BubbaNub 2/12

Am I the only one disturbed by the notion and examples shown of eclecticism in class on Tuesday. I believe Bella said in his/her post that it is a "perfect example of how cultures can fuse together to create a text" and that "it is fascinating that two drastically different cultures can come together". I would have to say I disagree, I find it to be a horrible exercise in America's global takeover. The video's shown, primarily the music video on Al Jazeera, is not a fuzing of cultures. It is our culture, it is the American stereotyped perspective that is attempting to change and modify their culture into the same mindless crap we put on our TV. The music video is like any other piece of MTV trash (not just in the way it objectifies women--also note all of the women were from other countries) that serves as political and cultural propaghanda that advocates consumerism. They place the singer with a black rapper so it seems as though, "Hey, they are cool with us over there, everything is just dandy". I repeat, we are not fusing together cultures by doing this, we are destroying a culture into the melting pot mindframe of America.

It scares me that anyone could view these video's as good things. Both in the Kanye West video and the Gorilla's video they attempt to reach the Japanese audience by showing Japanese characters and futuristic signs. However, this is superficial at best. I took Japanese for four years and lived in Japan and none of the Japanese shown in the videos was significant culturally at all. In fact most of it was written in Katakana (which is the form of writing they use for Americanized words, such as pizza and hamburger). If we embraced cultures instead of destroying them, eclecticism would not be as scary of a concept. However, all we are serving to do is transport MTV over to Al Jazeera and rot another civilizations brain since we have already done it to ourselves.