Michael D. Dwyer

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There are many, many things to love about being a member of the Department of Media and Communication, but one of my very favorite perks is the Department’s relationship with the Philadelphia Film Society and the Philadelphia Film Festival, which was held this year in October, and Arcadia students and faculty had the opportunity to see loads of great films there. I wasn’t able to catch as many films there as I’d wanted, but I did get to see some great ones: THE SESSIONS, STEP UP TO THE PLATE, the short THE PROCESSION, HOLY MOTORS and SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK. But perhaps my favorite experience at the festival this year was seeing GAYBY, the lovely little comedy written and directed by Jonathan Lisecki.

Part of what makes GAYBY so charming is how deceptively simple its premise is. Jenn wants to get pregnant, can’t afford fertility treatments or in vitro procedures, so she asks her college best friend Matt to impregnate her the old fashioned way. Matt is gay, hijinks ensue, you can fill in the blanks from there. Except you can’t, exactly–the film is able to avoid and often subvert those well-worn conventions from all of those television sitcoms that have toyed with the scenario since the mid 1990s. It’s not fine cinema, and it’s not trying to be. It’s just a clever and fun movie.

Lisecki first made Gayby as a short film (which is where I first heard of it–it won Best Short at the 2010 Philly Film Fest). By 2011 production had begun on the Gayby full-length feature, which premiered at South by Southwest in March 2012, and picked up an Honorable Mention Audience Award for American Independent Film at the Philadelphia Film Festival.

I enjoyed the film itself, but what has kept me thinking about GAYBY for the last month is the process by which the film itself got made. Lisecki told The New York Times that part of his motivation for making the film was his own frustration with the acting parts available for gay men: “I went through a five-year period where I auditioned for these absurdly caricatured versions of the gay best friend,” he told Mekado Murphy in October, “And I thought if this is all I’m going to be allowed to do in this industry, then I have to go create my own work.” But he wasn’t alone in making the film, of course.

As I watched the film’s end credits roll, I noticed a special thanks message to Kickstarter backers, so during the Q&A with Lisecki after the film I asked him about his experience with the crowd-funding service. Lisecki had nothing but positive things to say about the experience–he was able to raise over 16000 to help fund post-production–but what he said about it was somewhat surprising. What was most valuable, he said, was not the people making economic investments in the film, but emotional investments in the film–feeling a sense of ownership of the project, talking about it with their friends, posting about it on social media, and so on. In other words, building a following, a community of support, and a structure of belief around the project was as important as raising the money itself.

The idea of building your own structures through which you could follow your interests that Lesnicki emphasized resonated with my own experience.  In high school I killed time with friends by endlessly working on scripting, filming, and editing a movie with nothing but a full-size VHS camcorder. I also built a website, took tons of photographs and wrote cruddy poetry. None of these things were “good,” but they were fun to work on, and the experience helped me in projects I worked on later.

Then, in college, I discovered the Mr. Roboto Project in Pittsburgh, which transformed my life. I remember the first time I walked into the Roboto space, for a benefit show that a high school friend had organized. I had been going to punk/hardcore shows in VFW halls and church basements for a while, but Roboto was different. VFW halls, naturally, had their own idiosyncratic rules about how you might use their space. But Roboto was ours–it was owned and operated by kids in Pittsburgh, and if you wanted to join, all you had to do was put in your twenty bucks. You weren’t at the whims of a landlord or a show promoter. You could promote your own show or host a zine exchange, have a discussion group or screen a film. You could make decisions on how the space was run. Instead of just being a consumer of things, you could experience the power and pleasure of DIY. Like Ian Mackaye recently told Mother Jones, “if you ask for permission, the answer is always no. So I developed a practice of just doing things.”

This is not just possible in dingy underground music venues.  A few years ago I was listening to an interview with Judd Apatow on a podcast called The Sound of Young America (now called Bullseye), and was struck by the story of how he broke into the comedy world:

I just love the idea of a teenaged Judd Apatow calling up the Screen Actors Guild and hunting down Weird Al for an interview for his rinky-dink high school radio show.

This, it seems to me, is not all that different from the story of how The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein broke into the world of high-level political commentary. Getting a column in The Washington Post is traditionally the result of high level connections, whether through money or elite Ivy League education. Klein is certainly well-educated–he attended both UC Santa Cruz and UCLA as an undergraduate–but he was not hand-picked for success. When he applied for a position in the campus newspaper, he was turned down. So he began blogging, first on his own and then with other prominent “netroots” figures.

It’s also not all that different from the story of Tavi Gevinson, the young woman who went from fashion blogging at 13 to founding Rookie magazine at age 15. She is now a prominent figure in global fashion, appearing in the pages of The New York Times, at fashion shows, and on television shows like Project Runway. This article in Rookie is a good example of the magazine’s style and attitude.

What do these people have in common? They did not wait to get a job in the industry that they were interested in to start working in that industry. And they didn’t start that work thinking it would immediately turn into something professional–it just helped them build their skills, make connections, and develop their own confidence. Like Apatow says, his high school radio show was “comedy college.”

In my own job as a college professor, I try to make clear to my students that while I am there to help them develop their skills, expand their knowledge, challenge them and build their confidence, I am not going to be enough. No teacher could be. If you are training to be a basketball player, you need to listen to coaches, study opponents, and understand both basketball techniques and tactics. But you can’t just watch film and do drills. You also have to play basketball. So it is the same for my students, who want to be filmmakers, or writers, or designers, or public relations professionals. They need to study, they need to work on their technique. But they also just need to do stuff.

This is why the most rewarding thing I’ve done as a teacher has been advising the students at Loco Magazine.  While I do my very best to advise, support, and counsel those students regarding the process of pitching stories, making the most of the online format of the magazine, and promoting their work on social media, the work those students do is entirely of their design. They pitch the stories, make assignments, rigorously edit (with double-blind review!), design and promote the project. This means considerable risk–every issue could be really bad. And since every issue is online, with their names attached to it, it could be embarrassing for a long, long time. But instead, because of these students ability and commitment, they’ve built what I believe to be the best student publication on campus. And they’ve done it entirely on their own.

There is a radical power to sticking your neck out and doing the stuff you want to do. Even if that work is not as good as you wish it could be, the very fact of making your own film, or starting your own radio program, or founding a magazine reinforces a belief that the things you create can be meaningful–that you yourself are meaningful and important and powerful. That is as crucial as any essay, any project, or any mark on a transcript. This is the opportunity we can offer here at Arcadia, and I sincerely hope all of our students will take it.

In teaching my undergraduate Media Studies seminar, I often illustrate concepts that students find abstract or complex with examples from pop music, and especially music video. A few weeks ago, I was using a series of clips to run through some  dominant concepts in mid-twentieth century media studies, a funny thing happened in my classroom.

I started to play this clip…

…and just as I reached to turn the sound down and start talking about QD Leavis, my students started singing. All of them. Loudly.

White, black and hispanic, males and females, gamers and fashionistas, tattooed and pigtailed, suburbanites and urban immigrants, every single one of these students–many of whom are often too shy to raise their hands in class–were bobbing their heads (like yeah) and hey-eyey-ey-ey-ey-ing their little hearts out.

We eventually carried on with the day’s agenda, working the day’s scheduled readings. But the moment stuck with me long after class was over and my students had all gone home with visions of Barthes and De Certeau dancing in their heads. Considering how often we hear about narrowcasting and niche programming fracturing American audiences, this outburst seemed compelling. But such claims about uber-fragmentation have always been overblown, I think (the vast majority of my students seem to share the same core tastes, even if they differ a little at the edges.) The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that my classes’ singalong resonated with the narrative of the song, cut against much of the reading we’d done in class so far, and served as a reminder of both the utility, and the joy, of media studies.

In the song’s narrative, poor little Miley/Hannah/Destiny Hope/whatever-her-name-is hops off a plane at L-A-X with her dreams and a cardigan, dislocated from her home/social structure and chock full of anxieties. In this moment, she is under the conditions that left so many late 19th and early 20th century theorists, from Emile Durkheim to Dwight MacDonald clutching their pearls: increased mobility of populations, the expanding reach of capitalist markets, and the breakdown of traditional community structures left masses of thoroughly modern Mileys feeling adrift in an alienating world.

In the song, however, Miley’s feet are planted firmly on the ground. If the song’s sound doesn’t, the video’s visual elements consistently work to solidify Cyrus’ American heartland bona fides–there are EIGHT close-ups of Cyrus’ cowboy boots in a three minute video. She performs in a dusty drive-in theater overflowing with cutoff jeans and flannel shirts, muscle cars and pickup trucks, and (of course) a giant American flag. The video’s color palette looks astonishingly like an Instagram photo. Clearly, the idea here is to differentiate Cyrus from the culture industry capitals of New York and Los Angeles, as well as tie her to a community context (“Nashville”) that serves as the antithesis of the upper crust of commercial media.

Of course, this is all total bunk. Cyrus isn’t just some good-ol’ country girl. She is famously the daughter of country-pop crossover star and sometimes stage/screen actor Billy Ray Cyrus. She was raised on a 500 acre estate in an upper middle class suburb, but also lived in Toronto while her father filmed a TV series. By 2003, at age 11, she was appearing in major Hollywood films. So while “Miley Cyrus,” as a constructed image, represents an authentic heartland America, a quick glance at her Wikipedia page reveals that authentic Heartland America to be largely a slapdash collection of signifiers that stand for a series of vague social and political values. A “myth,” even.

But none of that matters in the song itself. Ultimately, songs are stories, and stories don’t play by the same rules as people do. It doesn’t matter that Superman REALLY COULDN’T fly around the world fast enough to turn back time, what matters is how the story reflects or constructs meaning for the world in which it circulates. In the story of “Party in the U.S.A.,” what finally connects Cyrus to her new L.A. community is not an embrace of taco trucks or the resounding success of a tween-oriented sitcom, but a Jay-Z song on the radio. It’s significant, I think, that Cyrus’ lyric says “They’re playing my song”–a privileged white tween from Nashville/Toronto/Hollywood claiming ownership of hip-hop might give us pause–but considering the degree to which Jay-Z has succeeded in redefining hip-hop success as “market saturation,” maybe it’s not so crazy after all. But Cyrus knows that the songs on Top-40 radio in Nashville are the very same songs on Top-40 radio in L.A., and that, if nothing else, that’s one thing that holds us together as Americans.  She hears that song and she knows she’s gonna be okay, even if she’s not in Nashville anymore. It’s still her country, and it’s still her culture.

The idea that the mass standardization of mass culture would allow for greater connection and communion cuts against much of the reading we had done in class. Dwight MacDonald famously warned against the alienation and atomization of “mass society,” and feared that the consumption of mass culture would serve as a surrogate for actual community, leaving us unable to interact with, or contribute to, either our local communities or with “high culture.”  But the “Party in the U.S.A.” experiment in my classroom suggested a different role for mass culture in American society.

For both my students (who arrive in my classroom from wildly different backgrounds and with divergent social and cultural perspectives on the world) and for the “Miley” character in the song, pop culture texts like silly tween-pop songs represent a lingua franca over which they can bond, exchange, argue, and even rejoice. It can also be the launching pad for new creative endeavors.

Which, it seems to me, is part of the value of teaching theory in a media studies department. It matters to me that my students think rigorously about the function of culture in society, understand concepts like ideology and hegemony, and think about how media texts produce and accumulate meanings throughout their processes of production, circulation, and reception. But I also want to make clear that these things are not just present in dense theoretical texts, or just in “intellectual” literature or film.  In fact, texts like “Party in the U.S.A.” give us a common point of reference over which we can discuss difference, privilege, culture and politics. These are things that surround us all of the time, and acknowledging that need not be a grim rejection of all earthly pleasures.

This is, I’m afraid, how my students initially respond to the thing we roughly call “theory.” Students often get the impression that “theory” or “critique”  is a self-righteous condemnation of mainstream culture or American values. As a result, students often remark that a lecture on ideology leaves them “depressed,” or still worse, they become defensively angry and frustrated.

This is not the point of learning “theory” in media studies, of course, and to my mind it is precisely the wrong attitude to have about learning in general. But this is how our students often experience their first exposure to “theory,” and as instructors, educators, and as citizens we have an obligation to address this discomfort in as direct, honest, and empathetic way possible. While it is often dispiriting to think about one’s own complicity in systems of inequality and oppression, we must relentlessly oppose the idea that thinking about things can paralyze us or destroy our ability to enjoy ourselves. It gives us the agency to understand, and shape, the world around us. Acknowledging the political and social values that are implicit within film or pop music does not mean holding one’s self above, or outside of the audiences that enjoy those texts. It simply means identifying those implicit messages as neither neutral, nor natural. It means dealing with complexity, instead of denying it.

I believe there is a utility to media studies, and not just in preparing students for careers in media industries, and not just so they can understand “academic” writing. I don’t subscribe to the idea of teaching theory as a series of “lenses.” The metaphor has always struck me as ill-fitting, as it suggests that Marxism or psychoanalysis or whatever is a singular or monolithic “view” of a particular text that one can put on or take off depending on the assignment. Instead, I prefer to organize my theory courses around a series of interpretive methods, that can work in concert or in conflict with one another, and make available an irreducible number of potential readings that can themselves be a source of further debate, contestation, and even pleasure.

One of the primary goals of my course is to emphasize to students that we don’t have to choose between critique and consumption. Both are valid pleasures, and neither makes the other irrelevant, or impossible. I try to emphasize that, as Judith Butler said in a recent interview:

To re-examine our thinking is not just our dour political duty. It is a singularly human ability, among all living things, to reflect upon our own processes of perception, of reasoning, and of evaluation. It is invigorating, exciting, empowering…even fun. My students may initially roll their eyes at that claim, but once they grow out of the idea that ‘theory’ is some foreign and intimidating drill sergeant trying to destroy everything they hold dear, and begin to acknowledge that “theory” is an acknowledgement of the complex and constructed nature of our “common sense” visions of the world, I can see my classroom change. It becomes clear that critique need not replace “normal” consumption. Critique can coexist and contest with consumption, and even cooperate with it.

Just like we can.

Hey-ey-ey-eee-yayee-yay.

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A friend of mine posted this cartoon from The New Yorker’s caption contest on Facebook the other day, accompanied by the comment: “Holy shit! They finally did it! And yes, I submitted ‘My wife is a slut.’”

This struck me as weird, because a) It’s sort of an unremarkable cartoon b) I had no idea this friend cared about New Yorker caption contests (I thought that was just Roger Ebert?) and c) the incongruous ‘shock’ misogyny coming from him.

I figured it must be some sort of pop culture “thing” that I just wasn’t recognizing. So, for what was without question the first time in my life, I punched “pig complaints wife slut” into Google, and wound up at this page from the fansite Seinology, the transcript from Season Nine, Episode Thirteen of Seinfeld titled “The Cartoon.” After a few moments, I started to recall a fuzzy memory of scenes of Elaine railing against the New Yorker‘s arcane humor.

In the last few days, various internet outlets (Gawker, Yahoo, the AV Club) as well as The New Yorker itself (via a 2-part essay from Cartoon editor Bob Mankoff on its blog and posts on Tumblr…yes, The New Yorker has a Tumblr) have written about the caption contest, which is undoubtedly the result that The New Yorker was looking for. It also, in the Mankoff piece, gives a talented and thoughtful guy a chance to reflect upon the kind of work he does, and how it’s received from the outside. But I find myself more interested in my friend’s “Holy shit!” response, and what it says about the pleasures we take in contemporary media.

“The Cartoon” is a solid Seinfeld episode, but is hardly a legendary one like “The Soup Nazi” or “The Contest” or “The Pez Dispenser.” It’s not even one of the best from the final season, an honor that I think would probably go to “The Merv Griffin Show” or “The Slicer.” I would consider myself a pretty big Seinfeld fan: In high school I wore a “THE K MAN” t-shirt so nerdy THEY DON’T EVEN SELL IT ON THE INTERNET, somberly attended a party for the final episode, and in retrospect my initial decision to study marine science as an undergraduate was more than a little influenced by my desire to begin stories with “The sea was angry that day, my friends…” I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a show on network television from week to week as much as I enjoyed Seinfeld. Still, when I saw my friend had posted that New Yorker cartoon to Facebook I had absolutely no recollection of it. This, I think, is part of the pleasure that my friend took from the cartoon.

Had the cartoon been a gag about a puffy shirt or a yadda yadda, I don’t think his response would be the same. Nor would the pleasure of recognition (his, or mine) be the same if this cartoon ran in the weeks following the episode’s original airing in January 1998. Part of why the connection is enjoyable is that it is not obvious, it takes either significant knowledge of the show (as evidenced by my friend) or a little bit of research (my route) to “get it.” But this kind of pleasure is only made accessible by changing modes of media consumption and circulation. If we had shifted this entire scenario 30 years into the past (say, if in 1995 a New Yorker cartoonist wanted to submit a cartoon entirely dedicated to a mid-tier All in the Family episode), it’s hard to imagine it making past the pitch stage, let alone being widely recognized and understood.  Even if there were some  Archie Bunker superfans that may have caught the reference, the chances that enough would also pay attention to New Yorker caption contests as to make it a valid talking point within a week is basically nil. Sorry Meathead.*

Every year I teach Roland Barthes’ “From Work to Text” as an introduction to the tradition of cultural studies, which among other things defines the object of study not as an inert ‘work,’ something that has intrinsic meaning and politics and pleasures, but as a ‘text’, a cultural object that “is experienced only in an activity, in a production.”¹ In the case of the Seinfeld cartoon, it was only rendered meaningful by my friend Paul’s engagement with it. The key concept here is that texts are activated by our readings, and that our readings are influenced by our experiences in the world, including our experiences with other texts. Barthes stresses the importance of intertextuality, the notion that each text is “entirely woven of quotations, references, echoes: cultural languages…antecedent or contemporary which traverse it through and through.”² This is why my friend’s initial reading produced pleasure, while mine produced nothing but confusion…until I re-encountered the Seinfeld episode that gave me access to a similar reading.

And it’s that ability to re-encounter the episode that is the crucial difference between my initial reading and my friend’s, and it’s also the difference between this real-world Seinfeld situation and my hypothetical All in the Family example mentioned above. I watched Seinfeld during its original run and enjoyed reruns in syndication, had a Seinfeld t-shirt and talked about the show with friends. That’s what being a fan of the show meant in the late 1990s. But being a Seinfeld fan now means having much greater access to the show–the entire series plus bonus material on DVD, ongoing discussion through online episode recaps and fan forums, free streaming episodes on Crackle and updates on the official Soup Nazi food truck tour of 2012 (coming soon to a city near you …no, really.) This is just the stuff I found in 2 minutes on Facebook.

These changes in fans access to, and media companies’ circulation of, cultural texts allow for increasingly more sophisticated and subtle intertextual relationships to be built for active fans. Because my friend owns the series on DVD, his familiarity with and access to episodes like “The Cartoon” far outstrips mine, and thus he can immediately recognize the cartoon’s referent. But because I am connected to superfans like him via social media, the New Yorker can rest assured that even those people not immediately in the know can be brought up to speed with minimal effort on their part. And we can all feel special for being in on the joke.

In the past I’ve explained the concept of intertextuality to students using examples from The Grapes of Wrath (with its biblical allusions) ICarly shouting out The Wire,  Doomtree blending two underrated 1990s music institutions and even “My Country tis of Thee” giving a jolly old middle finger to the English crown. I’m not sure if I’ll use this example in my teaching (I suspect my students haven’t really watched much Seinfeld, and they certainly don’t care about New Yorker caption contests), but I think what’s interesting about the New Yorker cartoon is that it shows that the pleasures of intertextuality have penetrated into the marketing strategies of even the most stuffy of media outlets, and how important it will be to media production, circulation, and consumption in the coming years. However cliquey and insular the fan communities that take pleasure in intertextuality might be…these days even The New Yorker wants to get into the club. So hurry up, hipsters–you need to be able to say you were up on your media studies before it was cool.

¹ Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text.” In The Cultural Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2007. p 83.

²ibid, p 84

* Thanks to twitter user @kbyme91 for the correction. I initially typed “Meatball.” In my defense, that’s clearly a better name.

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My first piece for Negative Dunkalectics went up today. It’s about grief, my dad, and the 2012 Boston Celtics, but mostly it’s about how we use sports to understand our lives. Or about how I do, anyway. Give it a read if you have a moment. It’s called “On Windows Closing”

It is a strange time to be a Celtics fan. Rajon Rondo is one of the most uniquely talented and uniquely limited players in the NBA. Ray Allen’s jump shot remains staggeringly beautiful, and the work he does running off screens remains astounding. Paul Pierce still has an array of stepbacks, upfakes and pull-up shots from the elbow. And Garnett remains the quarterback of the team’s strong defense, calling out switches, stepping out on pick and rolls and grabbing seven or eight rebounds a game. In short, the Celtics still look like the Celtics. But in this young season, it’s abundantly clear that they are not the same Celtics that they were before. (MORE)

I’ve  started and re-started this post six times already, trying to come up with an intriguing angle on Girls to the Front, the book by Sara Marcus that occupied the coveted “first-book-Michael-will-read-after-the-school-year-ends” for 2010-2011. For the seventh attempt at writing this entry, I’m going to try a simpler approach. Read this book. Trust on this.

More after the jump.

Instead of trying to frame this entry around a particular theme or resonance with contemporary culture (the gist of attempts #1-6 of this post), I’ll try to give some reasons why people with different levels of familiarity with 1990s youth culture and RG in particular must (must must must!) read Marcus’ book.

For students that have no familiarity with this history, this is unquestionably the best book out there to introduce you to the multifaceted developments in feminist youth culture that came to be known (for better and for worse) under the label of “riot grrrl.” In teaching classes on popular media in the last five years, I’ve tried multiple approaches to introduce students to RG–forcing them (with much resistance) to listen to Bikini Kill and Bratmobile records, screening the documentary Don’t Need You (2006), reading Joanne Gottlieb & Gayle Wald’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit, assigning them to ” browse the EMP’s “Riot Grrrl Retrospective” online exhibit, and having them write responses to selections from Nadine Modem’s collection Revolution Girl Style Now, Alex Wrekk’s Stolen Sharpie Revolution  and Steven Duncombe’s Notes from the Underground. Hell, I even dug up a clip of that one Roseanne episode where Roseanne and Jackie pick up a riot grrl hitchhiker played by a pre-Dharma and Greg Jenna Elfman.

While I was able to convince some students that maybe, maaaybe there may have been legitimate reasons that one might want to be a feminist, and there could possibly be some value in a musical aesthetic that did not adhere to traditional notions of what a band, and particularly a band with a female vocalist, should sound like, it was tough going. Honestly, I got the most mileage out of the observation that one of the most beloved figures from Millenial teen films was coded as a riot grrrl:

But while students have generally been willing to acknowledge that everyone has a right to free speech, they have rarely been able to appreciate why RG rhetorically pitched itself the way that it did. Students often feel discomfort at the notion of anger at all, particularly when it comes from women, and only a handful have ever fathomed the rationale behind the not-quite-”media blackout” (though this might be explained by the immense number of aspiring press professionals populating my courses).

Girls to the Front is the best available introduction to RG for such audiences not only because it’s immensely readable (the language is often spine-tingling, and I hate it when people say junk like that) and incredibly-well researched (Marcus clearly put in a ton time reporting, digging in archives, reading and reviewing zines, press, and concert footage). More importantly, the book provides the context behind what was happening from the years 1989-1994 — both in American society and in punk/DIY subcultures — that no other history has been able to. Marcus doesn’t just give you a list of zines and bands. More crucially, she shows how things like Faludi’s Backlash, the emergence of Rush Limbaugh, the shameful Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, Jesus Jones’ contemptible chart-topper “Right Here, Right Now” and the growth of the Hooters restaurant chain contributed to the toxic atmosphere against which 90s youth subcultures like RG defined themselves.

For people like myself, who were either too young or too insulated from the world to really understand RG, but had some awareness of its existence (I sort of remember that Roseanne episode, but as a 14 year old in 1995 I think the furthest I got into RG was thinking that Elastica, Dance Hall Crashers, and Luscious Jackson were, like, pretty cool)–Girls to the Front will provide that external context that’s crucial for students, as well as offering a sober and sometimes critical view of riot grrrl. It’s easy, I think, for retrospectives and tributes to come across as simple celebrations, but Marcus never celebrates simply, even though it is perfectly clear that she has a personal investment in the era. The last 100 pages are particularly fantastic in this regard, not only showing what happened to those prominent figures who distanced themselves from RG practically and conceptually, convinced that sudden media attention and inevitable fatigue had rendered the movement unrecognizable to what had come before. Marcus’ account of the Jessica Hopper affair and the disappointing 2nd National Convention in Omaha display her ability to render critiques without resorting to condemnation or caricatured villains. I learned tons from this book, not only understanding who did what when, but what the motivations and tensions that motivated the big names (Kathleen, Tobi, Allison, Jessica, Ian) and lesser-known participants (there is an extended account of the founding of RG Vancouver that was really interesting).

The book’s ability to make clear-eyed assessments of what riot got right, and where it went wrong, is perhaps what makes it valuable to those audiences who had personal experience with it. Marcus isn’t just interested in saying what riot grrrl was and where it came from–there is an extended section that discusses why it’s as important now as ever. Tobi Vail’s review of the book makes this point explicitly (bt dubs if you’re not reading Tobi’s blog you should be):

Is “riot grrrl” dead? Well I will not make that claim now because in retrospect, it was certainly not dead in 1993, it had relevancy to all kinds of girls then, even if I no longer felt it was a useful term, and I think the same is probably true today. In fact I know it is true, because I get letters (ok emails) from girls all over the world all the time who tell me they are riot grrrls and love Bikini Kill and that they believe in “The Revolution, GRRL STYLE NOW!” By the way, I still think that the emphasis needs to be on “now” and “revolution” rather than on “grrl” or “style”, but if you disagree, please let me know why! But if you are a Riot Grrl then own it! Don’t get all caught up in early 90′s retro crap. Start a fucking riot!!!!

Tobi describes her position as an anti-nostalgia one, but I actually think the nostalgic affect (both pleasurable and painful) that is produced by reading a book like Girls to the Front can motivate and generate productive dialogue, practices, and tension that can move things forward, for punk, for feminism, for youth, and for culture more generally. It’s certainly sparked discussions like the one below (from the Kelly Writers’ House in Philadelphia in February), which allow those who lived RG, or those who are just learning about it for the first time, to start talking about where to go next.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about The Beastie Boys lately, and not because they’ve been one of my favorite bands (Licensed to Ill was one of the first two albums I purchased with my own money–six year old Mikey Dwyer picked it up on cassette from a Massachusetts record store in early 1987, along with the soundtrack to Top Gun). And it’s not just because the run-up to their latest album, Hot Sauce Committee Part 2, has utilized new media services and transmedia promotion with a sophistication and savviness not ordinarily associated with the major record labels. And it’s not because the album is, by the way, totally fresh. I mean, it is because of those things, and there are lots of worthwhile reads on those subjects. But it’s also because the promotion for this album has also featured the Beastie Boys seeking to reflect on, and finally redefine, their 1980s stardom, and perhaps offer a new vision of the 1980s as a whole.

My dissertation focused on issues of cultural memory and nostalgia, particularly on the ways that film and popular culture in the 1980s invoked and redefined cultural images of the fifties, to diverse and sometimes contentious political and social effects. Over the last four or five years, it’s been impossible not to notice that the 1980s are subject to similar retrospection now. Whether it is Lady Gaga recycling the 1980s star image of Madonna or  Hollywood films like Easy A, Hot Tub Time Machine and Take Me Home Tonight pastiching John Hughes teen films, government officials renaming highways, schools and airports after Ronald Reagan, or 80s-themed parties at clubs and on college campuses, it’s clear that the cultural meaning of the eighties is entering a new period of negotiation and debate.

With Hot Sauce Committee Part 2, The Beastie Boys get in on the Eighties nostalgia action. There is a lyrical callback to “Fight for Right” in “Make Some Noise,” the kinda-sorta lead single¹ that repeatedly promise to “party for the motherfuckin’ right to fight.” The album’s release also coincided with an oral history of the Beastie Boys published in New York magazine which, interestingly, only covers the years 1981-1987. But the most obvious connection to the 1980s is made by “Fight for Your Right, Revisited,” a 30-minute promotional film produced by Adam Yauch’s film/recording studio Oscilloscope Laboratories.  The film picks up where the Beasties’ debut video left off, with Ad-Rock (Elijah Wood), MCA (Danny McBride) and Mike D (Seth Rogen) escaping a house party gone wild. From there, the B-Boys break into a bodega, party with Bon Jovi groupies, harass some squares in an outdoor cafe, and eventually, meet up with time-travelling future versions of themselves (Will Ferrell, Jack Black and John C. Reilly) that have (naturally) arrived in a DeLorean.

In an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition, Mike D and AdRock call the gesture “a tribute to ourselves,” and others (particularly R. Colin Tait in Antenna) have placed the video in the context of a “culture of referentiality” to which the Beasties have certainly contributed. Tait calls the video “both a playful reflection on the band’s meaning and travels within the past 25 years, as well as a text that indicates the Beasties’ influence within a larger cultural net of references, fandoms, stars and other texts.” Fans of the group will no doubt recognize the connections to other Beasties videos–the final scene  recalls the “Shake Your Rump” video, and the video features several characters from the Beasties universe, from Johnny Ryall to Nathanial Hörnblowér, who famously and hilariously interrupted Michael Stipe at the 1994 Video Music Awards after “Sabotage” inexplicably did not win “Best Video.”

Still, it’s somewhat surprising that The Beastie Boys would venture back into the 1980s, as they’ve essentially spent their entire career trying to escape the legacy of “Fight for your Right.” Their discomfort with the frat-goon personas of Licensed to Ill directly led to their split with Rick Rubin and Def Jam in 1987, and their follow up album Paul’s Boutique represented an enormous shift in the Beastie Boys sound, moving from cheezy classic rock riffs to a sampling tour de force.  When the band looked backward, it was to the 1970s, a tendency reflected in their choice of funk and jazz samples (from artists like Jimmy Castor and Kool & the Gang), their instrumentation (funk guitars and organs), as well as their fashion and imagery (producing and wearing ABA-style basketball jerseys, and the entire “Sabotage” video). At the same time, the band embraced 1990s-style politics, organizing and performing in several Free Tibet concerts and aligning themselves with Third Wave feminist movements of the 1990s, particularly after Horowitz became involved with Kathleen Hanna. In 1994′s Ill Communication, Yauch raps “I’m gonna say a little something that’s long overdue / This disrespecting women has got to be through,” a far cry from the ethos he espoused on “Girls” just 8 years prior.  They were also some of the only mainstream (male) artists to publicly condemn the sexual violence at Woodstock 99.

By the late 1990s, the Beastie Boys had all but eliminated Licensed to Ill songs from their live performances. Of the 42 tracks on The Sounds of Science, the Beasties’ double LP Greatest Hits anthology released in 2000, only three songs come from Licensed to Ill (the same number of tracks that came from 1995′s Aglio e Olio, their 8-song hardcore EP) and one of those songs, “Brass Monkey,” is introduced in the liner notes by Yauch saying “We included this song because it sucks.” Perhaps most notably, only one Beastie Boys song prior to “Make Some Noise”  included a direct reference to  Licensed to Ill  (the “mmmmm…..drrrroooop” from Licensed‘s “The New Style” pops up in 1998′s “Intergalactic).

So why would a band that gained legitimacy and respect by working as hard as possible to escape “Fight for Your Right” return to it 25 years later? Aside from it being a funny and intriguing way to promote the new album, it seems to me that “Fight for Your Right, Revisited” allows the Beastie Boys to retroactively define their “Fight for Your Right” personas as juvenile, misguided, and ultimately ridiculous performance. The impressive and somewhat gratuitous use of celebrity cameos reinforces that notion, as viewers are constantly reminded that these characters are “played” and not lived, and the silly plot (a breakdancing showdown becomes a literal pissing match at the video’s close) highlights the absurdity of the entire affair.

Underscoring that point is an exchange between 1986 Adrock (Wood) and Mike D (Seth Rogan) toward the end of the film. As they watch the bumbling, middle-aged versions of themselves struggle to accomplish the most simple tasks, Mike D assures his compatriots “this is just a possibility of the future. I think we’re being given the gift of seeing what we could be like, what we might be like.”

In the end, “Fight for Your Right (Revisited)” provides the rationale for moving beyond the 1980s, as appealing as they might be through the haze of retrospection, and Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 shows us the rewards for doing so. As we suffer through a series of Hollywood reboots and remakes of films, television, and even toys of the 1980s, and as we prepare for another campaign season where every candidate tries to be the most like Ronald Reagan, we would do well to remember that it’s much better to revisit the 1980s than to re-live them.

¹ – “Too Many Rappers” was actually released in June 2009 as the advanced single to Hot Sauce Committee, Part 1 –which was delayed and renamed Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 after MCA entered treatment for lymphoma.