Post Modernism

"Post modernism is a shortcut to mass audiences"

Post modernism is when you take something almost archaic and make reference to it in a modern era. To put it in simpler terms, post modernism is when something becomes new by referring to the old.

In music, genres styles go in cycles 

1) Experimental - attempt to establish trends 

2) Cannon - Works within those trends to fix them into our cultural understanding 

3) Post Modern - makes fun of these trends e.g. parodies

An example of this is the 'Boy Band' genre. If the Beatles were the original boy band who made pop music and all had the same haircut and outfits fitting into their brand identity then this was experimental as it had never really been done before. After them came bands like the beach boys, take that, boy zone, etc following a similar type of trend. This is called cannon. Eventually the idea of boy bands became so generic that bands such as Busted almost parodied the concept by being slightly more out the box of what a conventional boy band was meant to be. After that there was a drought in boy bands and the cycle began again with the birth of One Direction who were the typical manufactured boy band. 

Many artists take post modernity and use it to make intertextual references to older forms of media most commonly films. This is a massive shortcut to mass audiences as it grabs the attention of older audiences who are likely to understand the intertextual reference giving them a heavy feeling of nostalgia thus making them warm to the song and video a lot quicker than if it was something they had no emotional connection to.
It also grasps the attention of younger audiences as nowadays it is fashionable to take an interest in the 'classics' this can be in the form of music, tv shows, films and fashion.

This theory was made evident when Iggy Azalea heavily referenced the 1995 teen film 'Clueless' in her music video for her 4th single, Fancy. As a result of this colourful nostalgic music video it has 816,263,268 views on youtube and was no.1 for seven weeks and in the top 10 for 17 consecutive weeks.The video pays pastiche to the film with lyrics such as "I'm so fancy" which can be said for the girls of Clueless as they love shopping and looking very stylish.