Hollywood Undead’s “Hear Me Now” and the Postmodern

After watching the mildly-infamous video multiple, I’m convinced that is indicative of postmodernism in every sense of the term.

Pastiche: The video has it in spades. It references other forms of media left and right, without parodying any of them. This because parody relies on an underlying normative standard, which postmodernism categorically rejects. Instead it merely shows the audience a array media, it is almost a celebration of how clever the director is for cramming so many references into a single music video.

Consumerism: The product placement is obvious, but it is not portrayed as humorous, more of a sense of anarchy, rebellion and self belief. The camera does not linger on each product, and the video knows it, but it still manages to avoid parody. Rather, the video uses these consumer images as an integral part of its aesthetic with small amount of comments on their social context, which can be heard in the lyrics of the song.

Self-Reference: The blatant product placement shows a self-awareness in the video, but this particular brand of ironic detached harms the video’s ability to make any sort of overall message on its own. Instead it implies that celebrating consumer culture, anarchy and rebellion against the norms is fine as long as we are appropriately ironic about it, this is a largely intended consequence of the video’s aesthetic.

Appropriation of Identity-based-struggle: Hollywood Undead is interesting for turning a blind eye on authority, and for portraying the mainstream genres like pop, and hip-hop as wrong. The resistance to authority and power on each of the band members parts is purely individual but is present throughout the whole video.