Global Convergence Cultures

Transmedia Earth

Matthew Freeman, William Proctor, Matthew Freeman, William Proctor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351743204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Today's convergent media industries readily produce stories that span multiple media, telling the tales of superheroes across comics, film and television, inviting audiences to participate in the popular universes across cinema, novels, the Web, and more. This transmedia phenomenon may be a common strategy in Hollywood's blockbuster fiction factory, tied up with digital marketing and fictional world-building, but transmediality is so much more than global movie franchises. Different cultures around the world are now making new and often far less commercial uses of transmediality, applying this phenomenon to the needs and structures of a nation and re-thinking it in the form of cultural, political and heritage projects. This book offers an exploration of these national and cultural systems of transmediality around the world, showing how national cultures – including politics, people, heritage, traditions, leisure and so on – are informing transmediality in different countries. The book spans four continents and twelve countries, looking across the UK, Spain, Portugal, France, Estonia, USA, Canada, Colombia, Brazil, Japan, India, and Russia.

Part I
European Transmediality

1 United Kingdom

The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu’s ‘Comeback’ as a Transmedia Undertaking

Matt Hills

Work on transmediality, despite being concerned with intellectual properties moving across media, has tended to focus on film, television, comic books and video games. When introducing transmedia storytelling as a concept, Henry Jenkins discusses the Matrix franchise (2006, 101). And it is emblematic of the field that Jan-Noel Thon’s (2016) Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture focuses on films, graphic novels and video games. Such an orientation has assumed that some media are not well suited, or even especially relevant, to understanding transmediality. For instance, popular music has been largely occluded, despite the fact that

transmedia can play an important role … since the identification of special characteristics within a given case is not restricted to the sphere of musical sounds and structures, rather the overall phenomenological spectrum of popular music, including gesture, (moving) image or fashion, is factored in. It is very likely that this perspective captures the realities of popular music fans.

(Jost 2015, 4)

Rather than using transmediality as a lens through which to understand pop music and its fans, music has instead been confined to a distinct ‘media family’, and one not concerned with narrative (Thon 2016, 72) or cross-media meanings. However, here I will focus on a highly successful UK pop music act from the 1980s and 1990s: the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (The JAMs)/the KLF, made up of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. In the summer of 2017, Cauty and Drummond staged an unusual multiday happening in Liverpool entitled ‘Welcome to the Dark Ages’ (‘WTTDA’), the city being linked to the duo’s pop-cultural history. The title of the event related to diegetic incidents from Drummond and Cauty’s novel 2023 (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu 2017), where the internet is catastrophically disrupted, leading to a new ‘Dark Age’ (Gell 2017).

I am interested in considering the ‘transmedia aesthetics’ (Long 2017, 140) of popular music. In fact, the KLF have been described by Jeremy Deller – a leading proponent of participatory art – as ‘one of the great mythological bands of all time’ (in Harrison 2017, 18). As a pop music act, the JAMs/KLF have crafted a significant mythos around and through their music (Fitzgerald and Hayward 2016), appropriating Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s novel The Illuminatus! Trilogy along with aspects of Discordianism as a new religious movement. The KLF also deleted their entire back catalogue at the height of their fame and single sales, and burnt £1 million – income from their pop career – on the island of Jura in 1994.

But if pop has typically been excluded from transmedia theorizations, then so too have the JAMs/KLF been marginalized in academic work. They are frequently lauded in music criticism and journalism; Bob Stanley’s history of pop posits that either The Beatles or The KLF would be ‘a hard one to argue with’, if ‘you were forced to name your favorite group of all time’ (2014, 646). In a similar vein, chapters have been devoted to The Jams/KLF in book-length pop criticism of the 1990s focusing on sampling (Beadle 1993), and in later histories of ‘indie’ music mavericks (King 2012), while multiple volumes have been produced about the KLF’s exploits by writers and music journalists (Higgs 2012; Shirley 2017). In contrast to their pop-journalistic canonization, scholarship focusing on the band – including Drummond and Cauty’s subsequent literary and artistic work – has been thin on the ground (see, for example, Fitzgerald and Hayward 2016; McLeod 2011; Wiseman-Trowse 2014). I am therefore aiming to belatedly focus academic attention both on this particular UK band and the relationship of their music to transmediality.

‘WTTDA’ was unusual for the manner in which it shifted between music, popular fiction, physical merchandise, film, multiple forms of participatory art, and the announcement that Drummond and Cauty – as aging former pop stars – had entered a new and wholly serious career phase as undertakers, with all of these aspects being framed in relation to ‘the realities of popular music [JAMs/KLF] fans’ who had aged alongside their idols. It was announced in advance on bidolito.co.uk – the JAMs’ mythos encompassing a strong opposition to music industry norms – that ‘The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu in any of their … guises … [would] not be performing music’. Instead, the event (officially running from 23–25 August 2017) was immediately preceded by the book launch of a novel by the JAMs, 2023: A Trilogy, itself timed to coincide with the end of a self-imposed twenty-three-year moratorium on Drummond and Cauty discussing their burning of the £1 million.

But if there was to be no pop music reunion, contra what has been attacked as ‘retromania’ (Reynolds 2011) and taken seriously in pop music scholarship as ‘repackaged’ pop (Driessen 2017), then how could ‘WTTDA’ function transmedially (and locally/internationally) in relation to the band’s mythology? I will consider how – despite the fact there was no traditional ‘reunion’ performance from the JAMs/KLF – in a series of ways, their 1980s/1990s pop music output – and its associated mythos – was honored, updated and transmedially extended into literature, merchandise, and even the funerary arrangements of ‘mumufication’. In what follows, then, I will address the role(s) of fandom and place within the transmedia undertaking of ‘WTTDA’.

‘Where on Earth to Begin?’: The Mythology of the JAMs/KLF as a Challenge to Conventions of the Pop Music Industry … and Fandom

Only 400 tickets (priced at £100) were available for ‘WTTDA’, and when they went on sale it was not entirely clear what the event would involve. Potential ticket purchasers were told via bidolito.co.uk: ‘There are no guest lists. There are no press passes. Every one of the 400 ticket holders will be expected to be Volunteers’. By selling such a limited number of tickets for a one-off event, the JAMs secured a sense of exclusivity as well as challenging typical industry hierarchies (where ‘guest lists’ and ‘press passes’ would usually grant privileged access over and above fans’ access to ticketing). At the same time, however, ticketholders were not positioned as standard consumers within the ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999), given that they were also expected to carry out the role of a ‘Volunteer’. An anonymized contributor to Liverpool’s niche newspaper covering the city’s music scene, Bido Lito!, who wrote up ‘WTTDA’, observed that:

We paid £100 for a bit-part in [something]… We 400 had become the band. It trumps that bit, which is just entertainment, where the singer makes you yell you’re having a good time to obscure the emptiness.

(One of the 400 2017, 28)

Bido Lito! played a key role in promoting the happening, stressing how it was grounded in the city’s pop music-derived identity, and in Drummond and Cauty’s (but especially Drummond’s) prior links to Liverpool. The music paper’s editor, Christopher Torpey, used an editorial to discuss a previous ‘Situationist event’ overseen by Drummond in Liverpool in 1984, said to be ‘pure Drummond in its theatrical flair, designed purely to mess with the audience’s heads’ (Torpey 2017a, 9). The mystery surrounding ‘WTTDA’ took on a similarly theatrical lure. In Torpey’s terms, ‘these gaps in our knowledge are the key, cavities … conjecture, folklore and character flood into. These are the things a city is built on’ (Torpey 2017a, 9) – namely, the creations and accretions of pop music mythology. Once the dust had begun to settle, Torpey returned to his theme that Liverpool itself was a collection of ever-evolving mythologies and (trans)mediations:

[During those] surreal days in August, 23 Roscoe Lane … became the hub for the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu’s Discordian/Situationist/absurd (delete as appropriate) Welcome to the Dark Ages event. It was a brief period when it seemed like Liverpool was the centre of the world; …on [the] national news, and filled with people buzzing with excitement and ritualistic fervor.

(Torpey 2017b, 9)

Just like its 1984 forerunner ‘A Crystal Day’, this event, too, was rendered more permanent via the fragmentary transmedial archives of the national press and broadcasters, operating alongside fan-posted footage of surprise guest Jarvis Cocker performing a newly reinterpreted rendition of ‘Justified and Ancient’. But impermanence also necessarily ghosted across the happening (Wiseman-Trowse 2014); left behind it were peeling fly posters, chalked expressions of fandom for the Volunteer-created band Badger Kull, spray-painted signs and fans’ memories of ‘being there’ which would ‘live long [for] those for whom the legend around the KLF is almost sacred’ (Torpey 2017b, 9).

Connections between the JAMs and Liverpool are positioned by Bido Lito! as not just one master story but ‘many stories, not an easily navigated narrative footpath but a labyrinth of art and ideas. So where on Earth to begin?’ (Fairclough 2017, 13). Transmedia narrative in the guise of popular music mythology becomes sedimented into fans’ ‘imagined memories’, with fans wishing they could have ‘been there’ at canonized/romanticized gigs and ordinary moments when scenes or bands first emerged into the pop-cultural limelight (Duffett 2013, 229). Indeed, given the prevalence of pop’s transmediated and recirculated ‘imagined memories’ – with these key moments, for example the KLF’s performance at the 1992 Brit Awards, being recounted again and again in media coverage and pop journalism – it could be argued that the fans who eagerly acquired tickets for ‘WTTDA’ were wagering on the future fan-cultural status of ‘having been there’ at this happening, anticipating and projecting future memories of fan exclusivity. Rather than merely assimilating live events into an experience economy of popular music and myth, this places the JAMs’ mythos at the service of fans’ personal (and communal) mythologizing.

There is a sense of ‘Transmedia Earth’ here in terms of Liverpool’s hosting of the event, with narratives of the city and the JAMs/KLF providing a network of connections for fans to navigate metaphorically and literally, as well as the pre-event mystery (and post-event picking-over) facilitating a transmedial ‘negative space’ (Long 2017, 147) which could be filled by fans’ speculations, critiques, photos and commentaries. But alongside the locality of the event and its transmedia array of meaning-making, the involvement of fans was significantly international. ‘The 400’ ticketholders used a shared map within their Facebook group – containing 370 members at the time of writing – to plot where attendees had travelled from. Although the predominant cluster was UK based, this geographical information showed that fans had also travelled from Ireland, North America, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, Austria, Holland, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Australia and New Zealand. Evidently, to participate in the event (and the Facebook group) fans needed a degree of proficiency in the English language. However, given the exclusivity of the happening, and its potential to create future memories indexed to high fan status, it is perhaps unsurprising that such an international fan cohort was called into being.

How did ‘WTTDA’ draw on the pop music mythology of the JAMs/KLF? Dan Hassler-Forest has been one of the few scholars to explicitly discuss pop music as transmedia storytelling, arguing that pop can be ‘far more loosely organized than the fantastic worlds in media more preoccupied by narrative, such as literature, film, comic books, or even videogames’: while its ‘albums, music videos, and stage performances [can] contain obvious narrative elements, they simultaneously remain open to a wide variety of alternative readings’ (2016, 175). Pop music can thus work via what Aaron Delwiche terms ‘soft’ transmedia, where ‘a shared fictional world unfolds across media channels but there are relatively few narrative links between the channels’ (2017, 37). Additionally, Hassler-Forest observes that even specific pop music tracks, using sampled sonic effects, dialogue and/or lyrics, can convey heteroglossic narrative content (2016, 175). The JAMs, by appropriating material from cult novel The Illuminatus! Trilogy, position themselves with the book’s ‘Justified Ancients of Mummu’ (Higgs 2012, 232) as agents of chaos opposed to rival repressive forces that are manipulating and using the record industry (Fitzgerald and Hayward 2016, 52). The Illuminatus! Trilogy posits two secret societies – the chaotic Discordians and the repressive Illuminati – who have clandestinely been at war. By inserting phrases from Shea and Wilson’s novel into their music, and making use of the ‘23 Enigma’ from Discordianism, where the number 23 is emphasized and granted a mystical status (Higgs 2012, 239, 242–243), the JAMs/KLF transmedially aligned themselves with a mythos of grandly elemental (but hidden) conflict played out through popular music.

At the same time, the high-selling singles at the commercial peak of the KLF’s pop career were also narrated as part of a ‘trilogy’, being self-dubbed the ‘Stadium House Trilogy’. These tracks – What Time is Love?, 3AM Eternal and Last Train to Trancentral – use recorded crowd noise as a type of world-building device, creating the (fictional) sense that they are occurring at raves:

The ‘stadium’ aspect of their sound refers to the singles’ dense sound mix, high dynamic range and the use of background crowd sounds to give the performances an epic quality (as if the artists were being cheered on by a massive crowd). They also featured frequent use of branding lyrics (such as ‘KLF is gonna rock ya’ and ‘Ancients of Mu Mu’).

(Fitzgerald and Hayward 2016, 55)

This repeated ‘brand assertion’ (ibid) or self-reference – common across the JAMs/KLF musical oeuvre, as well as via their ‘Blaster in the Pyramid’ logo and consistent typeface – is therefore fused with production emphasizing ‘sufficient crowd noise, a thumping bass line and a propulsive house beat so that … the listener was transported and submerged in the disorientating euphoria of a rave in full swing’ (King 2012, 391). By interweaving epic Discordian narrative and an ‘epic quality’ of sound and production via self-branding, the band engaged in an ‘intermedia campaign … steeped in excess’ (Fauteux 2015, 60), creating ‘a myth which … [was] self-propagating, self-sufficient, self-consuming and self-recreating’ (Beadle 1993, 223).

This insistent narrative excess and brand assertion has occurred across all their different pop guises, including the Tinelords, the K Fundation and K2. It is present – via sleeve imagery and the accompanying video – in the Timelords’ use of a car, ‘Ford Timelord’, to front their single ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’ (Hayward and Fitzgerald 2013, 142). It is also felt in the K Foundation’s subsequent burning of £1 million, and the KLF’s deletion of their back catalogue – something that, as an independent, they were able to enact – as well as via K2’s self-reflexive ‘comeback’ in 1997 with a brass band version of ‘What Time is Love?’ (Drummond 2001, 342–343). The catalogue deletion and money-burning created further transmedial ‘negative space’ (Long 2017, 147), inspiring bootlegging and fan-compiled catalogues of official releases along with attempts to understand and narrate the band’s destruction of £1 million. The latter very much informed ‘WTTDA’, as a ‘Hearing’ at the end of Day One discussed the meaning of Drummond and Cauty’s money-burning via a series of commentaries and eye-witness accounts. Meanwhile, the world-building ‘Stadium House Trilogy’, whereby raves could be imagined even if listeners did not actually attend them, was reflected in the ‘pop’ discourse (Frith 1996, 41–42) of Day Three’s Graduation Ball with its performing DJs and fictional/imagined band, Badger Kull. Most of ‘WTTDA’ was far more focused on what Simon Frith has identified as ‘folk’ and ‘art’ discourses of popular music (1996, 39–41), revolving around a festival-like gathering of fans with the JAMs/KLF plus associates, and involving the activities of participatory art.

However, a ‘pop’ discourse was also integrated into the rites of Day Three. The KLF’s commercially successful popular music was commemorated, and characteristically extended into a new self-branding narrative, by the live appearance of Jarvis Cocker who performed a reimagined/’remixed’ version of ‘Justified and Ancient’, continuing the JAMs/KLF tradition of reworking their own material multiple times with different vocalists (King 2012, 398). Lyric sheets were distributed to attendees, emphasizing the new Jarvis-specific reworking of Tammy Wynette’s previous version, and despite requests that the performance should not be filmed by fans, it nonetheless circulated online.Thus although the JAMs themselves did not perform, their back catalogue was nonetheless updated, not as an instance of ‘retromania’ (Reynolds 2011) where the musical past was nostalgically replayed, but rather in heteroglossic dialogue with the KLF’s earlier selves (Earl 2010, 131) and fan memories (Harvey 2015, 38–39). Indeed, the recreation of ‘Justified and Ancient’ was highly emotional for many fans present. For those who were perhaps teenagers or pre-teens at the time of the JAMs/KLF’s pop ascendancy (One of the 400 2017, 28), this allowed an individualized ‘affective scene’ – the relatively privatized or domestic consumption of KLF’s music in the present day, where other fans might be imagined via Facebook groups and YouTube uploads rath...