DAY 5

OKAY I'VE GOT IT NOW.

On today's episode of Hello Bastards, we will be giving a special postmodern analysis of the discography of the screamo/powerviolence band known as Orchid. Legends within the scene, Orchid was active from 1997-2002 and became infamous for combining the extreme intensity and speed of hardcore and grindcore with very emotional and soul-baring screaming, all filtered through a postmodern aesthetic that made references and oblique homages to Anna Karina to the Frankfurt School, both lyrically and stylistically. They released three albums and they're all essential listening for any hippie who dare uses the term "punk rock" unironically.

As far as postmodern analysis goes, Orchid are, ironically enough, the one group who I've discussed who most directly reference, meta-textually, these concepts and ideas in their work. One such example exists in their second LP Dance Tonight! Revolution Tomorrow! on the song Snow Delay At The Frankfurt School. The song is only a minute long and in its last 20 seconds the singer shrieks: 

"like anywhere else there are no
coincidences, probability makes for accomplices and change creates meaning."
when we move, it's a movement.


Damn son. The postmodern aspects of the philosophy (consistent change that creates a constantly changing truth) translate onto the ethos of the band (rapid-fire and unpredictable music played at varying dynamics) like butter onto toast. The band challenged the meathead conformity of the hardcore scene by blatantly challenging it with abstract lyricism much like the postmodern literary movement sought to do against the singular, modernist views of the past. Orchid was, at its core, an emoviolence punk rock band, but it was also a band that was emotional, skeptical, and spastic in its music and lyrics. 

Check dis shit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTdt-PbcYZY&t=409s

Reference:

Green, Jayson. Perf. Geoff Garlock, Jeffrey Salane, and Will Killingsworth. Snow Delay At The Frankfurt School. Orchid. Kurt Ballou, 1999. MP3.

DAY 4

OOOHHHH HOLY SHIT IT'S TIME

Fooly Cooly is without a doubt my favorite anime of all time, it's just full of everything I like in the medium. The music, the aesthetic, the characters, the way the plot unfolds, YAS. Fooly Cooly, basically, is about a sixth grade asshole named Naoto, who spends his days trying to act mature and hanging around with his brother's emotionally unstable ex-girlfriend. He meets a Martian woman who hits him over the head with a bass guitar and causes robots to come out of it. Plot ensues. Comprehension is not the primary draw, or even point, to this show. The plot is something that must be discovered for yourself, not explained. I've watched this shit like twenty times and I still don't really know what goes on for some of it.

As postmodern works of art go, there's really nothing that's like this show. The series is ultimately an exercise in creativity for creativity's sake, but in the process it becomes a show that analyzes the importance of context in art and deconstructs the medium of animation as a whole. So much of the humor of the anime comes from Japanese wordplay, meaning that a good portion of the humor is either lost on those who watch the dubbed version or get an edited version of the jokes in the English subtitles. Along with this, many of the characters in the series exhibit odd characteristics for reasons that we don't necessarily understand unless we were to watch interviews with the director of the show Kazuya Tsurumaki. For example many of the characters in the show exhibit an obsession with spicy curry, which stems from Tsurumaki's belief that people who love spicy food tend to be more eccentric and thrilling than those who do not. Both of these are just two examples of how Fooly Cooly manages to comment on the importance of context in art and its role in the art itself. Without context, the work is left incomplete and the message ultimately lost on the viewer. In this case, however, the message is humor and imagination, without a care in the world or how we interpret it. This in turn is also a form of deconstruction of the anime format. Many examples exist in the show when the animation style completely changes to a different format or homage to earlier cartoons. Episode 5 in particular has an entire segment told in the art form of South Park. All of this can be interpreted almost as a stab at the tedious nature of the anime format. You know what it will look like, how it will move, etc. With Fooly Cooly, you don't even know what the plot is.

Backtrack THIS reference:

Tsurumaki, Kazuya. "Brittle Bullet." Fooly Cooly. 9 Aug. 2003. Television.

DAY 3

As far as post-modern video games go, P.T. seems like a very odd choice to analyze. First off, it's not really a game. It was a playable teaser (P.T.) for Silent Hills, the formerly planned newest game in the Silent Hill series. The Silent Hill series is a survival horror game series known for containing themes of psychological guilt, religion, family, memory, and insanity, and this now cancelled Silent Hills teaser seemed to contain similar elements of family, sudden loss of control, and religious imagery. Also, it's scary af. ALSO, this game isn't really a post-modern game in the traditional sense. Most video games viewed as post-modern like Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid 2 (also by the director of P.T., Hideo Kojima), or Undertale usually discuss themes of player-character interaction, the nature of video game storytelling, and the deconstruction of the game as a set of code and pixels, whereas P.T. is post-modern in how it discusses the way video games scare us and the concept of reflection and identity as a whole works as simply one of its many, many themes. The unique themes discussed in P.T., as well as my personal love of horror, are why I chose this tech demo over classics like Undertale.

The first thing the player is greeted with upon starting the game is the following quotation:

Watch out. The gap in the door... it's a separate reality. The only me is me. Are you sure the only you is you?

If I had the time, intellect, and passion I could write a thesis about how this line plays out through the demo and it's implications towards the higher meaning of the art, but let's just say that alternate realities and uncertainty of identity are central themes to the series as a whole. These themes seem to be more modernist than postmodernist in how complex and intertwined the ideas work, but the work really is a postmodern text because of how these ideas unfold. In this case, through the gaming community.

The puzzles and sequences that are required by the player to complete the game are so overtly complex and require such outside critical thinking, and mountains of luck, to discover that inevitably the overwhelming majority of players will turn to the community for a way to beat the game. The game's final puzzles were finally deciphered by a small group of overly dedicated gamers who worked together and with the community to determine how to best the game, and they eventually cracked the code through communication and teamwork. The game P.T. is postmodern in how it effectively portrays the differences between the mediums of horror; in this case, video games.

References today:

Kojima, Hideo. P.T. Konami, 12 Aug. 2014. Web.

DAY 2

OutKast is a hip-hop group rooted in Atlanta, Georgia fronted by André 3000 and Big Boi. The group was known for their rapid-fire, Southern slang heavy flows, eccentric lyrical topics and themes, and fusion of several music genres, from rock to gospel. The group's aesthetic of combining the Southern gangsta rap narratives with left-field experimentation allows for common post-modern tropes to be found in their music and lyrics, such as the case with their hit single Rosa Parks.

Hehe, post-modern tropes. It's ironic, guys.

The post-modern themes of conflicting identities and the rejection of a singular truth of what something should be, both of which appear in this single. As stated above, OutKast has always been a group that chooses to challenge its audience's perceptions of hip-hop through conflicting the image with the sound and sometimes the sound with the sound. One only needs to look at Andre 3000's wardrobe to get an idea of what image conflict exists within OutKast, and as for the song, well, let's get into it. Genre-purists could argue that this is an example of country-rap, as the backing beat is laid out through an acoustic guitar, accentuated with DJ scratches, and a mid-song hoedown. The first and third song elements are pretty uncommon in hip-hop, especially songs that manage to overtake the game and change its course of history forever. OutKast rejects the notion that hip-hop has to be a certain way in every song and action they take, and Rosa Parks furthers this theme by being such an oddball of a song and lyrically subverting the glory of Rosa Parks, the person, into something that is simply more of a part of African-American history. The name conjures images of glory, anti-racism, and women's bravery in the eyes of doe-eyed white high school students, but to OutKast it means rebellion and Southern pride.

Peep this shtuff right with this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drsQLEU0N1Y

References:

Benjamin, Andre, and Antwan Patton. Rosa Parks. OutKast. OutKast, 1997. MP3.

DAY 1

DAY 1

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a novel that follows the story of a father and his son as they attempt to survive in the apocalyptic environment the boy was born in, complete with cannibals, brutal winter, and absolutely no hope left at all for a better life. This is unrelated but if you really wanna get a sense of why I believe that the freedom of speech is a bad idea, go and look at the reviews for this book on Goodreads.com.

There are several themes throughout this novel, in religious nature usually, allowing for it to be interpreted through numerous perspectives, but from the postmodern perspective the themes of identity, a lack of knowledge of the truth, and the autobiographical nature of fiction.

Identity is usually assigned to a character at its most basic form through a name. We identify a character in our mind most commonly through their name, from which we can see and view their personality and character as a whole. The two main characters of The Road, however, are completely unnamed, and very few of the other characters that they do meet have names given to them. Identity here is presented as something adoptable, metamorphic, but also concrete. The father, no matter how progressively "dark" his actions become will always be the father. But the reader, with an individual and unique identity, is able to latch onto the father's identity because he is presented entirely from the name-defining role of the story. This also connects to the autobiographical nature of the story, as the author Cormac McCarthy dedicated this work to his son, and one must notice the several similarities between his and his son's age in comparison with the book characters. Before I forget, the last theme I wanted to mention was the lack of defined truth in this world. The main characters are guided by faith, in a world beyond this and the like, and faith by nature is a lack of knowing. The true nature of the apocalypse, whether or not the son is a prophet, whether or not the strangers encountered can be trusted, all of these questions have no defined truth within the book. They require inference, or a leap of faith, to define a subjective answer.

References today:

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. Print.

So wth is postmodern theory anyway?

Glad you asked, Jimmy! To establish myself as someone with absolutely no life, I've decided to take the time to give, somewhat of, a tour of the postmodern school of thought and critical theory.

The postmodern approach to criticism concerns itself with viewing the art piece from the perspective of a lack of a single, "real" truth. There are several truths because each one requires many different variables and contexts that define is as currently true, but any one single theme or framework will collapse under postmodern theory because the frame of these concepts inevitably fall apart once the reality of a lack of a singular truth existing becomes applied. This movement, as its name implies, is a successor to the modernism movement, which sought to subvert the truths applied to society by changing our perceptions of what is beautiful, what is important, etc. Postmodernism is a reaction by saying essentially anything or nothing can be everything. 

When applying postmodern theory to a text, some of the considerations one must take heed to are "how does this piece critique/deconstruct the genre it lies in?" and "is there a projected truth throughout the reality the piece takes place in? and if so is it rejected?" and other questions, but ultimately the philosophy cannot be applied piece by piece to certain moments of the art. It's an overall mindset of schizophrenia, skepticism, and playfulness. Nothing is real; okay, where do we go from there?

References of the day:

"Postmodern Criticism." Purdue OWL: Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism. Purdue OWL, n.d. Web. 19 May 2017.

Day 0

Thought of the day: telling people what your thoughts of the day are is stupid. People can't be trusted with facts, nonetheless intrinsic, incomprehensible moments of imagination. Also why would it be just one thought? Like no one has one thought, and if you were to narrow down one single thought you'd need paragraphs of context before you could begin to explain it to anyone.

btw this marks the start of the five day trip to analyze bits of artwork through postmodern theory. 

IT GOES

DAY 1: The Road by Cormac McCarthy. 

DAY 2: Rosa Parks by OutKast

DAY 3: P.T. a playable teaser directed by Hideo Kojima. 

DAY 4: Fooly Cooly (do you italicize anime? anyway) 

DAY 5: ...idk yet. something musical.

Album cover of Atomizer. Earth. Let's go.