Jess Pardoe Postmodernism Essay: Using Summer Camp and a band of your choice, explain how some artists

can be called postmodern Summer Camp is the band I am going to talk about in this essay; Summer Camp, the band, is postmodern in all of their work. Firstly, the sounds of Summer Camps music closely relates to music of foreign pop bands from Sweden or elsewhere. The expectation of Summer Camps appearance is that both the man and woman are foreign in appearance and they have a quirky style. In contrast to this the real appearance of Summer Camp are two regular looking, British people with dark hair and original clothes. This is postmodernism in itself as they break the rules of tying their appearance in with their music. Postmodernism is summed up in many different ways; two types of postmodernism are pastiche, and homage. A pastiche is a micky take of something, for example Family Guy doing a Star Wars featured episode but making a joke of the original Star Wars plot. Homage is a respectful copy of someone elses work; many artists release cover albums, or singles, which are potentially not their own work but they have put a twist on the original song and claimed whom they have taken the song from. Postmodernism was recreated as a response to modernism, and breaks conventional and traditional rules of media. Kirby Ferguson has a theory of postmodernism that Everything is a Remix, he created a series of videos expressing his theory, which explains his way of thinking. Fergusons theory applies to the Rihanna Umbrella track, and the fact that the backing track of that number 1 hit song was taken from Garage Band, an application for Mac computers. Another artist that is postmodern is, Eminem. The way in which Eminem uses postmodernism in his work is that he has a stage name within his regular music name, as well as characters in his videos and performances, Slim Shady and Marshall Mathers which is actually his birth name. Eminem uses hyperreality by having characters and allowing the audience to interpret them in their own way, this is a form of audience participation. Eminem often samples many different artists, for example he took Queen and Paul Rodgers opening from Reaching Out and changed the pitch and tempo to use it in his song, Beautiful. Summer Camp differs to this as within their work they often use regular instruments combined with computerized sounds. This is a combination of modernist and postmodernist styles; the modernist being the traditional instruments such as guitars, or pianos; and the postmodern being computerized sounds through keyboards. As for comparing the two artists styles, Eminem often uses his characters within his videos, showing different sides to his personality. One of the characters is Slim Shady, his alter ego; this album consisted of a style of music called horrorcore hip-hop. Eminem changes genre according to each of his characters, the main category he fits into is hip-hop, however he has produced rap, horrorcore, rap rock, and many more genres of music before. This is very different to the style of Summer Camp; they fit into indie-pop, indie-rock, and alternative pop genres. Their sound often resembles that of 60s girl band groups, as well as 80s synth pop bands, this is because they use computerized sounds. Summer Camps video to their single Round the Moon is a shortened version of

Jess Pardoe a 1980s Swedish film; they did not make the video themselves. Using old videos is common with postmodern bands, they either use clips from old films or take bits from discarded videos that were never used. Summer Camp managed to combine the old fashioned style of video, with a modern sound; this shows that there is no difference between the music style of the past and present within their music. Summer Camp and Eminem both write their own songs, which means they are of a high style class of music. Within Eminems lyrics he often contradicts himself, and even uses mockery against himself, society, and other people. Summer Camps lyrics are merely conventional pop lyrics, such as those of Better Off Without You, for example: stop calling me late at night and I dont care anymore. Summer Camp has not covered any controversial issues within their music, however Eminem has such as: drugs, violence, sex, and alcoholism. Eminem has made it into the Top 40 charts multiple times, which is opposite to Summer Camp as they have never been listed within these charts. Eminem is still not considered a mainstream act in terms of his choice of lyrics, style, and different personalities or characters. He has performed at large festivals in the UK but his music is certainly not appealing to every person interested in hip-hop. Summer Camp at the present time are very elitist in their popularity, they formed in 2009 so have only been around for a few years; they have not released many songs at all and have not appeared on any famous chat shows or other TV programs as of yet. As Summer Camp become more famous, they will probably lose many of the fans that they have in the present time. This is because, as soon as something elitist becomes mainstream, the elitist fans will find someone new who has not made it big yet. Summer Camps songs all have a similar tone to them, this could be why they have not made it in their careers yet; Eminem however has a broad enough range of genres within his music that he has appealed to many different audiences, but not so many that he has destroyed his elitist fans. Another factor that makes both these artists postmodern is the artwork they use within presenting their music. Eminem has released many albums, for example: Infinite, The Eminem Show, Relapse, Recovery and others. All of his albums reflect a different style of music; this is similar to the album structure of David Bowie. The album covers Eminem has used for his albums are all plain and simple; this is similar to his website as it has a plain colour scheme and is easy to navigate. By Eminem using simple designs for his non-musical work, it contradicts his mix of genres when it comes to his musical work. Summer Camp however give an opposite impression to this through their non-musical work, for example their website is a combination of many different sound clips which the navigator can click on different words of phrases to play the sounds and short videos. The website loads while a sentence is crossed out Everything changes when you get older. This contrasts their style of musical work as all of their music sounds very similar; whereas all of the music and sound clips on their website is very different. The date on their website is also 1984, which reflects the era their music is supposed to sound like its from; this ties in with their online digipak as it is written in the style of a combination of a teenage boy, and teenage girls diary. This links to the idea of binary opposites, as the teenage boys diary pages have pictures of girls on, and the teenage girl diary pages have

Jess Pardoe friends lists on them. Jonathan Kramer argues that it is often typical of postmodern bands to distrust binary opposites, however Summer Camp stick by the binary opposition of genders through their diaries on the website, as well as the bands visual appearance. There are two members of Summer Camp, one male, one female; they both dress stereotypically according to their gender and the girl has traditional long hair, whilst the boy has short hair.