Fabricating the Absolute Fake: America in Contemporary Pop Culture - Revised Edition

234 Pages·2013·2.54 MB·English

by  Kooijman

When rock star Bono told Oprah Winfrey that America is an ideal that is F
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supposed to be contagious, the talk show host was moved to tears. Such b
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an imagined America, rather than the nation-state USA, is the topic
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of Fabricating the Absolute Fake. Pop and politics become intertwined,
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as Hollywood, television, and celebrities spread the American Dream t
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around the world. Using concepts such as the absolute fake and karaoke n
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Americanism, the book examines this global mediation as well as

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the way America is appropriated in pop culture produced outside of h
the USA, as demonstrated by such diverse cultural icons as the Elvis- e

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inspired crooner Lee Towers and the Moroccan-Dutch rapper Ali B. This
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revised and extended edition includes a new chapter on Barack Obama s
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and Michael Jackson as global celebrities and a new afterword on
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teaching American pop culture. u
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Jaap Kooijman is Associate Professor in Media Studies and American F
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Studies at the University of Amsterdam. k
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“A brilliant, thoroughly enjoyable work of cultural critique, Fabricating the Absolute Fake
takes seemingly exhausted concepts like ‘Americanization’ and turns them on their head.
Refusing simple binaries between the fake and the authentic, or between cultural impe-
rialism and native resistance, Kooijman demonstrates just how flexible the signifiers of
Americanness can be when they circulate globally.”
Anna McCarthy, Cinema Studies, New York University
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“Most daring and persuasive is Kooijman’s ability to move between and connect the most a
delicious pop and the most searing political events (9/11, the murder of Pim Fortuyn), p

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never evading the seriousness of entertainment nor the spectacle of politics. A book that
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is a pleasure for what it conveys of its subject and for its intellectual rigor, managing to o Revised and Extended Edition
be at once subtle and straightforward, complex and lucid.” ij Fabricating
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Richard Dyer, Film Studies, King’s College London
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ISBN 978-90-8964-559-3 n
the absolute Fake
“Fabricating the Absolute Fake shows that pop culture is more
than ephemeral entertainment. When looked at with Kooijman’s
cosmopolitan eye, pop culture can be seen as a continuing ritual
America in Contemporary Pop Culture
in celebration of national identities, America’s identity for sure,
but also, intriguingly, a Dutch or even European sense of self.”
9 789089 645593
Rob Kroes, American Studies, University of Amsterdam
Jaap Kooijman
A         U          P     A         U          P    
fabricating the absolute fake

Fabricating

the Absolute Fake
America in Contemporary Pop Culture
Revised and Extended Edition
Jaap Kooijman
Cover illustration: “Ice Cream Parlor,” 2004 © Erwin Olaf
Cover design: Neon, design and communications | Sabine Mannel
Lay-out: Heymans & Vanhove, Goes
Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US
and Canada by the University of Chicago Press.
ISBN 978 90 8964 559 3
e-ISBN 978 90 4851 955 2 (pdf)
e-ISBN 978 90 4851 956 9 (ePub)
NUR 757
Creative Commons License CC BY NC
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0)
Jaap Kooijman / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2013
Revised and extended edition
Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this
book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise).
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 7
Additional Acknowledgments 9
Introduction 11
Fabricating the Absolute Fake
1. We Are the World 23
America’s Dominance in Global Pop Culture
2. The Oprahification of 9/11 43
America as Imagined Community
3. The Desert of the Real 69
America as Hyperreality
4. Americans We Never Were 95
Dutch Pop Culture as Karaoke Americanism
5. The Dutch Dream 121
Americanization, Pop Culture, and National Identity
6. Yes We Can, This Is It 147
America and Celebrity Culture
Conclusion 169
Let’s Make Things Better

Afterword 175
Teaching the Absolute Fake

Notes 187
Bibliography 209
Index 221

Acknowledgments
In his stand-up comedy show Delirious (HBO, 1983), Eddie Murphy does an
amazing imitation of Stevie Wonder giving his acceptance speech after win-
ning a Grammy Award. Stevie just cannot “shut the f*ck up” and is still saying
“I want to thank…” when the credits of the televised Grammy Awards show
are rolling. As a Dutch teenager, back in 1983, I loved Eddie Murphy and Stevie
Wonder, not yet realizing that these American entertainers (and many others)
helped to make “America” an integral part of my own culture. Now, twenty-five
years later, as I write these acknowledgments, the image of Eddie Murphy “do-
ing Stevie at the Grammy’s” keeps popping up in my mind.
I want to thank the students who participated in the courses that I have
taught on this subject. Since 2001, I teach the MA courses America in Global
Media Culture and Images of America at the Media and Culture Department of
the University of Amsterdam. In 2003, I taught the graduate course America
in Media Abroad at the Cinema Studies Department of New York University.
In 2006, I taught the MA course American Pop Culture as Hyperreality at the
American Studies Department of the University of Amsterdam. Discussing the
subject with the students has been invaluable for the writing of this book.
I want to thank the organizers and the fellows of the two sessions of the
Salzburg Seminar in American Studies that I attended: The Politics of American
Popular Culture: Here, There, and Everywhere (October 2002) and American
Culture in the U.S. and Abroad (September 2005). I want to thank Marty Gecek,
Tilly de Groot, and the American Embassy in the Hague, the Netherlands, for
making my participation possible. I want to thank Linda Berg-Cross, Jude
Davies, Bart Eeckhout, Milena Katsarska, Carol Smith, and Reinhold Wagn-
leitner for continuing our discussions at other occasions, including the confer-
ences of the European Association for American Studies.
I want to thank Kate Delaney and Ruud Janssens for commenting on
parts of the manuscript that were published before in different form: “Bombs
Bursting in Air: The Gulf War, 9/11, and the Super Bowl Performances of ‘The
Star-Spangled Banner’ by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey,” in Post-Cold
War Europe, Post-Cold War America (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2004),
edited by Ruud Janssens and Rob Kroes, and “Let’s Make Things Better: Hyper-
Americanness in Dutch Pop Culture,” in Over (T)here: Transatlantic Essays in
Honor of Rob Kroes (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2005), edited by Kate
Delaney and Ruud Janssens.
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I want to thank my colleagues at the Amsterdam School for Cultural
Analysis, the Media and Culture Department, and the American Studies De-
partment of the University of Amsterdam for the inspiring intellectual envi-
ronment. I want to thank Eloe Kingma for helping me to make research pro-
jects possible. I want to thank the members of The 9/11 Effect research group of
the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and the Institute for Culture and
History, and in particular my fellow initiators Marieke de Goede, Joyce Goggin,
and Margriet Schavemaker. I want to thank Joke Hermes, Jeroen de Kloet, Tarja
Laine, Ruth Oldenziel, Maarten Reesink, Marja Roholl, and Jan Teurlings for
commenting on parts of the manuscript. I want to thank Sudeep Dasgupta and
Wanda Strauven for their feedback at crucial moments. I want to thank José
van Dijck, Richard Dyer, Rob Kroes, Giselinde Kuipers, Anna McCarthy, and
the anonymous reviewers for reading the entire manuscript.
I want to thank Thomas Elsaesser for letting me imitate his concept of
karaoke Americanism and Chris Keulemans for letting me appropriate his con-
cept of “the American I never was.” I want to thank Erwin Olaf and his team
for granting me permission to use the “Ice Cream Parlor” photograph on the
book’s cover. I want to thank Jeroen Sondervan, Christine Waslander, and the
staff of Amsterdam University Press for turning the manuscript into a book. I
want to thank Anniek Meinders for initiating this book project.
I want to thank some of my friends who actively kept me from writing,
either in Amsterdam, Berlin, New York, or Minneapolis: Christopher Clark,
Rob van Duijn, José Freire, Daniel Gerdes and Tesseltje de Lange, Richard Gon-
lag, Esther van der Hoeven, Theresa Kimm, Kenneth McRooy, Laura Minder-
houd, Timon Moll, Donato Montanari, Francine Parling and John Stueland,
Gus Reuchlin and Katinka Schreuder, Nelly Voorhuis and Sara van der Heide,
my fellow players of the Amsterdam Tigers basketball team, and my fellow
deejays of the Re-Disco-Very crew. I want to thank my (extended) family: my
parents Aat Kooijman and Sonja Langeveld, my sister Annelies Kooijman, and
my best friends Laura Copier and Maarten Vervaat.
I want to thank Stevie, Michael, Diana, Tina, Bruce, Ray, and all the other
stars of USA for Africa for introducing me to “America” – and Eddie Murphy
for making fun of them.
Jaap Kooijman
Amsterdam, June 2008
8 fabricating the absolute fake
Additional
Acknowledgments
When Fabricating the Absolute Fake was published in June 2008, no one had
heard of Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber, Barack Obama had not yet been elected,
and Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston were still alive. For this new edi-
tion, the original text has been revised and updated. Chapter six has been add-
ed, addressing the intertwinement of politics and pop by discussing Obama
through the perspective of celebrity culture. This chapter is partially based on
my keynote lecture “The King of Pop and the President of Cool,” held at the
2011 annual conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies. I
thank Astrid Fellner and Klaus Heissenberger for their critical feedback. Also
newly added is the afterword on using Fabricating the Absolute Fake in courses
on American pop culture. This afterword includes parts of my article “Ameri-
cans We Never Were: Teaching American Popular Culture in the Netherlands,”
published in The Journal of American Culture (March 2011).
In addition to those mentioned in the 2008 acknowledgments, I want to
thank Murat Aydemir, Melis Behlil, Christoph Lindner, and Patricia Pisters. In
particular, I want to thank Bas Heijne and Stine Jensen for their presentations
at the initial book launch in June 2008, my students of the graduate seminar
Re-Imagining America in a Post-9/11 World that I taught at the Cultural Stud-
ies and Comparative Literature Department of the University of Minnesota
in spring 2009, Sascha de Graaf for proofreading the entire manuscript, and
Chantal Nicolaes for the final editing. I thank my partner Jeroen van Ingen for
his unconditional support and for being in my life.
Fabricating the Absolute Fake is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Sonja
Kooijman Langeveld, who read the first edition and spotted a few typos, which
are now corrected. I miss her dearly.
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