Postmodernism: Part I

The main aspect of postmodernism I’d like to focus on is pastiche. Pastiche is a collection of reimagined or recreated ideas, a medley of concepts, sometimes directly imitated. I’d like to discuss the use of sampling within hip-hop, an example of pastiche, more in depth. Sampling is the act of taking a section or specific sound from within a song and reusing it by playing it once, or looping it repeatedly within the song, acting as an individual piece of the song, essentially an additional instrument. While pastiche within film is viewed as just reused ideas, sampling is literally reusing old music, usually soul or funk records. However in each of these practices of pastiche, the new product is a modernization of what their borrowing ideas, or literal sounds from. In class, the concept of pastiche removing all true style and creativity from the new product is something that I still strongly disagree with. As you see within the Youtube video of 9^th Wonder creating a beat from the sample of Dynamic Five’s 1979 song, “Beautiful Lady,” a style is embedded within the song during the beat-making process. 9^th Wonder shows his creative process to his viewers, letting them see what style he mixes with the original song to craft his beat, or his take on the soul classic. Directors do this as well within film. The most famous, and often criticized for being unoriginal is Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino tends to base his films off of his favorite movies, recreating them with his own style, and original plot twists. Both 9^th Wonder and Quentin Tarantino are remarkably creative and original artists; however their styles both include paying homage to their favorite artists within their art. This is a very postmodern trait. In today’s postmodern art world I feel 9^th Wonder and Quentin Tarantino are at the forefront of their crafts because of their postmodern, heavily-pastiche styles, and they should be praised for their innovative takes on replication through a creative process, rather than criticized for paying respect to the classics.