“We Can Always Empathize with Ourselves”: Pastiche, Parody, and Rock Journalism in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and Kanye West’s Yeezus (2013)

Abstract

This article studies the hipster as the neoliberal offspring of the yuppie. In order to understand the pillars of these cultures, the focus is on their staging of a musicology. I use the term “musicology” here as an umbrella term for the musicological musings of representatives of each of the subcultures studied here. These often encompass approaches to the scholarly analysis of music as regards historical musicology, performance practice, or music theory.of this paper also studies the music industry’s corresponding modes of production by the lived experience of both the hipster and the yuppie subcultures. For a closer reading of these, the parodied rhetoric of music journalism in the novel American Psycho and its film adaptation will serve as a starting point to discuss the relevance of economic and cultural capital in subcultural style or fashion statements.

Notes

1. Greif (“Positions” 8) here refers to Anatole Broyard’s use of the term a priorism, which defines a secret code in black culture and thus facilitates a speaker’s superior knowledge: “The hip reaction was to insist, purely symbolically, on forms of knowledge that they [African-Americans] possessed before anyone else, indeed before the creation of positive knowledge—a priori.” Later in this discussion, Greif (“Positions” 10–11) would water down the notion of social dominance in the hipster. Rather he understands hipsterism as comprising “the very old dyad of knowingness and naïveté, adulthood and a child-centered world—but with a radical or vertiginous alternation between the two” (“Positions” 10–11). However, in a Foucauldian sense of the term, a priorism could also be understood as the element that defines the subculture’s “group of rules that characterize a [i.e. their] discursive practice” (Foucault 127). Thus, the formal a priori of the hipster would contain both the system of the temporal dispersion of negotiations of superior knowledge and the social group’s very own transformability between moments of self-awareness and those of self-absorption.

2. Preppy here designates two qualities of the yuppie: (1) attending an established prep school before entering private higher education and (2) maintaining a self-confident dress code that includes established and classic brands, usually with an upscale price tag.

3. Given the scope of this article and the striking analogies Bret Easton Ellis draws between yuppie and hipster culture, it is necessary to quote Ellis in full here: “[S]ometimes I think that if I had written the book in the past decade, perhaps Bateman would have been working in Silicon Valley, living in Cupertino with excursions into San Francisco or down to Big Sur to the Post Ranch Inn and palling around with Zuckerberg and dining at the French Laundry, or lunching with Reed Hastings at Manresa in Los Gatos, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder....Would he be using Instagram, showcasing his wealth, his abs, his potential victims? Possibly....The idea of Patrick’s obsession with himself, with his likes and dislikes and his detailing—curating—everything he owns, wears, eats, and watches, has certainly reached a new apotheosis. In many ways the text of American Psycho is one man's ultimate series of selfies” (Ellis, “American Psycho Author”).

4. The formal censorship of American Psycho is still practiced in Australia. The country’s national censorship legislation classifies the novel as “R18,” and thus it can be sold to over-18s only as a shrink-wrapped item. In July 2015, the novel even became the subject of a police raid in a bookshop in Adelaide after it was sold there without the required wrapping (Sutton).

5. Indeed, as a member of the so-called Generation X and the literary brat pack, Bret Easton Ellis’s writing was influenced by punk music. Time and again he sports the theoretical punk attire:

“As a member of Generation X, rejecting, or more likely ignoring, the status quo came easily to me. One of my generation’s loudest anthems was Joan Jett’s ‘Bad Reputation,’ whose chorus rang out: ‘I don't give a damn about my reputation/ I’ve never been afraid of any deviation.’ I was a target of corporate-think myself when the company that owned my publishing house decided it didn’t like the contents of a particular novel I had been contracted to write and refused to publish it on the grounds of ‘taste.’” (“Living”).

6. Between 1982 and 2015, Fredric Jameson became the main theorist of postmodernism. From “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984) to The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms (2015), Jameson cataloged the textures of postmodern artifacts. He described postmodern culture as a superficial culture that is characterized, above all, by the visual image, depthlessness, the collapsing distinction between highbrow and lowbrow, and an all-pervasive sense of nostalgia. In a state of what can best be described as cultural amnesia, postmodern texts may cite from other cultures and historical moments but are marked by “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion” (Jameson, “Postmodernism” 65–66). The effect of this random referencing of history results in a system that appropriates schizophrenia and pastiche as its cultural style. Hence, Jameson considers postmodernist aesthetics as centered on the idea that authentic notions have already been expressed at a certain point in the past and are now replaced by indirect references to these representations. Pastiche for him is “like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody” (Jameson, “Postmodernism” 65). Hence, by, for example, identifying “Dylanesque” sounds rock journalistic writing is marked as being stuck in a faux notion of the “authentic American 1960s.” The narrative discourse of American Psycho thus suggests that rock journalists would praise any record as authentic, original, and inspiring that reproduces this notion of the “authentic 1960s.” Rock journalism re-creates this notion by drawing on a random image from the 1960s, Bob Dylan, and thus creates a blank fiction of 1960s rock authenticity by referencing only the mere image in the descriptor “Dylanesque.” This observation directly connects with another feature Jameson sees in postmodernism: nostalgia for the past. (Indeed, in Jameson’s case the 1960s would remain of decisive importance to his own writing.) Nostalgia texts would not try to recapture an “authentic” past, but merely myths and stereotypes that characterize the “authenticity” of the past. This is what Jameson would term “false realism” and also what shapes American Psycho’s rock journalistic vignettes. By relying on the image and the myth, the rock critic supposedly relies on the commodities he or she can picture in referencing the past. Commodities alone thus inform cultural expressions and are thus informative about yet another dilemma: “[T]he economic could be observed to have become cultural (just as culture could be observed to have become economic and commodified)” (Jameson, Ideologies x). Thus, global capitalism is the only story that can be referenced, even in rock journalism. Such a view also unearths the underlying structure in rock journalistic rhetoric as commodified, blank, depthless, merely economical. This is exactly what the narrative discourse in American Psycho attacks in mimicking rock journalism’s “false realism.”.

7. Cultural field describes Pierre Bourdieu’s strategy of making graspable the interrelation between cultural practices and social processes on a broader scale. In that sense, Bourdieu sees a “relationality” (Field 30) between products and producers that results in objective relations between them: “The space of literary or artistic position-takings, i.e. the structured set of the manifestations of the social agents involved in the field—literary or artistic works, of course, but also political acts or pronouncements, manifestos or polemics, etc.—is inseparable from the space of literary or artistic positions defined by possession of a determinate quantity of specific capital (recognition) and, at the same time, by occupation of a determinate position in the structure of the distribution of this specific capital. The literary or artistic field is a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces" (30, emphasis in original). As argued here, a rock journalist in this cultural field of rock criticism is caught between the struggle of conserving cultural capital and transforming it to economic capital.

8. In Reassembling the Social, Bruno Latour distinguishes between “intermediaries” and “mediators” in his actor-network theory: “An intermediary, in my vocabulary, is what transports meaning or force without transformation: defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs....Mediators, on the other hand...transform, translate, distort, and modify meaning of the elements they are supposed to carry” (39, emphasis in original). Latour suggests that a conversation can become a “terribly complex chain of mediators” (39). Here, language, as a set of signs resulting from the interplay of signifiers and their signifieds, is to be thought as a system of mediators. Accordingly, a rock-journalistic text is a mediator, as it transports meaning by transforming it, particularly due to the less predictable system of signifieds.

9. Please note here how the sonic phenomenon of the band’s “crisp sound” produces the value of “consummate professionalism” and how the screenwriters Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner carefully adapt the narrative discourse of the novel’s rock-journalist vignettes, discussed in the first part of this study, into Bateman’s monologue.

10. The clip can be found via searching the band’s name and “funny or die.” YouTube currently hosts the clip under https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk15H6PjBis.

11. The commercial was hosted on Kanye West’s own website during the implementation stage of the marketing of Yeezus. In the meantime, it has been replaced with more contemporary advertisements. However, digital copies of the clip can be found on many of the major video platforms. I would like to recommend the following URL for a copy without the unpleasant sound glitch that most of the online videos unfortunately have: https://vimeo.com/68595317. This is not the first time that Kanye West has used Patrick Bateman’s apartment to stage a commercial stunt. In the music video for his 2008 lead single “Love Lockdown,” from his studio album 808 & Heartbreak, Kanye West lies on Bateman’s couch and impersonates American Psycho’s protagonist while performing the song. This hints at the film adaptation’s cultural context only auratically. While it may be a nod to Bateman’s inability to express anything emotionally, the song, as well as the album, is expressive of 1980s pop music and its appreciation of the Roland TR-808 drum machine.

12. During a gig at the Big Chill Festival 2011, Kanye West started a rant on stage and claimed that “people look at me like I’m insane, like I’m Hitler” (McKinley). On another occasion, at a 2013 concert at Paris’s Le Zenith, the artist told his audience that he is “Picasso. I’m Walt Disney, I’m Steve Jobs” (Bychawski). Both of these publicity stunts were echoed widely in the press. However, journalists have been comparing Kanye West in rhetorical questions to Jesus Christ ever since the release of “Jesus Walks” in 2004, the fourth single on his debut album The College Dropout.

13. In July 2013, Kanye’s Twitter feed featured the tweets “I am God” and “I open the debate…The 2nd verse of New Slaves is the best rap verse of all time…meaning…OF ALL TIME IN THE HISTORY OF RAP MUSIC, PERIOD.” Both of these statements are repeated by Disick in the commercial.

14. Whiteface minstrelsy is an Afro-diasporic tradition that has existed in the United States since the beginning of slavery in the “New World.” Marvin Edward McAllister defines the phenomenon as “extra-theatrical, social performance in which people of African descent appropriate white-identified gestures, vocabulary, dialects, dress, or social entitlements” (1). Disick in this clip poses as Kanye, however, without performing blackface minstrelsy. Instead Disick wears no make-up and performs as Kanye’s interface. Thus, he is inverting the racism of blackface minstrelsy and Disick becomes the literal “wigger,” a derogatory word used in hip hop to denounce white people who try to imitate behavior that is attributed to black culture.

15. Jameson defines postmodernism as a cultural dominant—that is, “a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate features” (“Postmodernism” 56).