My ex once told me I looked like “a kid in a sweet shop” whenever I got her to see her boobs. I think pop culture has that same effect on its subjects that a flash of voluptuous flesh did for me. We are all kids in the biggest candy store in the world and we’ve been told we can have whatever we want (1. see Side Note). The choice is making us sick up in our mouths a bit. Now I’m not saying that we always have a sexual experience of pop culture, but that’s often the form it takes: We get off on the suggestiveness of surfaces. We like the way things look and some of us don’t even care if the experience turns out in the end to be fake and a little hollow (she is now my ex, after all). Savvy pop fans such as I know we are buying into an illusion. The sex that naked boobs may lead to (the ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ experience) may not be as great as the suggestion they make (the ‘image’), and this way we prefer to be fakers.
Fake pop lesbians Tatu are Russia’s most successful pop exports, accused of exporting an offensive “lesbian schtick”. Pop culture tends to be described using lots of words with ‘sch’ in them:
KITSCH (adj. a bad copy)
SCHTICK (n. gimmick)
SCHLOCK (adj. cheap and nasty)
SCHMALTZ (n. bad taste)
SCHMOOZE (v. superficial socialising)
Forming the letters ‘SCH’ makes each side of the speaker’s mouth rise into a sneer: Anyone with good taste spits out these words with a shudder. Adding these three letters to any word immediately cheapens its meaning. The subject is ‘othered’ and a joke is formed around it like a pearl of self-righteousness around the offending piece of dirt. So, what is it that puts a ‘schneer’ into a perception of culture?
Let’s work with Clement Greenburg’s definition of KITSCH as “not art” (2. See Side Note). If art is high culture for the discerning elite, pop is the lowest of the low: Sensationalism for the masses.
There’s a dayglo vein of unapologetic bad taste running through and alongside pop culture: Tod Browning’s ‘Freaks’; Andy Warhol’s elevation of the gutterpress; Russ Meyer/Ken Russell’s Restoration-style bawdiness; the Cramps and B52s schlock horror; John Waters and Jeff Koons’ fetishization of schmaltz; white trash cultural icons Die Antwoord. These image-makers and icons are all connected through a perverse and provocative agenda which seeks to invert the values of so-called tastemakers. Irony allows the savvy viewer to enjoy the lowest form of culture from the safety of detachment. And what could be in worst taste than paedophilia?
(view here if link broken).
t.a.T.u. (Russian acronym for “This girl loves that girl”. The simplicity of this is perfect) were marketed as teenage lesbians with bad attitudes in the early noughties. What makes pop culture so fascinating is the way it exposes and mirrors the heady combination of power, corruption and lies in high society.
t.a.T.u’s typically teenage stock in trade was angsty anti-establishment songs about giving the finger to forces determined to split them apart. Five years later, the band have moved on from male fantasies about lesbian sex…to male fantasies about female masturbation. The kitschometer hasn’t moved.
(If link is broken, view video here)
The title (Prostye Dvizhenia) translates as “slow and easy motion”. It signifies the masturbating hand, but also the way the viewer’s gaze passes over the surfaces of popular culture. Yulia masturbates in front of a mirror (consuming her own image, like we are), Lena kills time in a cafe (consumed in imagining Yulia?) and we waste a few minutes watching.
There is a running joke on Youtube where every video is rated according to its ‘wankability’ (“I find this hard/easy to masturbate to”). This is partly an inadvertent comment on the increasing sexual content of music video. Pop culture operates as a visual surface offering unadulterated aesthetic stimulation. In other words, POP is a sex aid for a global village of viewers. The representation of wanking has become a MEME to represent the effects of pop culture: self-congratulatory and solipsistic.
The video ends with a slideshow of appropriated images from ethnography, Hollywood and Socialist Realist grand spectacles. This is the post-Communist globalized culture: everything is grist to the pleasure mill. The pleasure-thwarting seriousness of the Cold War and its belief in history is supplanted by the simple timeless command to have fun. Russian pop can finally be playful about its past, because meaning has lost its appeal. The world of pop has subsumed history and now offers a neverending showreel of impeccable wankability. Just as Bill and Ted find here.
Art and life have got into a whole heap of mess around t.a.T.u. In 2006, a semi-fictional slash novel (3. Side Note) called Come Back t.a.T.u. was published; this has since been made into an American film featuring the band called You and I (or Finding TATU). The official film site summary (badly translated by Google, with my emphasis) is as follows:
It is about a young girl, Lana, who moves from the provinces to Moscow, not having in mind that meeting a virtual girlfriend, Jenny, will result in a string of adventures. Indeed, in the capital at night, among the clubs and parties, all things are possible, to become a fascinating model, or wake up in the morning a popular singer. But the main thing was to find her true and only love.
A throwaway review of a throwaway film, yes; but this is how pop life is. What it reveals is:
- Rustic authenticity (the provincial, pre-modern myth of Socialist Realism, the ultime kitsch) has been replaced by urban artifice (virtual relationships). Clement Greenberg makes the same point about pop’s erosion of folk culture, see here for the discussion.
- While ‘all things are possible’, only the fakest and most superficial things are worthwhile (being a model or a pop star).
- True love however knows no artifice: reality is restored by finding ‘the one’.
A reviewer on IMDb lampoons it: “Worthless statement, worthless camera-work, worthless actor’s game”, missing the point that worthlessness is the point of the film, the band, and the whole of pop culture. It’s all as worthless as a wank- but that doesn’t stop anyone does it? Whether Yulia’s orgasm at the end of Prostye Dvizhenia is real or fake is anyone’s guess (is she even pretending to masturbate?). What matters is that it doesn’t matter. Baudrillard made us paranoid about authenticity (4. See Side Note), but we should just relax: whether something we enjoy is technically ‘real’ or authentic is (literally) academic. If our pleasure is real, who cares? Fake is the very essence of POP; judged in these terms a ‘schneer’ is misplaced.
There’s a whole thread on Youtube about whether or not t.a.T.u are lesbians. “They can’t be coz she’s pregnant” argues one fan; “You can still be pregnant and gay” reasons another. The argument is infinite and thus pointless; truth is irrelevant in a world of images. Fake or not, what remains is the power (or not) of the image to create a discourse that we treat as real.
disgustingness 
