Abstract
One of the most enjoyable aspects of revisiting movie songs from the 1980s—now more accessible than ever online—is the inadvertent comedy of their incongruities. The video for Peter Cetera’s “Glory of Love” (1986), a #1 hit from The Karate Kid II, places the unathletic 42-year-old singer in a karate dojo. Many of the thousands of comments on YouTube express how enjoyable it can be to laugh at Cetera, swaying dreamily in his oversized mock-turtleneck sweater, offering to be “the hero that you’re dreaming of.”
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Notes
Arthur Knight and Pamela Robertson Wojcik, introduction to Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, ed. Arthur Knight and Pamela Robertson Wojcik (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 1.
Julie McQuinn, introduction to Popular Music and Multimedia, ed. Julie McQuinn (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), xi.
Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 7.
Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute (New York: Verso, 2000), 20–21.
Will Straw, “Pop Music and Postmodernism in the 1980s,” in Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, ed. Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin and Lawrence Grossberg (New York: Routledge, 1993), 16.
Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing (London: Verso, 2012), 590.
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 61.
Alenka Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 178.
Tia DeNora, “Music and Self-identity,” in Popular Music Studies Reader, ed. Andy Bennett, Barry Shank and Jason Toynbee (New York: Routledge, 2006), 145.
Mark Crispin Miller, “End of Story,” in Seeing Through Movies, ed. Mark Crispin Miller (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 208.
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© 2014 Matthew Flisfeder and Louis-Paul Willis
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Wolfe, G. (2014). Žižek and the 80s Movie Song: “There Is a Non-Relationship”. In: Flisfeder, M., Willis, LP. (eds) Žižek and Media Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137361516_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137361516_8
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