Fabricating the Absolute Fake: America in Contemporary Pop Culture.

By Jaap Kooijman.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, December 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-90-5356-492-9, $45. 224 pages.

Review by Laurence Raw, Baskent University, Ankara

Fabricating the Absolute Fake offers an incisive look at how American culture – as represented by Hollywood cinema, television and popular music – has penetrated the world. Kooijman argues that “Americanization” has less to do with politics and more with “an imagined America, an imagined community that goes far beyond the boundaries of the nation-state USA” (143). Drawing on Umberto Eco’s concept of the absolute fake, Kooijman shows how American pop culture consists of fakes that succeed as “the real thing”—in other words, improved copies of the “real” originals. This is particularly evident, for instance, in the way Dutch popular culture appropriates artefacts based on an original, and presents them as their own version of “America.” Kooijman avoids making any value-judgments on such appropriations, but rather invokes Thomas Elsaesser’s concept of “Karaoke Americanism” to show how “America” can be represented in different ways in culture-specific contexts, ranging from “explicit hyper-Americanness to implicit mimicking of an American original in which the association with ‘America’ is almost lost” (144).

The book is divided into two sections. The first, comprised of three chapters, uses specific case-studies to show how “America” and Americanism now dominates the world. Such terms are often synonymous with universalism; this is evident, for example, in USA for Africa’s single “We are the World” (1985) whose ostensible purpose was to broaden awareness of the Ethiopian famine, but nonetheless “invest[ed] its ideal of global human universalism with the star myth and the American Dream, both based on a belief in meritocracy which promotes individual agency and self-reliance.” The video bears strong visual resemblances to the famous “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” commercial, produced by Coca-Cola in 1971; this turns “an act of benevolence into an act of consumption” (140). Koijman subsequently analyzes how American television disseminates a view of the world based on individual and personal choice (through shows like Oprah). The third chapter treads a familiar path by showing how the American media constructs a hyperreal world, in which the first Gulf War of 1991 becomes a major television event, and where occasions such as the Super Bowl are transformed into patriotic celebrations of the American war effort in Iraq: “the intertwining of sports, the military, patriotism and popular entertainment presents a combination that is difficult to resist” (83). Hollywood cinema assumes such a dominant position in popular culture that it now influences the media’s presentation of current affairs: the 9/11 catastrophe played out on television like a disaster movie. Koijman quotes Jean Baudrillard, who argues that “the American experience as fiction . . . shapes . . . imagination into the form of reality” (90).

The second part of Fabricating the Absolute Fake looks at how Dutch popular culture has appropriated American images. He cites the example of Lee Towers (né Leen Huyzer), a popular crooner described as a cross between Sinatra, Presley and Tony Bennett. While performing standards such as “You’ll Never Walk Alone” or “I Can See Clearly Now,” he has translated his hyper-Americanness into a local and national idiom: “[Towers’] star image is rooted in Rotterdam working-class culture, exemplified by his identification with the Rotterdam harbor and the local soccer club Feyenoord” (102). Towers’s example parallels that of the 1950s British rock ‘n roll singer Tommy Steele (né Thomas Hicks) who established his own version of the genre rooted in Cockney culture. Kooijman also focuses on the Moroccan-Dutch hip-hop artist Ali B (“the American rapper that never was”) who uses the imagery of African-American gangsta rap to assume the persona of a streetwise rapper (113). The author believes that such performers have indulged in Karaoke Americanism, “an active performance of mimicking and mockery, based on the clichéd conventions of pop culture, yet also paying tribute to the [American] original in a specific local or national manner” (117).

Despite Richard Dyer’s claims in the publicity blurb that Fabricating the Absolute Fake is a “daring and persuasive” piece of critical analysis, the book actually covers familiar ground by showing how non-American artistes have adapted American cultural icons for their own purposes. Ali B’s example resembles that of Sacha Baron Cohen, who began his career by assuming the comic persona of Ali G, the streetwise rapper from the quiet London suburb of Staines. Kooijman’s argument depends on familiar binary oppositions (global/local, American/non-American), which tend to minimize the capacity of individual artistes to respond to American popular culture in different ways. Kooijman is well aware of this, as he points out that “Not all American viewers will be hailed successfully into the position of ‘docile patriot,’ or ‘infantile citizen,’ and not all non-American viewers will be seduced by the uncritical portrayal of America as the Beacon of Freedom and Democracy” (66). Nonetheless some evidence of how viewers react to shows like Oprah—in the form of surveys, ethnographic studies or blogs—might have given a sense of how (or even whether) dominant images of American culture as disseminated through the media affect individual consumers.

The book contains distracting proofreading errors that could easily have been avoided: Capital instead of Capitol Building (44), NYDP instead of NYPD Blue (53), Bagdad for Baghdad (81), and Top of the Pop rather than Top of the Pops (104). Nonetheless, Fabricating the Absolute Fake is an entertaining read, lucidly argued with a wealth of examples from both Dutch and American popular cultures. What we understand from the book is how “pop culture can be both manipulative and empowering,” allowing for the creation of an imagined America that opens up new spaces for “a shared sense of belonging across different cultural and ethnic identities” (124).