2002-08-29 - 2:13 p.m.
I've been incommunicado for a week. My dad was in town, and then I got an evil flu. I'm now back in the saddle, and completely recovered (though I may stay away from Sprite and Saltines for awhile).
I don't like to write too much personal stuff on this page, but I will take this chance to give a little public declaration of how rad my dad is. We've had some trouble with each other for awhile now, and this last visit was such a breaking away from that. He accompanied me and my friends to two rock shows, played a game of football with a bunch of queer freaks, bought an anti-imperialist book from the anarchist bookstore, took photobooth pictures with me, and told me lots how much he loves me. He wins.
I tried to write an entry the other day about Josie and the Pussycats, which I saw on Monday night. Unfortunately, the entry got erased, but I'll recreate a little bit of it. Did anyone see this movie? I kind of liked it, shockingly enough. Minus the hippie-dippy drummer who I wanted to drop-kick and the ugly overly-produced pop-gag-me "hits" sung by Josie and the Pussycats. As always, I could have done without the requisite sub-plot love story between Josie and Alan M. (or Adam-12, as Alan Cummings' character refers to him). However, the whole anti-consumerist subplot was somewhat amusing in a slick Hollywood movie, and the boy-band Du Jour and their none-too-subtle faggy song "Backdoor Lover" cracked me up (I'm always a sucker for the anal sex double-entendre).
If you haven't seen it, the gist of the movie is that Josie and the Pussycats is a small-time band that gets "discovered" by a big record label and is immediately signed and propelled to stardom. The catch is that the record label is terribly anxious to sign them because it needs some musical vehicle to mask subliminal messages to teens that will compel them to buy particular products. The government is involved, of course, as are various recognizable corporations: Starbucks, Abercrombie & Fitch, MTV, Bloomingdale's, McDonald's and so on. And, not shockingly, all of these companies and more have mega-product placement in the movie. MTV was clearly in on the joke, with two of their veejays playing themselves rather self-mockingly. This brings up a few (perhaps or perhaps not) interesting questions about the film and its intended audience and impact: first, just how anti-consumerist can a movie be that is being paid big bucks by and essentially peddling the wares of those companies it accuses of brainwashing? Second, to what extent must have the owners of these corporate logos been complicit in the context in which these images were being circulated? Did they know they were being poked fun at? Did this matter in terms of publicity? And is this a way for these companies to minimalize and/or fictionalize their violence in the world to appear in such a context? I imagine I'm thinking about it too much. But still... the movie speaks to me in a particular way. I wonder how it speaks to my sister, who loves to shop-til-she-drops, or the Gap-Old Navy-Starbucks- McDonald's faithfuls I work with? For a bubblegum-cutsie movie, it definitely got my gears turning.
It also got me to thinking about copyrights, intellectual property, and other strange forms of "ownership" that are legally sanctioned and selectively enforced. For example Brillo Magazine, a rad feminist publication, was around for years before Church & Dwight Co., Inc. objected to their use of the Arm & Hammer logo and the copyrighted "Brillo" name (read about it here). I'm also thinking about the 1991 case in which Biz Markie got sued by Gilbert O'Sullivan for his uncredited sample on the song "Alone Again, Naturally" on the "I Need A Haircut" album. The album was pulled from the shelves, as far as I recall, and from that point on, all samples required getting permission from original artists. His following album was entitled "All Samples Cleared." In 1999, I went to a lecture by Siva Vaidhyanathan entitled "Fear of a Sampling Planet: How Hip-Hop Bum-rushed American Copyright Law." In it, he discussed the multiplicity of ways in which intellectual property can be conceived of and discussed, and the different ways it can hold up in court. He brought up Public Enemy's lyrics of Caught, Can I Get A Witness in which Flava Flav proclaims to have "found this mineral I call a beat" and then expands on that with, "You singers are spineless/As you sing your senseless songs to the mindless/Your general subject love is minimal/Its sex for profit/Scream that I sample." To what extent, then, does the initial *intended meaning* of a song, or logo, or piece of art have to do with the way it is circulated in a different context? What if, for example, as my friend A. brought up, Josie and the Pussycats had used logos that resembled recognizable ones but that did not incorporate them in their original state? Would this have lent a more subversive satire potential to the film? If so, what issues might they have encountered in getting legal rights to these logos that called forth logos representing wealthy (and anal-retentive) corporations? And would Hollywood ever truly participate in satire in which corporations were not at some level complicit?
This topic also brings up the concept of wealth and what it ends up having to do with "property." Copyrights have a disastrous effect, for example, on people and in nations dealing with both AIDS and poverty (see an article here ), because pharmaceutical companies are much more concerned with profit and cutting edge treatment development (read: for those who can afford it) than they are with realistic widespread treatment and prevention. In thinking about all of these laws we have to "protect" people and privacy, it doesn't seem to surprising that there is only a particular set of people that end up being "protected," and rarely is it a group of people who is unaccustomed to such protection.
All of this also reminds me of a mess in which friends of mine were ordered by a lawyer to cease and desist performing in a particular troupe because the girl who claims she formed the group threatened to sue for intellectual property. Through their case would in all likelihood have stood up in court, nobody had the time, money, or energy to go through more of what had already become an ordeal. It did, however, result in my favorite conclusion to a song ever: "Yeah, Intellectual property...whatever, motherfucker."
