Edited Summer Camp and Queen essay.

Summer Camp and Queen can be seen as postmodern because they fit into several of the criteria that make them postmodern. They reject the idea of categorised genres, and take influence from the past and present to create something new.

Postmodernism originated from a rejection of modernism which is always looking for new ways to improve, looking to the future and forget the mistakes of the past. In terms of music it allows unpopular genres and the past generations music to be changed and introduced and made popular in current music. This can be done through remixes where a certain sound is taken and changed or simply through bricolage sampling which often gives the sample a new meaning when put into a different context. Brian Eno’s theory on the “Death of Uncool” suggests that blurring the boundaries between genres means that no one listens to one type of music similarly artists do not fit into one genre. The remix culture of today’s music has lead to mixing of genres, sampling and creating several versions of the same song. However there is a fine line between being postmodern by taking previous music to create something new and just copying another artists’ work. An example of this difference would be Weezer and Led Zeppelin. Weezer use sampling in their song The Greatest Man That Ever Lived as a pastiche to the music that is sampled which is seen as postmodern because they do not try to cover up the sources of their sample. Whereas Led Zeppelin took lyrics and musical styles and passed them off as their own, by not crediting their source or changing the copy enough it is not seen as a postmodern cover but as a rip off of other artists’ work for their own ends.

Summer Camp are a current band who are relatively unknown and are not likely to appeal to a large audience because they can be seen as quite niche in their approach to their music. They have a hyper-real approach to their music, for example their website and blog are set in the fictitious town Condale which the band say is the setting for their songs and music videos. The idea being the audience is brought into a different alternative reality to listen to the music which is backed up by the fake nostalgia created by the band through the use of old photographs. The structure of their website with the short samples of songs playing on loops and repeating footage almost makes the audience feel trapped in this hyper real world without much understanding of why or what purpose there is to it. This relates to Kramer’s theory of a postmodern artist impressing meaning onto its audience and leaving it open interpretation. They also create a hyper reality by not showing the audience what they actually look like on their album artwork. Although this would be acceptable to an audience who are familiar with alter-egos and stage names in pop culture, for example David Bowie who took on the persona of Ziggy Stardust and changed his image, it does not quite work for Summer Camp as the audience are left wandering why they don’t chose to make themselves identifiable. This effects their impact on the audience, if they made it clearer to the audience who they were and what they were trying to achieve it would allow the audience to interact and enjoy the music without negative opinions on the point of Condale. In terms of using bricolage and changing the meaning of something, Summer Camp use all found footage in their music videos Ghost Train and Round The Moon, which was uncopyrighted footage from a Swedish film “En Karlekshistoria”. They changed the context of the footage and made it fit with the rest of their concept of two people from the 80’s. This is an example of simulacrum because they are almost suggesting that the characters are them as children, however the footage is not “real” in the sense that it is a film narrative rather than home-footage. A large majority of the audience would not know where the footage was from, which leaves them confused when watching the video. The heavy influence from the 80’s shows that they do not respect boundaries of the past and present, which is also seen as postmodern. Also they attempt to make what was cool for a teenager in the 80’s appeal to a modern audience through the feeling of nostalgia. Despite Eno’s “Death of Uncool” theory, Summer Camp are unlikely to appeal to a wider audience than they already have because there is not obvious point to the self-referencing nostalgia which would not appeal to a younger audience who have not grown up in the 80’s and might miss the references. Their attempt to make something that was cool in the 80’s cool now can be seen as quite niche which means it appeals to an audience who specifically like artists who are not seen as mainstream cool. A niche audience will like them because they are influenced by the “uncool” 80’s both in their music and artistic concept, and because they reference fairly unknown subject, “En Karlekshistoria” for example. Katy Perry made reference to the “uncool” of the 80’s in her music video Last Friday Night with bright neon clothing and disco style karaoke, she managed to make it cool because it was portrayed in the style of a modern music video and has the star image behind it to anchor it, without Katy Perry’s star image it might just be labelled as cheesy. Even though Summer Camp are postmodern in their approach it does not make them successful as they are not able to pull it off in a way that would appeal to a larger audience. The 80’s content and unfamiliar references are seen as too niche and would put people off especially when the hyper-real town and image of the band confuses and alienates the audience. Their approach is too different from “normal” structure of bands and artists that the nostalgia that they try to create seems pointless. Frederic Jameson’s criticism of post-modernists self-reference has no purpose and in the context of Summer Camp I agree with him.

Queen are a rock band that had their high point the 70’s and 80’s and can be seen as postmodern because they rejected sonority, now being labelled as glam rock they helped to create a new direction for rock, incorporating opera and theatrics into the shape of a traditional rock band. The rejection of sonority is seen as a positive aspect of postmodernism in music because it allows diversity and can make an artist appeal to a wider audience if it is done in the right way. For example Queen in their early albums took opera, which can be seen as quite elitist and inaccessible to a mass audience, and made it massively popular by mixing it with hard rock which was very big in 70’s. This links to Kirby Ferguson’s theory that everything is a remix because they took influence from British operatic style, influenced by the likes of Gilbert and Sullivan and Noel Coward’s satires, which doesn’t make it original but by putting it with rock they created their own original sound. By putting Victorian opera, which would be seen as very archaic, into the 70’s rock scene it shows they rejected the boundaries of past and present and of elitist and popularist values that in Kramer’s theory make a band postmodern. I think Queen are more successful in this aspect than Summer Camp, as the blurring of boundaries of past and present make more sense. To addition, they ignore structural unity by changing and adapting their sound from album to album which in time contradicts their initial ideology which Kramer also states is postmodern. For example on several of their early albums; Queen, Queen II, Sheer Heart Attack, A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races, they explicitly state they did not use synthesizers not wanting to be mistaken as a soft disco band. They go back on this later in their discography when they use synths in their music which is heavily used in Hot Space. However this contradiction may not have been intended to make an ironic statement but to keep up to date with the movement of the music industry at the time. They changed styles and used a wide range of influences with the singles Another One Bites The Dust and Under Pressure with David Bowie being funk inspired with a heavy bass beat, which sounds very different to Crazy Little Thing Called Love which is almost a homage to 50’s rock n’ roll. Like Summer Camp, for some of their music videos they take found footage and put it into a new context. For example Radio Ga Ga uses scenes from the sci-fi film Metropolis and mix it with footage from previous Queen videos. As a lot of their later work was sci-fi inspired this explains why they used the footage, by referencing Metropolis and their previous work they can be called postmodern as they are making intertextual references to pop culture which includes themselves as they had become quite popular at this point. They also use intertextual references in their I Want To Break Free music video which begins with a parody of Coronation Street with the band dressed as housewives. To some extent Queen can be called postmodern because they used a wide range of genres in their music including genres that can be seen as elitist like opera and unfamiliar to the UK mainstream audience at the time like funk. They also used intertextual references in their work and rejected structural unity within songs and albums.

I think that postmodernism in music is unlikely to disappear in the near future because it is a very easy way of producing music, in the sense that sampling, remixing, covering and mashing up songs is quicker and simpler than creating a whole album from scratch. Some believe this will lead to prosumer dominance in music where people like DJ Audacity, who is a 16 year old boy who takes current songs and mixes them together on his laptop. He has received become very popular and millions of views on YouTube. Although this is an example of someone who does not need the technology and label behind him, mash-ups like this are unlikely to dominate because audiences want the band/ artist star image to go with it. However through Brian Eno’s Death of Uncool, nothing can be classed as uncool because everything is a mixture of genres, through mash-ups, sampling and remixing. Frederic Jameson’s criticises postmodernism and says that it just traps the media in endless circular references, in terms of music, there is a concern the use of sampling and covers will wear away the quality and validity of bands. For example 5ive’s cover of We Will Rock You takes a very popular song, tries to make it fit in 00’s music by incorporating hip-hop and rap but fail in making it good as it feels too much like a rip off rather than a fresh take on the song. 

In conclusion, Summer Camp and Queen can be called postmodern as they reject modernist rules for structure and genres, by taking sounds from the past and putting it into the present. They both also use found footage in their work which gives the footage a new meaning in a different context. Summer Camp can be seen as postmodern in the way they interact with their audience through the use of hyper reality. However, I think their emphasis on the hyper-real world of Condale is what prevents them from being more successful because they are too detachment from a real “normal” band structure that the audience do not understand who and what the band are about. There rejection of a band image status has a negative effect on their approach because audiences are used to an image of “real” people to go with the music. This is why Queen are more successful in incorporating postmodern aspects in their work because they follow structure enough for the audience to understand and stay interested as they changed and incorporated different genres. Both can be used as examples of postmodernism in music as sampling in their work shows the state of modern day music industry where a majority of music and influence has been borrowed from a previous artist.