Phoenix
“Lisztomania”This “Brooklyn Brat Pack mashup” video by Ian Parker was made in response to Sarah Neuehaus’ “Brat Pack mashup” montage of John Hughes footage, and though it lacks that clip’s charge of cultural recognition, it evokes a more specific nostalgia for the Brooklyn of the past decade. This is a fan-made amateur clip full of the director’s friends, but seriously, professional art directors and casting agents with deep pockets could not possibly give you a more recognizable and idealized version of “hipster” Brooklyn. I mean, c’mon, this may as well be the opening credits to Friends: The Next Generation! Like Neuehaus’ mashup, Parker connects with and amplifies the essential perkiness of the song, but places it in the context of a more modern fantasy of youthful utopia.
“Liztomania” is inescapable, sigh. It’s a car commercial! It’s the soundtrack to our lives! It’s a car commercial! and so on.
While I agree with a chunk of your analysis Matt, I don’t think this is any less culturally charged. While I loved Sarah Neuhaus’ original recontextualization, there’s an added layer here that makes this perhaps more intruiging than a basic mashup (which is kinda so 2002, if you want to get down to it).
First of all, let’s clear something up: this is not the work of an amateur. What does that even mean in 2009 with the democratization of media technologies, anyway? Getting paid or having a degree is no longer the professional/amateur divide. Ian Parker’s visual style, along with his editing and directing technique, is a clear indicator of the author’s ability. What I see is intent, not mistakes derived from unskilled craft or concept.
There is a double fantasy apparent in the work. It is not simply a nostalgic take on The Breakfast Club, but the setting evokes a nostalgia for whimsical squalor of late 1970s/early 1980s Lower Manhattan. Oh, to be a punk dancing amongst the graffiti to new wave music! The Breakfast Club’s rebellion-through-dance aspires to that, but they’re still trapped in the library. Parker’s version is a realization of a mediated wish fulfillment. But the decay of Lower Manhattan is inaccessible. The WTC site is holy ground; the dream is deferred to Brooklyn.
Somehow, this piece evokes Herbert Gans’ (2002) and Thomas Gieryn’s (2000) competing ideas of space and place. Gans argued that “individuals and collectivities shape natural and social space by how they use these, although each kind of space, and particularly the social, will also have effects on them” (p. 330). On the flipside, Gieryn attributed place to geographic locale which shaped social behavior. In the “Brooklyn Pack Mashup,” Parker has managed to compress the differing ideas. Brooklyn, as we know it, is both a space which has been shaped by the “hipster” culture the first decade, as well as a place carved out of the geographic loss of another. Using an updated take on 80s pop music provides the necessary link between the two.
Works Cited
Gans, H. J. (2002). The Sociology of Space: A Use-Centered View. City & Community, 1(4), 329-339. doi: 10.1111/1540-6040.00027
Gieryn, T. F. (2000). A Space for Place in Sociology. Annual Review of Sociology, 26(1), 463-496. doi: 10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.463
