Process Reproduction - The Pussycat Dolls Analyzed

            For as long as we can remember, we have been looking for more efficient ways of doing things: a shift towards mass producing mono crops for diverse and populous townships; harnessing the glowing incandescent fire to cook our food with; centralizing our lives around sedentary land plots. It is the latter from which early twentieth century scholar Walter Benjamin (1936) speaks of as a “desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly,” the will to have the world’s resources at the tip of our fingers. This is the “Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” a time that sees the reproduction various art forms and how it alters the experience of (re)viewing the same objects in a new context. What concerns us here is technical or process reproduction, a reproduction that, in a way, remixes the original work of art in a new creative way, creating a new product that often is recognizable to the original, but not always. This latter form of reproduction can, for example, simply be copying note off the board onto a sheet of paper, or singing a song that has been performed by your favorite artist. Though according to Benjamin, this reproduction loses its aura: the originality that differentiates the piece of art from others in all aspects or representation, materials of reproduction, and experience of viewing.

An example of process reproduction is found in the reproduction of the Pussycat Dolls’ sexy spin off of “Jai Ho,” originally performed at the end of the movie Slumdog Millionaire by the cast. The original, performed by A.R. Rahman, involves the main actors of the movie and others performing a choreographed dance in a Mumbai train station supplemented with intermittent clips from the movie. It is interesting to first note that this is in fact a process reproduction already, seeing as how the original that played as the Slumdog Millionaire credits rolled did not include these ‘flash backs’ to the movie itself. By doing this, it changes the aura, or involves, the “shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crises and renewal of mankind” (Benjamin 1936). The Pussycat Dolls’ appropriation of this song yields a dramatically different result. Some alternations are obvious: the main cast and backup dancers are replaced by scantily clad women in pan-Indian clothing and an L.A. suburban populace; approximately 33 million more Youtube hits on the Pussycat Dolls version; the lead singer pronounces “Jai Ho” more like (phonetically) “dʒεΙ ho.” Event though this new version includes the voice of A.R. Rahman, this process reproduction includes new material shaping a new feeling, a new aura, associated with viewing the music video. Firstly, the entire music video – the mock subway and Indian market – has most likely been filmed in an Interscope Records warehouse in Los Angeles. Thus, the aura is altered as I recognize this shift in subject position and context. Secondly, the ‘covert’ insertion of American electronic companies Nokia and Beats headphones into the video manipulates our senses dial in on these commodities. As an individual within the target age bracket of the music video, I catch myself drifting off thinking whether or not my headphones are sufficient or I should upgrade to a Nokia smartphone. Finally, in the Pussycat Dolls’ recreation, each individual video segment in the music video is unquestionably longer, allowing other human senses to play a part in engaging with it. There is more emphasis on the visual now than on the audio. This allows the viewer to spend more time absorbing more of what is going on in the video itself (ironically), rather than the lyrics or melodies of the song.

In these three examples, we are seeing an increasing distance between the A.R. Rahman original production of Jai Ho, positioned at the end of Slumdog Millionaire (albeit sort of out of place to begin with), and the recreation of it by the Pussycat Dolls. But does this hinder the creativity of the twenty-first century arts? I don’t think so. The last decade has been seen as the remix decade, ripe with recreations and new ways of stimulating ourselves with older material: Marvel comic books are being made into movies; music artists add samples from classic rock songs creating a new and entirely different song. These endless occurrences of mechanical and process reproductions are central to the arts, as many painters/artists/authors/directors are sampling other materials and adding their own personal spin. Today, this is the role art plays in the age of reproduction.

References

Benjamin, Walter. (1936). The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press