In class today, Tuesday 9/28/2010 we discussed Jean Baudrillard's piece 'The Precession of Simulacra'. As my media example for the week and the title of this post suggest this post is about taking a critical media approach interpreting a musical text through Baudrillard's filter. The media text I will be analyzing through Baudrillard is the song by Billy Joel, 'We Didn't Start the Fire.' The song 'We Didn't Start the Fire' lyrically lists the historical personalities and events from 1949 - 1989. The lyrics take the form of a list, in which Joel lists off everything from famous people, movements, books, theorists, events, social problems, movies, musicians to even include Ham the Chimpanzee, formerly known as the 'Space Monkey' who was the first 'American' launched into space as a test subject pre-human launch in 1961.
The song textually embodies Baudrillard's notion of 'simulacra' which the dictionary defines as 'a slight, unreal or superficial likeness or semblance' (dictionary.com) as it is a historical list of global persons and events however it is not all encompassing or entirely factual. This gives the songs listing of historical events in order from 1949 the appearance of being an all inclusive historical account which it however is not. What I am attempting to do in this blog is take key events from the song and decipher them through Baudrillard.
To start with Baudrilard states on page 457 that 'in order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being 'discovered' and with its death defies teh science that wants to grasp it'. The dictionary definition of ethnology differs from this however being 'a branch of anthropology that analyzes cultures, esp. in regard to their historical development and the similarities and dissimilarities between them' (dictionary.com). Using the dictionary's definition Joel's lyrical text embodies an ethnology as it compares global historical events on a timeline, albeit from an American-centric perspective. For example, Joel lyrisizes 'sputnik' and 'space monkey' in rapid succesion, Sputnik being the first orbiting satellite the USSR put into space in 1957 which started the space race and Space Monkey being America's rebuttle to this launch, testing their own spacecraft with Ham the Chimpanzee in 1961. Joel uses an American-centric viewpoint to list historical events and contrast some of them globally. The song by the end paints an impressive global picture of an American-centric historical timeline from '49 to '89 however it is an incomplete text. The text thus acts as Baudrillard would say, as representation of such a text. Baudrillard conceptualizes representation on page 456 as stemming 'from the principle of the equivalence of teh sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom)'. Joel's lyrics thus represent the real but do not manage to properly its lyrical signifiers as the real as the text is not all encompassing.
The song starts off with the lyric 'Harry Truman'. Truman was the President after Roosevelt and responsible for both dropping the atomic bomb on Japan ending WWII and starting the Marshall plan to rebuild Europe post-war. Joel later mentions Einstein who developed the Theory of Relativity. To use Baudrillard to analize these two inclusions we need to look at his coverage of nuclear balance and then science. On page 475 Baudrillard elaborates 'the risk of nuclear annihilation only serves as a pretext, through the sophistication of weapons for installing a universal security system, a universal lockup and control system whose deterret effect is not at all aimed at an atomic clash but, rather, at the much greater probability of any real event, of anything that would be an event in the general system and upset its balance. The balance of terror is the terror of balance.' (475). Now I have taken this out of context and backwards to prove my point (the science comes first in Baudrillard) but forgive for this misguidance. What Baudrillard means here is that post-Truman ending WWII using the atomic bomb on Japan, culture has never again resorted to nuclear usage in war-time out of balance. Elaborating, Russia knows we have nukes and we know they do so we are at a standstil to use them on one another as it would lead to the annihilation of both. To tie this into science, the atomic bomb was a scientific breakthrough which was then militarized and used to annihilate an enormous amount of people in order to resolve world conflict. This notion of science as an inherent weapon is paramount in Baudrillard. Baudrillard states on 457 that, 'it is not a question of sacrifice (science never sacrifices itself, it is always murderous)' (457). The atomic bomb drop is the clearest example of science as murderous although there are a plethora of them - the largest being the creation of science leading to the disenchantment of the world.
My next lyrical example from Joel tied directly to Baudrillard is the mention of Disneyland. Joel lists Disneyland refering to its creation and opening, however the universality of recognition in Disneyland as a global cultural norm relates to Baudrillard. Disneyland, created by Walt Disney emerged as a reinvention of American culture through distortion of historical fact to create the magical world we all love. Disney's 'Mainstreet' is based on a utopian 1950's American 'Pleasantville', other aspects of the park based on other time periods such as the Victorian era combining differing ideologies to create the park. Baudrillard says 'this 'ideological' blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral)' (461). This conceptualization by Baudrillard covers a number of topics in his piece, most paramount that of simulation. Simulation, defined by Baudrillard throughout the text stands as: '...the generation by models of a real without origin or reality... to feign to have what one doesn't have (implying absence)... threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false", the "real" and the "imaginary"... it transfers the symptom of the organic order to the unconscious order: the latter is new and taken for "real" more real than the other' (453-455). In my words what this pertains to the experience of Disneyland as follows: people who enter Disneyland see images, cultural norms, social structures and hierarchies that mimic reality, simulating the American cultural experience so chameleon-like that upon entering the park the guest's suspension of disbelief forces them to take the American cultural simulation presented by Disneyland as truth for the duration of their stay. This is problematic for the real American culture as Disneyland stands, in Baudrillard's words, as 'a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes' (454). What is meant here, in lamens terms, (and this quote did not apply specifically to Disneyland but I used it in that context) is that Disneyland presents the American cultural experience without any of the bad - there is no mention of slavery, civil war, 9/11, Pearly Harbor, Vietnam, racism or any negative aspects of American history anywhere in Disneyland. The pirates even sing and dance. What this notion acts as, in Baudrillard's terms is to dissimulate American history of negativity - 'to dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has (implying presence)... leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked...' (454). Baudrillard continues marking 'the transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point. The first reflects a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates the era of simulacra and of simulation' (457). By dissimulating American culture to create a purposeful falsified utopian simulation of American culture, the guests leaving Disneyland are struck fighting the dilemma incurred by the simulacra seeing the real world from a fundamentally altered perspective byproduct of the visit - 'the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its fully meaning' (457). The exited guests remember, associate and instill Disney-history on both their own subjective experience and that of American history and there is something supremely dangerous about this. In summation from Baudrillard, 'it is thus very naive to look for ethnology in the Savages or in some Third World - it is here, everywhere, in the metropolises, in the White community, in a world completely cataloged and analyzed, then artificially resurrected under the auspices of teh real, in a world of simulation, of the hallucination of truth, of the blackmail of the real, of the murder of every symbolic form and of its hysterical, historical retrospective - a murder of which... for a long time has extended to all Western societies' (458).
I took some of Joel's lyrical text and analyzed aspects of it applying Baudrillard's theories and have come away with a much more elaborate understanding of both Joel, Baudrillard and the pros and cons of science, simulation, simulacra, dissimulation, ethnology, ideological blanketing, and the balance of terror. My final thought taken from Baudrillard is this 'simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition that, above and beyond its object, law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation' (466) and to think I only covered five of Billy Joel's lyrics...
On my honor I have not given, nor received, nor witnessed any unauthorized assistance on this work.
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