Some more postmodernism

I just read David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster.

The most fun that Wallace has is consideration of meta-irony and post modernism.


Consider how sprite markets itself as the anti-drink. Well, then Sprite is still marketing itself, isn't it? Or independent music markets itself as outsider image; but this is still an image. The pop musician Pink, for example, sings music written by Max Martin just like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera; which would be great except that Pink markets the image that she is different from or better than or at least separate from these other two singers.

Well I have another one: Ben Folds' song "Hiroshima."

There is something unnerving about the song, which is a "benign" pop song.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNqj-0YLOoM&feature=related


In it, Folds (the explanation is in the video before the song) explains that he hit his head after he fell at a show in Hiroshima, Japan.


The dandy point of the song is that in the midst of a fall, he was able to get up and succeed at singing.

The song could be taken even more literal than that, in the way that he sings, "They're watching me, watching me, watching me fall."

The point is that we're all in front of other people and these people watch us whether we succeed or fail.


The reason that Hiroshima is supposed to be a big deal for everyone else, or have emotional significance, is because it's about thousands of people dying when a nuclear weapon went off.

The reason why this is a memorable title is because thousands of people died.

I mean it gets down to this "no you didn't" thing because it's so straightforward: Folds simply fell on the stage in Hiroshima, Japan.

But is comparing his humiliation or our humiliation (of being human and empathizing with him) okay for writing a pop song when the name has so many connotations?


So there's this one level where it's just him saying he hit his head in Japan. Then there's this other level where he's using the name of a city which was bombed in World War II and has significance because of that. Either we know the significance of the people bombed, in which case I think he's wrong to use that song name, or we don't and that doesn't eliminate the significance, and we're still wrong about it.

Come on Ben, there's too much of an in-joke on this one. Postmodernism strikes again!!!