It is a truth universally acknowledged that in popular culture, innovation engenders imitation. When something works, for whatever reason, elements of it will invariably show up in subsequent cultural product, sometimes as recontextualized bits and bobs, sometimes as entire setups with a fresh coat of paint and the names changed just enough to avoid a lawsuit.
What keeps the game fresh — what keeps the culture alive, really — is that the chain of antecedent is endless, and often indirect, and if you follow it long enough you come to some insight about the human condition. It’s easy, albeit reductive, to look at the current crop of vampires-in-high-school books and see them all as simply ganking Stephenie Meyer’s steez, for just so was Meyer influenced by Buffy, and Joss Whedon by the X-Men, and so on back into the mists of causality.
But the larger truth is that Meyer and Whedon and even Bram Stoker were all drinking from the same well, all telling the same human story — that our interpersonal relationships, the very thing that sustains us and gives our lives meaning, have always the potential to go horribly awry such that we use each other, we hurt each other, we drain each other dry; and that this horror is felt most keenly by the young, to whom it is new, and who have not yet mustered adequate defenses against it. In other words, nobody would have bothered ripping off the Twilight series had Meyer herself not been part of a larger cultural moment, if the books — their considerable flaws aside — didn’t strike some chord truer and purer than the brassy ka-ching of the cash register.
Here’s what this has to do with the new record by the UK group One Eskimo (their P.R. materials insist on spelling it One eskimO, but I have a rebel soul and will not be constrained by the orthographical conventions of The Man; also “One eskimO” looks really, really dumb); In itself, nothing. The eleven tracks on their debut are fair-to-middling triple-A singer-songwriter pop. It’s not particularly innovative, but neither does it derive so specifically from any single source as to constitute imitation per se. Frontman Kristian Leontiou, who hit the UK Top Ten with “Story of My Life” back in 2004, has the same package of sensitive-guy lyrics and steelwire voice as, say, James Blunt — though he never quite erupts into Blunt’s lethal honk — but that combination is common currency among a certain class of white Englishman, amongst whom it signifies something passing for “soul” (see also: Mick Hucknall), and does not in itself constitute evidence of a rip-off.
The music, though, is only half the story. Because One Eskimo is a full-on multimedia project, and the missing piece is the “visual album” that provides the band with cartoon stand-ins and the album with a storyline. And there, my friends, you’ve got the 800-pound Gorillaz in the room. (more…)
