First things first, hip-hop and pop music wouldn’t exist as they are today without the art of sampling. (Think Snoop Dogg, 2pac, Ice Cube-really any early 90s West Coast hip-hop without George Clinton?!) Sampling: cutting, scratching, and manipulating material from really any recorded source is not only intrinsically tied to hip-hop, but is a vital part of music-making today and has been since at least the 60s in the U.S. DJs such as Girl Talk and Doomtree use pure sampling to make mash-up albums such as Wugazi, even selling out venues. Sampling as a technique in music can be compared to pastiche and collage in the visual arts, seen in some of Picasso’s works and Pop Art, among countless others. While sampling is more widely accepted (and copyright laws are more widely enforced) in some artistic genres more than others, it’s not surprising that literary sampling or collage would be looked down upon due to institutional issues with plagiarism and writers’ claims to ownership. This is where the age-old controversies surrounding originality and authenticity arise. The 17-year-old German writer Helene Hegemann has been very blunt about her opinions on the subject after the controversies surrounding her “sampling” of several un-cited sources in her bestseller Axolotl Roadkill. She is quoted to have stated, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity” after the scandal broke.
Axolotl Roadkill is in itself a literary example of the art of sampling commonly found in hip-hop, electronic music, and collage, with Helene Hegemann at the turntables. Her aesthetic and views on the controversy can be summarized in a quote from the novel, in which the narrator Mifti and her brother Edmond discuss Berlin as a mash-up:
“‘Is it mixed by you? It’s mixed like shit! Berlin is here to mix everything with everything, man!’ ‘Did you make that up?’ ‘Berlin is here to mix everything with everything, man? I steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels my imagination, Mifti. Films, music, books, paintings, cold-cuts poetry, photos, conversations, dreams…’ ‘Street signs, clouds…’ ‘Light and shadows, that’s right, because my work and my theft are authentic as long as something speaks directly to my soul. It’s not where I take things from –it’s where I take them to.’ ‘So you didn’t make it up?’ ‘No. It’s from some blogger’” (7).
What I took away from this chaotic-choppy-experimental-drug-induced-psychosomatic-bildungsroman-type-diary- was a commentary on the effects of the rapid increase of technology and the speed and ease at which media and pop culture are spread and can be accessed on our collective (un)consciousness, on top of the drugs of course. Laws can’t seem to keep up with technology, and the term “stealing” has become ambiguous for the generation that has grown up surrounded by this type of consumption and culture. Pop culture in the form of music, movies, celebrities, video games, and digital communication (e-mail, texts, social media) pervades Axolotl Roadkill, and its effects seem to have penetrated the very consciousness of the protagonist’s generation. Pop culture inscribes standards of beauty: “[…] discussing Heidi Klum and the fact that that bitch is imparting medieval standards to my entire generation, and I think: is this the life I wanted to lead when I was thirteen?” (49). It even dictates life and death: “[…] I always thought, if he’s not on Facebook any more he must be dead” (92).
Mifti perceives the effect of this pervasive global pop culture as a rupture in the world as she knows it, a sort of dichotomy between real and imagined worlds that are colliding in the digital age. Hegemann writes:
“There’s just this one world of natural laws, one world of social laws and constraints, one world or moral laws and conventions and there’s this one world of games and pretences’ […] ‘So what happens if you exchange the world of social laws for the world of games and pretences in your private life? That’s what we do all the time isn’t it?’ ‘No idea. But I definitely think we’re far more than an insider phenomenon now’” (60-61).
For much of the novel she sees the world as two-dimentional: “After that night I wrote on all my T-shirts in permanent marker: I SEE THE WORLD IN TWO DIMENSIONS” (43). That is, however, until she has a sobering moment, experiencing the elements in the “real” world.
“I look out of the window. It can’t be true; today’s not the 16th of August. There’s snow on the grown. Within a matter of moments, I’m utterly convinced that I’m dreaming. If this is a dream, I think, the whole of humankind is doomed. I turn around, I bite my lips, I feel the wind, I realize it’s all real, it’s all three-dimensional. ‘What can you do to wake up from one of these tricky in-between worlds, Bryan?’” (126).
Mifti seems to be stuck in one of these so-called “in-between worlds.”
Her sister, Annika, who she calls a “weird fascinating monster dictator,” embodies the hegemonic power structure that dictates Mifti’s world. She continues:
“Annika explains that our world is in constant flux and trends are the trailblazers of this process of change. So as to ride the crest of the wave and not have to react to tides, she and her agency maintain an international network – the majority of whom will spend tomorrow making a deliberately ironic music video for the agency’s Facebook page at a fancy-dress party with the theme ‘Strange in Brandenburg’. As part of the event, thirty to forty poorly paid ‘PR trainees with their fingers on the fashion pulse’ will be singing Alice Cooper’s ‘Poison’, ‘showcasing the high-quality summer collections of the labels the represent on a continuous basis’” (64).
Mifti, on the other hand, represents the subordinate class, on the margins of this rapidly changing society in which originality ceases to exist. She explains:
“All I think any more is: that’s why. That’s why I’m not regarded as socially acceptable by generally accepted standards, and that’s why I don’t have my sights on the target of being utterly suitable for some kind of normal labour market – because it’s not just about whether you experience something or miss out on it, all it’s about is the degree of intensity, isn’t it, Madonna?” (144).
Despite the fact that Mifti is completely entangled in this cultural mash-up, she occasionally resists, shouting, “Fuck capitalism!”, proposing the formation of a “culture annihilation crew,” and attending an “unexplored territories party” and “concept-free parties” (65, 70, 71). Her drug use, or at least her heroin use, is seen as untrendy by her peers: “Heroin, well, you know, it’s kinda sorta uncool in the year 2009” (140). “Ha ha, heroin, how out is that?” (161).
Mifti’s world is “an underworld in a land that’s menstruating, turning to shit day after day and plunging all the existences patched together out of fantasies to their doom and its relentless putrefaction” (101). Annika’s “life of regularity” stands in stark contrast to her chaotic existence where binaries such as truth and lies, sobriety and intoxication, and pop culture and intimacy are confused and blurred (54). While talking with her neighbor Lars about his art project entitled Intimacy, she states that, “I’d probably have taken photos of movie stills from Intimacy” (85). While her response is cheeky and ironic, it demonstrates the way in which global pop culture has permeated her [private] existence. He responds by telling her about his fellow classmate who “re-created peripheral settings, because the peripheral settings are life the thing that makes us remember intimate situations most incisively, so that’s what she recreated” (86).
So what can be taken away from this pastiche of a novel about the effects of the digital age and global pop culture on society? Mifti is a 16-year-old upper-class girl who has experienced some significant trauma in her lifetime. Even disregarding her drug habits and excessive partying, she is by all accounts, mentally unstable. Her mind constantly flutters from one idea to another like the rapidly changing trends in pop culture. She explains in her arrogant and cheeky humor while visiting a concentration camp, “I find it hard to exercise full concentration because it seems so incredible old-fashioned” (98). She doesn’t attend school because “I just found the unserious side of life much better, that sexy moment, the provisional, the luxurious and the playful elements. The fact that it makes no sense at all to be alive” (96). Living in excess, in partial oblivion, in the present moment is the only way she knows how to live.
It’s so fitting that the controversy surrounding her “plagiarism” is the manifestation of the very issue that is central to the novel. Simple yet incredibly relevant in this argument, Hegemann writes, “They’ve imbued me with a language that is not my own” (42). And she took it and ran; Axolotl Roadkill is the authentic product of such mash-up culture. I now leave you to experience some sampling, (as if you haven’t had your brain rocked enough with the novel!).
http://www.whosampled.com/song-tag/Rolling%20Stones%20500%20Greatest%20Songs/samples/1/
Sarah, I really find your comments regarding sampling fascinating. In an age where “surely that’s been done before–nothing can be original…can it?” (my current thought process when attempting to create a thesis topic), I do think it is important to realize the colossal amount of art that is borrowed before it is transformed (or not). I appreciate your analysis, as I found myself unable to fully engross myself in Hegemann’s novel. Reading this work was disorienting, and I felt as if I was flitting about from scene to scene, wanting to skip ahead–asking myself “what’s happening?”
When you write about her “arrogant and cheeky humor,” I thought of the very beginning of the novel, when Mifti states, “Like any underage drug addict with an ability for reflection, my tendency to escape from reality expresses itself in a pronounced reading addiction” (6). I loved that this misfit of a main character is well-versed in European philosophy, well-read. She is marginalized, but versed in mainstream. Her life in the “in-between” is extreme, to say the least, but also so representative of the loss of self manifesting in millennial society.