Good Co-opting/Bad Co-opting
Two recent videos crossed across the bloghopper that bear some comparison:
Exhibit A — Courtesy Carrie Andersen’s blog. Ashley Tisdale performs “Never Going To Give You Up”
ajrad555 (9 minutes ago) she just turned rickroll into rickfail. epic rickfail.
rick should personally roll her for killing his song
bubs848 (45 minutes ago) RAGE
Rey9318 (4 hours ago) she ruined a perfectly good song thanks for fucking up another classic thanks a lot rick astley forever rick rolled bitch
Nite0Mare0Jess (9 hours ago) disney fucks up everything
orginal was so much better.. legendary..
god.
disney likes fucking shit up.
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Exhibit B — Weezer “Pork and Beans”
Selected Comments on YouTube —
m4ryb4m (25 minutes ago) I looooooove this video and the song!!!!!!
Sammygirl1194 (1 hour ago) songs ok. video was better, it like all the youtube hits.
angelchic1993 (1 hour ago) kool vid and so
very entertaining!!
Deadpool2008 (2 hours ago) great vid great Youtube cameos. also seein Ryan Vs Dorkman in the backround was cool. good song as well
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It’s a brief sampling, but these comments are pretty representative insofar as people seem to largely effervesce about Weezer and hate on Tisdale (though exceptions certainly exist, mostly, it appears, from people who aren’t familiar with the original song). If you take a look across all the duplicates on YouTube, you’ll find that the general mood of the internet is the same towards each video.
However, the strange thing going on here is that both appear to be corporate co-optings of internet culture. Weezer in a direct way from the content of the video, and Tisdale since it seems unlikely that such a cheeseball song would’ve been re-recorded without its revival by the internet. So what’s going on? Why does Disney lose and Universal (through Geffen Records) win? Where’s marketing go wrong? There’s a bunch of differences, all of which contribute to Disney’s epic fail, but I’m thinking there’s two useful points of comparison that allow Universal to signal at least a facial credibility with its audience and use internet culture in a commercial (and at least temporarily acceptable) way.
1) Cohesive Identities
Everyone remembers Weezer as that cool, geeky band from the 90s that sung about sitting along in your garage and playing D&D. Their identity, however actually manufactured it is behind the scenes, makes sense with what they’re trying to do here. In some sense “Pork and Beans” feels like the song that the 2000s version of the D&D nerd would write now. (which, incidentally, is one of the criticisms that have been leveraged against the album: Weezer is pretty much the same as it was almost a decade ago — you can’t win I guess)
In contrast, Tisdale’s use of “Never Going To Give You Up” is completely incongruous with the rest of her public identity. This was the girl was the drama-queen girl in High School Musical and she models for Marc Ecko in her spare time. Blender named her “the second Hottest Woman of Pop/R&B” for chrissakes. So instead of being highly entertaining, the song sounds like at best a misguided attempt, or an aggressive takeover of internet culture. It gives, even worse, the impression that she has no sense of the actual meaning of the song online (which may or may not be the case). There’s no sense of self-conscious irony of the ridiculousness of material in her song (in the way that Weezer’s video signals). There’s nothing inherently problematic about using Astley’s material — one could imagine that a dance remix could really ham the song up in a great way — but Tisdale fails to deliver on recognizing this.
2) Repetition and Remix
Subcultures tend to enjoy the uniqueness of their identity. No one likes it when a corporation starts doing the exact same thing. The issue with Tisdale’s video is that it doesn’t add anything to the culture it draws from. Instead, it just repeats the song. This is mimicry, not dialogue, and the result is that it almost automatically jumps the shark. Disney’s interaction with the cultural element destroys its credibility.
In contrast, Weezer rounds out its co-opting by adding something new. Sure, there’s the song itself — but as one of the comments above makes clear, this isn’t the most important thing. The video on its own adds something to the culture it draws from (by having the celebrities do something new and different). It knows enough about the cultural elements it plays with to extend their meaning in some way. The contribution, if nothing else, gives a better sense of “authenticity” to the community and creates a peer interaction that seems to differ from the “corporation pretending to be JUST like you” as a copycat “participant.”
There’s more, but still mulling it over — more to come later.
