our hyper-referential, branded culture
Multiplatinum rapper and MTV mainstay Missy Elliot comes
from the same place I do: the southeastern corner of Vir-
ginia, called Tidewater. We’re even the same age. “There’s nothing in particular there,” Missy says about the place. “We’d sit on the beach, go in different stores. We didn’t come from a place like New York or L.A., where there are big events in a club. A lot of music we made was just done in the house, and it kind of circulated through friends on the block, on tapes.”1 We went to different schools, but sometimes I imagine we crossed paths at the record store I worked at or on the Virginia Beach boardwalk, a popular hangout. There, Missy could have good-naturedly cheered on my lame backspins on a flattened cardboard box—my break-dancing tag was Cold Crush Kembrew—or my arhythmic popping and locking. I might have
even watched her rap over “Jam on It” during a “break-dancing festival” I attended at the Virginia Beach Civic Center, by the ocean.
The first time I heard her retro-futuristic hip-hop, I had no clue about any of these connections; there was no hometown pride. I only knew that her music dropped from nowhere. “Work It”—her
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ubiquitous 2003 single, the masterpiece of her career, thus far—
pushed all the right avant-pop buttons with its can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head hook and back-masked chorus: “Is it worth it, can I work it? I put my bang down, flip it and reverse it / ti esrever dna ti pilf nwod gnab ym tup-i.” It’s like Stockhausen’s musique concrète tape experiments put to a beat you can dance to. About two-thirds the way through the song, the instrumental track abruptly switches gears as Missy and her coproducer Timbaland drop in a percussive loop from Run-DMC’s 1986 classic, “Peter Piper.”
Jam Master Jay was Run-DMC’s DJ, but he was murdered soon
after the release of Missy’s “Work It.” The irony was that the album from which her song came, Under Construction, was a tribute to the simplicity of less violent times—the old-school days of hip-hop that were the soundtrack to her youth. On this album, Missy
doesn’t just produce a verbal snapshot of that era (name-checking Public Enemy, Salt ’n’ Pepa, Big Daddy Kane, Slick Rick, and other 1980s hip-hop icons). She also samples the music of that time, with each track unfolding like pages of a musical history book. Or, to use a more appropriate metaphor, it’s akin to a hyper- hyperlinked Web page that sends you zooming from one clickable reference to the next, a groove-y kind of pop-culture collage.
T. S. ELIOT, MISSY ELLIOT, AND MISS-Y MOORE
Missy Elliot’s Under Construction may be a quilted musical bed of virtual citation marks, but T. S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece The Waste Land is quite literally loaded with footnotes. Eliot’s mosaic method was also used by modernist contemporaries such as Marianne Moore and Finnegans Wake author James Joyce. Joyce used literature like a library, periodically checking out and inserting into his writing ideas, words, and sentences that interested him. Actually, he was less like a respectable library patron and more like a McLe_0385513259_7p_all_r1.qxd 12/7/04 11:29 AM Page 173
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Dumpster diver who found interesting things to recycle. The
screaming irony in all this is that Stephen Joyce, the beneficiary of his grandfather’s copyrights, regularly uses copyright to prevent his ancestor’s words from being quoted in films, plays, and even scholarly works.
When Stanford University professor Carol Loeb Shloss wrote a
book about Joyce’s troubled daughter, Lucia, she encountered
tremendous obstacles that almost stopped her book from being
published. “The process of deleting things that had taken years to find out was just excruciating.” She added, “The ability of people to use quotes from Joyce has ground to a standstill.” Robert Spoo—the former editor of James Joyce Quarterly, who also happens to be an intellectual-property lawyer—said, “There is a climate of concern bordering on fear among Joyce scholars that their work may suddenly come under copyright scrutiny.”2 Unlike the scholars who study him, the quote-happy James Joyce collaged at will, creating a kind of “recirculation”—his word—of cultural history. “The letter!
The litter!” Joyce wrote in the Wake, wordplay that reminds me of Chuck D’s opening lines, “The rhythm! The rebel!” from “Rebel Without a Pause.” Like Missy Elliot, Joyce put his bang down, flipped it, and reversed it.
Missy samples Public Enemy in two of Under Construction’s songs, but the aural and verbal nods to the old school are at their most dense on the track “Funky Fresh Dressed.” It features a sampled hook by the influential female rapper MC Lyte, and begins with the line, “Here’s a little story that must be told.” It’s from Rod-ney Cee’s “Stoop Rap,” a track from the 1982 hip-hop flick Wild Style, and it is followed by another sample, “and it goes a little something like this,” culled from Run-DMC’s “Here We Go.”
Throughout the song, Missy evokes another old-school classic, U.T.F.O.’s “Roxanne, Roxanne,” by exactly imitating its cadence and rhyme scheme, which went: “She said she’d love to marry, my baby McLe_0385513259_7p_all_r1.qxd 12/7/04 11:29 AM Page 174
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she would carry / And if she had a baby, she’d name the baby
Harry.” The song branded itself on the DNA of most everyone who grew up on hip-hop in the 1980s and was a standard of amateur MC competitions in cafeterias throughout the nation. Elliot’s hom-age is unmistakably obvious, even when transcribed onto the page.
“My flow is legendary, and your style is temporary / Yeah, you need to worry, like Jason, it gets scary.”
Like “Work It,” the beat takes a ninety-degree turn two-thirds of the way through the song, this time sampling an instrumental loop from the Beastie Boys’ 1986 story rap, “Paul Revere.” (True to the connect-the-dot nature of Missy’s song, “Paul Revere” similarly begins with the line, “Here’s a little story I’ve got to tell.”) The Beasties themselves are hyper-referential: The opening song on their first album is named “Rhymin’ and Stealin’,” and it plods along over a blatant Led Zeppelin sample, from “When the Levee Breaks.” The
“stealing” reference is a direct nod to sampling, and the song’s rhymes also pillage from Moby Dick, KFC’s Colonel Sanders, Mutiny on the Bounty, and Betty Crocker. The Beasties’ twenty-years-plus lyrical oeuvre contains around one thousand refrences to high, low, and pop culture, from Pablo Picasso to Budweiser to Dirty Harry.
It’s clear that Missy Elliot’s referencing of old-school staples was purposeful; there’s nothing random about the complicated web
that makes up the deceptively simple party jam. Hip-hop artists often weave pop-culture references into their critiques of the dominant culture by using metaphors their audiences can relate to.
Cultural critic Todd Boyd argues that hip-hop connects with so many because it is “at once humorous and a weapon of guerrilla warfare” against the powers that be. He writes in The New H.N.I.C.,
“Hip-hop speaks in a code that allows us to communicate with one another beyond the eavesdropping that those in power often engage in.” The cloaked nature of hip-hop’s very public mode of communication was amusingly illustrated in 2003 when three British McLe_0385513259_7p_all_r1.qxd 12/7/04 11:29 AM Page 175
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judges were forced to rule on a copyright battle between competing groups. The case revolved around the nature of the Heartless
Crew’s lyrics, but Judge Kim Lewison admitted that the job was made more difficult because those hip-hop lyrics were “for all practical purposes a foreign language.”
The judge went on to comment on the “faintly surreal experi-
ence of three gentlemen in horsehair wigs” examining the meaning of such phrases as “shizzle my nizzle.”3 Hip-hop broadcasts its message far and wide, but in code. It’s in this way that Chuck D can rightly claim that hip-hop is black America’s CNN, while Boyd accurately refers to it as a lyrical tower of Babel barely decipherable to its ideological foes. Hip-hop has been around long enough for it to seep into every area of American life, every imaginable demo-graphic. For instance, the white, all-female Long Island crew called Northern State—featuring an MC named Hesta Prynne—represents the brainy wing of the hip-hop party. Her moniker, of course, is a nod to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, and she even refers to herself in verse as having a “liberal-arts-college academic-literary-kinda-name.”
If Marianne Moore were alive today, she might have written
rhymes for Northern State. The Missy Elliot of the twentieth-
century poetry world, she staked herself out in a male-dominated territory, earning the respect of peers such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. (Moore was so hip she even penned the liner notes for a Muhammad Ali album.) The hyper-referential remixes of Marianne Moore, who began publishing in the early twentieth century, were perhaps more subversive than those of other modernist writers. She absorbed the politicized spirit of Dada, particularly in her 1923 poem “Marriage,” which reworked fragments from history, literature, newspapers, and her own memory.
For Moore, who never married, matrimony was the wasteland.
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another, breaking them apart and putting them back together in disorienting ways, shaking up a sacred institution in the process.
Her departure point is the Bible—specifically Adam and Eve—
though she also uses many mundane sources from daily life, such as an article from Scientific American magazine. Moore also samples from a review in The New Republic, reworking and recontextualizing the words to make Adam a bit androgynous in the poem. At another point she quotes a lengthy passage from Edward Thomas’s Feminine Influence on the Poets. It describes King James I’s love for the daughter of the Earl of Somerset, Joan Beaufort, whom the king sees through his prison window, having no access to her. Thomas compares Beaufort to a bird that is made to sing sweet songs of love, though Moore tweaks this interpretation. Almost word for word, Moore appropriates Thomas’s written text into her own
verse, but with a major alteration: “He dares not clap his hands . . .
lest it should fly off.”
Thomas intended it to be a sweet passage about love at first sight, but Marianne Moore flipped and reversed it so that the suitor was unable to make his bird sing. “Just by being married,” explained Elizabeth Joyce, a Moore scholar, “the husband assumes that he can control the wife, the bird, and decide when and how she should give him pleasure. Instead, he looks merely foolish in his failure to manipulate her.”4 By reworking these sources with her own hand, Moore achieves a powerful and subversive layering of texts. This ironic and, at times, quite sarcastic poem was also radical because of its unconventional shifts in tone, vocabulary, rhythm, and point of view.
In “Marriage,” Moore also manipulated her sources to release
meanings never intended by the original authors, such as Shakespeare (whose play The Tempest was cut up in this proto-feminist poetic manifesto). Soon after the Shakespeare quote is the line
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Holyoke College, along with a charming line by Ezra Pound, “A wife is a coffin.” She sometimes changed the phrasing of the original sources to fit their placement in the poem, because fidelity to her own unconventional aesthetic trumped the academic desire to
quote exactly. Moore wrote a species of anti-poetry at times, much like the Dadaists practiced anti-art. Her cut-up method, where she plopped matter-of-fact advertising copy into a new context, mirrored Duchamp’s ready-mades.
Despite her cavalier attitude toward authors’ intentions, Moore felt a responsibility to acknowledge her stolen sources—even going so far as putting entire borrowed sentences or phrases in quotes, which were then cited in the appendix to The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. It creates a strange sight on the page, a smattering of quotation marks that disturb the flow of the poetry. Moore con-fessed her penchant for incorporating lines from others’ work into her own verse in Complete Poems’ oddly titled passage, “A Note on the Notes,” which introduces the appendix of citations. Moore explains, “I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, [so] acknowledgements seem only honest.” Kenneth Burke, an influential literary critic and early communication scholar, says of Moore’s appropriation method, “Since the quotation marks escape notice when such writing is read aloud, the page becomes wholly an act of collaboration, a good thing that seems to transcend any one person’s ownership.”5
In an interview, Moore further explained her use of quotation marks: “I was just trying to be honorable and not to steal things.
I’ve always felt that if a thing has been said in the very best way, how can you say it better? If I wanted to say something and somebody had said it ideally, then I’d take it but give the personal credit for it”—an interesting statement on the morality of borrowing.6 Sometimes Moore’s quotation and citation methods seem overly scrupu-McLe_0385513259_7p_all_r1.qxd 12/7/04 11:29 AM Page 178
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lous, as when she identifies a quotation that was “overheard at the circus.” But Moore had manners, so she acknowledged what she
took, after which she would do with it what she wanted.
BRANDING EVERYDAY LIFE
From Marianne Moore to Missy Elliot, pop culture provides
artists—and everybody else—with a kind of shorthand, a tool for expressing ourselves. By choosing our media-culled words wisely, we can convey a wide range of meanings and emotions, sometimes with only one monosyllabic utterance (i.e., “Doh!”). In titling his book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, the goofy, gonzo cultural critic Chuck Klosterman speaks to this tendency. The point of living, Klosterman argued in his “low culture manifesto,” is to understand what it means to be alive, or at least try to. This is something that philosophers have done for thousands of years. He admitted there are many respectable ways of deducing the answer to that question, but, he says, “I just happen to prefer examining the question through the context of Pamela Anderson and The Real World and Frosted Flakes. It’s certainly no less plausible than trying to understand Kant or Wittgenstein.”
In the writings of many philosophers, religion provided a
common reference point for their big questions, but today the media has become our lingua franca. The average American college student is more likely to recognize a line from The Simpsons, for instance, than an allusion to a story from the Old Testament. Referencing pop culture helps define our identities and cultural preferences. It also provides us with a kind of grammar and syntax that structures our everyday talk. In face-to-face interactions we can still refer to these intellectual properties, and we will continue to without inhibition. We can invoke popular (or unpopular) intellectual properties like, say, The Phantom Menace’s Jar Jar Binks—one of the McLe_0385513259_7p_all_r1.qxd 12/7/04 11:29 AM Page 179
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most hated cinematic figures of the 1990s. More important, we can do it in satirical ways that his owner (the extremely litigious Lucasfilm, Inc.) doesn’t approve of without worrying about it. In the multimedia space that is the Web, however, the metaphorical intellectual-property police can (and do) invade our homes in the form of cease-and-desist e-mails.
While much of popular culture is vapid—it’s a form of escapism, after all—it does impact our consciousness powerfully. As a social theorist, Karl Marx offered us a way of understanding our place in the world by explaining that we are born into conditions “not of our own choosing.” If the world is like a home (one littered with pop-culture products), the social conditions Marx describes are like the walls. We know our houses have been constructed, socially constructed, and we are free to roam around within rooms and halls that already exist. But those walls are very real. We can walk through them only if we take a hammer and knock them down, or blow the walls up. If we want to dismantle that house—or merely remodel the home—it is necessary for us to manipulate and transform the language of popular culture that surrounds us.
In recent years, it has been difficult to do so because federal law protects trademarks from being portrayed in an “unwholesome or unsavory context.” Some courts have suppressed unauthorized uses of famous cultural icons, even when there is no reasonable possibility of confusion in the marketplace. For example, when an environmental group used a caricature of the Reddy Kilowatt trademark in literature that was critical of the electric-utility industry, the company responded by filing an injunction for the unauthorized use of their mark. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia upheld this injunction. It essentially ruled that you cannot use a trademarked property to express yourself—it constitutes a type of trespassing. The Manitoba Court of Appeal similarly ruled that striking Safeway workers could not appropriate the Safeway trademark in their union litera-McLe_0385513259_7p_all_r1.qxd 12/7/04 11:29 AM Page 180
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ture. The court stated that, “there is no right under the guise of free speech to take or use what does not belong to [you].”7
Ironically enough, recently retired MPAA CEO Jack Valenti once alliteratively quipped that digital downloading gives movie producers “multiple Maalox moments.” Unlike Hollywood directors—who usually are required to secure permission when they reference a trademarked product in their movies—Valenti didn’t have to confer with Maalox’s lawyers. Nor was Valenti paid to do a product placement for Maalox.
Companies want us to feel comfortable with their intellectual properties and their brands, for them to feel like our “friends.” But they are extremely needy, attention-seeking, and money-draining friends. For instance, here’s an excerpt from an internal McDonald’s memo, which promoted the idea that customers should feel that the company “cares about me”: “The essence McDonald’s is embracing is ‘Trusted Friend’ [which] captures all the goodwill and the unique emotional connection customers have with their McDonald’s experience,” the memo states. “Note: this should be done without using the words ‘Trusted Friend.’ ”8
The friends that corporate marketers desire most are young
ones. “You’ll agree that the youth market is an untapped wellspring of new revenue,” reads an enthusiastic brochure from the Fourth Annual Kid Power Marketing Conference. “You’ll also agree that the youth market spends the majority of each day inside the school-house. Now the problem is, how do you reach that market?”9 Companies have solved that dilemma with creative tactics, such as corporate-subsidized textbooks that contain math problems with Nike logos or that regularly mention Oreo cookies. “The bestselling packaged cookie in the world is the Oreo cookie,” reads the 1999 edition of a McGraw-Hill math textbook. “The diameter of an Oreo cookie is 1.75 inches. Express the diameter of an Oreo cookie as a fraction in simplest form.”
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America’s largest producer of corporate-sponsored teaching
aids, Lifetime Learning Systems, said in one of its pitches to potential sponsors: “Now you can enter the classroom through custom-made learning materials created with your specific marketing
objectives in mind. . . . Through these materials, your product or point of view becomes the focus of discussions in the classrooms.”10
Some cash-strapped schools turn to Coke and Pepsi, which pay
very little (in relation to the exposure their products receive) in exchange for exclusive contracts that place their goods in cafeterias, halls, and locker rooms. Companies can also transform the crisis in education into free advertising masked as tax-deductible public service.
In 2004 schools in sixteen states participated in McDonald’s
“McTeacher’s Night,” where principals and teachers were reduced to flipping burgers in exchange for a fraction of the evening’s sales.
More than one thousand schools split the proceeds, earning less than seven hundred dollars apiece. Sadder still, parents and friends of a public school in Eugene, Oregon, held a blood-plasma drive to save one of five threatened teaching positions (they raised only fifteen hundred dollars).11 This makes me want to cry. With the governmental defunding of education, many schools believe they have no other choice than to accept deals with devils such as Coke.
There’s a depressing irony here. The massive funding cuts in American education made it possible for these companies to prey on kids by distributing their nominally educational materials.
Because of the supposed educational value of their propa-
ganda—such as Oreo-centric math problems—the money that the
corporations spend on these materials is fully tax-deductible. This kind of thinly veiled advertising can then be written off as money they don’t have to pay the government, further reducing the pool of tax money that can go to education. Not only have we undermined the quality of education by stretching resources to the breaking McLe_0385513259_7p_all_r1.qxd 12/7/04 11:29 AM Page 182
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point, but in doing so we have opened the window for marketers to crawl into schools. The branding and commercialization of education stretches from universities to elementary and high schools.
Sometimes students strike back in creative ways, such as clever dé-
tournements of ads on bathroom-stall billboards. Other times, protests take a subtler form, such as wearing a Pepsi shirt to school when your principle has orchestrated a “Coke Day.”
When Greenbrier High School student Mike Cameron did just
this, he was suspended. The Evans, Georgia, school was trying to win a five-hundred-dollar “Coke in Education” prize, awarded to schools that came up with creative ways of distributing discount Coke cards. During the Coke rally—which was held in lieu of the unprofitable act of learning, I assume—Cameron revealed his Pepsi T-shirt during a group photo. This sent the administration into a tizzy. Defending her tactics, principal Gloria Hamilton said, “These students knew we had guests. We had the regional president here, and people flew in from Atlanta to do us the honor of being resource speakers.” As an act of protest, wearing a Pepsi T-shirt is awfully mild, hardly as in-your-face as the “détourned” “Starfucks”
shirts some kids have made guerilla-style.
When simply wearing a competitor’s logo to a corporate-
sanctioned school event is considered a subversive act, it’s much harder for freedom of expression® to be a tenable concept. Schools are no longer the oasis free of aggressive marketers they once were, so it’s no wonder that kids start thinking early about brands. “It helps our work that teens define themselves by their possessions,”
says Amanda Freeman, formerly the director of research and trends at the teen-marketing firm Youth Intelligence. “They will say, ‘I am Sony, not Panasonic.’ Their favorite question is, ‘If Coke were a person, who would it be?’ I thought that was a stupid question, but they loved it.”12 It’s in this way that media and brand references embedded in everyday talk become something darker. It’s something McLe_0385513259_7p_all_r1.qxd 12/7/04 11:29 AM Page 183
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that reduces us—in part, no matter how imaginative we’re being—
to walking commercials who are literally working to keep consumer culture alive.
The intellectual properties sold by lifestyle companies provide the foundation for much of our economy and culture. For instance, Nike is less a shoe company than a conceptual house of cards built around the strength of its trademarks—a remarkably sturdy house of cards that is supported by the policing powers of the state. Nike’s massive profits stem not only from outsourcing its factory labor, legal scholar Rosemary Coombe points out, but also from its ability to successfully herd the migration of its trademarked brands into everyday life. Its CEO, Philip Knight, makes it clear that his company is not in the business of manufacturing shoes, but in the business of branding—connecting lifestyles to cheap pieces of plastic, leather, and rubber. This means that Nike must spend huge amounts on advertising and promotion in order to keep the Nike brand at the center of the popular cultural imagination.
Just as patents protect the research-and-development costs for pharmaceutical companies, trademarks protect the investments of companies such as Nike or the Gap or Tommy Hilfiger or any
other company for whom people serve as walking billboards.
Coombe, who has written extensively about the cultural life of intellectual properties, notes that the Nike logo “now marks sports teams, all clothing, and athletic equipment, colonizing the gym-nasiums, classrooms, and washrooms of our schools and is even cut into the designs of people’s hair and voluntarily branded onto the flesh of many North Americans who have marked their own
bodies with swoosh tattoos to proclaim their brand loyalty.”13
Companies such as Nike want fans to use their trademarks, but in approved ways. As soon as critically minded citizens subvert those uses, the corporations lash back in the form of cease-and-desist letters.
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The few places where biting satire is safe from the threat of intellectual-property litigation are areas clearly marked off as such.
Two of these places are The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a fake news show, and The Onion, a fake newspaper (both of which, interestingly, tend to be more influential and pointed than many legitimate news sources). The Daily Show, for instance, can get away with manipulating Mickey Mouse in ways that independent satirists who aren’t backed by Comedy Central and its lawyers can’t. For instance, it reported on a cutesy segment that occurred on the 2003 Academy Awards, which took place the week Gulf War 2.0 started. As blood flowed overseas, an actor on the Oscar stage traded innocuous dialogue with a computer-generated version of the rodent. The original dialogue on the awards show was no doubt approved by Disney; The Daily Show’s newly dubbed dialogue definitely wasn’t. “Regime change begins at home!” ranted the high-pitched voice of Mickey.
“Bush is the real dictator!”
Satire like this can still occur because overbearing assertions of intellectual-property rights would be PR suicide for Disney and would likely stoke public indignation. But it’s far more risky for such satirical commentary to be produced by guerrilla satirists or, for that matter, by mainstream media that isn’t designated as an
“Official Source of Humor” for our hyper-commerc