock their audiences, so too does Hilton, who often surrounds herself with shirtless muscle men and whose fame is largely based on her sex tape.  Punks emphasized excessive drug use and self-destruction; Paris shows up to all of her events under the influence of E, coke, or alcohol.  Her plastic features threaten self-destruction via of cosmetic surgery.   By way of different avenues, Paris and the Punks both reject mainstream culture: they both refuse to live by the “rules of society” which dictates that you should get a job, be productive, be educated, be of use.  They just want to party and be drunk.  
    Perhaps in the 1970’s, when Punk was really coming into its own, “the normals” were more likely to be offended by the torn and dirty leather jackets with bike chains and dog collars than they would be today.  But in our post-9/11 (woo buzzwords!) world it is more repellent to see a plastic princess with a Chanel bag and a convulsing Chihuahua walking towards us, judging us, evaluating us based on our wardrobe and our markers of conspicuous consumption.

Intentionality?

    Is this sounding too much like my Gaga essay?  Are you going to criticize me and say I am reading too much intentionality into the semiotic workings of a socialite?
    Fair.  Except that I do not think that Paris Hilton’s choices are necessarily thought out.  I think that, in the same way that Punk is a sincere and genuine expression of its wearer (unless, of course, each item is bought at a Hot Topic or some other store that sells the style pre-packaged)  Paris’s style is actually a result of her own taste level.  Her motivations are not meant to obliquely disgust, she is just a disgusting person, and therefore, a great one.
    Look, no cultural critic thinks that some Punk ever really had a thought out statement that went like: “Hey, I feel like dressing this way because these articles of clothing are grotesque re-appropriations of middle class clothing!  By refashioning the objects of my oppression I am aesthetically rebelling against the culture which enslaves me!” And I am not saying that Paris ever thought: “I will exaggerate the fetishes of the wealthy in order to point out the flaws of our celebrity obsessed culture!  I will exaggerate my vulgarity in order to disgust the culture which has created me!”  These are, however, the semiotic resultants of such cultural artifacts.

-eric

new artses!

(this art = self explanatory)

-sam + eric