from the link>One of the best readings of postmodernist music is E. Ann Kaplan's Rocking Around the Clock, in which she gives readings of music videos shown on the cable station MTV. But while Kaplan says MTV is the definitive version of postmodernist music, other scholars like Stephen Connor, Larry McCaffery and Tony Mitchell find some avant-garde rock music and performance, reggae, dub, ska, World music, rap, and other more marginalized ethnic minority music to have equally valid postmodernist characteristics, and they're just as well versed in high-falutin' French postmodern theorists as Kaplan is.
There are, in fact, a wide variety of interpretations of postmodernism, which creates much confusion in any discourse about postmodernism. For example, there is controversy about whether aesthetic and political distinctions can be made between commodified postmodernist music examined by Kaplan in MTV, and slightly less commodified, "cool" postmodernist music. There is a strong argument that there can be such distinctions, and the distinctions show the cultural/political changes postmodernism is bringing to the music industry. They also show how people as consumers, spectators, and participants accept, oppose, or fail to notice the changes. A small number of participants include postmodernist bands and musicians like the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, John Zorn and Negativland. Their songs/performances/texts are largely reactions against more undesirable qualities of consumer postmodernism, against canonized modernism and against cultural hegemony, while retaining many characteristics that qualify them as postmodernist.<
Well, gee, thanks, mav...that clears this all up for us, then.
