*I actually posted this on the online blackboard for my Film Theory class. I think it needs to live on. *
While reading Heidegger’s thoughts about mankind’s essential need to question art and technology to reveal truth in “The Question Concerning Technology,” I thought instantly of a music video I had recently seen. The rap group Das Racist is a pop culturally and socially conscious trio whose highly referential lyrics highlight the absurdity of the culture and media surrounding us by deconstructing and stripping cultural products of their meaning and placing them in a new light. They consistently and directly confront issues of race and representation, as the trio consists of two New Yorkers of South Asian/Indian descent/culture and an Italian/Cuban-American from the Bay Area. They also parody and deconstruct the urban existence of the modern hipster. Their first single, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” contains only the lyrics “I’m at the Pizza Hut. I’m at the Taco Bell. I’m at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” The constant repetition of these name brands begins to rob them of their original meaning, thereby presenting these brands as absurd, and thus calling into question the ubiquitous and often destructive presence of fast food chains in urban areas. It’s deceptively simple but highly complex.
In their new video for the single “Michael Jackson,” directed by the Weird Days collective, Das Racist starts out at a level of high artifice and keeps building the referential and irreverent layers. The band is featured in scenes mimicking the Last Supper, hosted by a Michael Jackson impersonator and attended by representations of “high” culturally significant figures such as Joan Didion, Pope John Paul II, a Russian general, etc. (identified in the credits), they also appear on an obvious green screen back drop of various exotic locations, with exotic cultural dancers, and as cartoon versions of themselves watching the real version rap on an animated TV screen, wherein the levels of spectatorship are threefold— we as a spectator watch the animated group watch the real group.
With as much as there is to dissect in the many many layers of artifice they continue to pile on, the part that is the most significant is at the end, when the camera pulls out to reveal the green screen, the set, the camera, the crew, revealing the real REALITY of the video. The multiple layers of reference and artifice are stripped away, in order to signify: “This is a music video. This music video is not reality.” Walter Benjamin states in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” that film “provides the equipment-free aspect of reality they are entitled to demand from a work of art, and does so precisely on the basis of the most intensive interpretation of reality with equipment” (116). By stripping away the multiple levels of artifice that have been generated within the video, Das Racist responds to Heidegger’s call to look closely at technology, in order to see beyond the technological itself and reveal truth. In layering on the levels of artifice and reference, Das Racist creates an absurd universe by which the only way out is to directly address the technology in and of itself as artificial, and the the direct confrontation of the music video process, that so many artists and fans blindly consume as truth and not as a highly constructed product. If you address the mechanism (technology) by which the cultural product is made, one can achieve Heidegger’s “essential reflection” and “decisive confrontation” on technology, by way of art which, “does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth after which we are questioning” (35). The art itself must remain aware in order to achieve the revelation of truth that Heidegger describes as “the unconcealment of the unconcealed has already come to pass whenever it calls man forth into the modes of revealing allotted to him” (19).
