Going by the Google cache of the page (http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:wAwebSx_2rAJ:mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/videos/2008/01/31/bricks-a-supernatural-vid-by-luminosity/+http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/videos/2008/01/31/bricks-a-supernatural-vid-by-luminosity/&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a): Stein's analysis is theoretically unsound and politically reprehensible. First of all, "Bricks" isn't a counternarrative, like "The Beautiful Struggle" is, and I think it just plain misses the point of the vid to posit it as oppositional to its source canon. (And Stein's analysis of the canon is dubious -- she's on a lot sounder ground when she calls SPN fetishistic of white masculinity than when she attempts to read it as situated in (racial) Otherness -- but it would take volumes to describe the problems with SPN and race, so I am just going to focus on the reading the vid.) I would argue that the vid doesn't "transgress" racial and gender boundaries by using a mashup with Aretha Franklin anymore than 50s rock stars who used black female backup singers to add "vocal texture" to their hits were "transgressing" race and gender: in both cases, black women are only present as support, object, Other. The subject remains white and male. Especially given the relationship between visuals and music in vids, in which the song is typically used to express something about the visual source, giving the visuals a kind of primacy of interpretation, what the vid does is use Franklin's voice as the voice of the Winchester brothers (and Stein fails to mention that it's followed up/chronologically preceded/displaced by or shown to be grounded in the Metallica lyrics which speak in the voice of John Winchester -- the voice of the father is shown as the ground and basis of the voices of the sons). This tells us something about the Winchesters. It tells us nothing about Aretha Franklin. It's not intended to, and it's fallacious to claim it is. But it doesn't change the limited and politically restricted role of black people, women, and black women in the universe of show or vid.
Voice/vocals/lyrics *can* be deliberately opposed to visuals in a way that interposes an omitted subjectivity--I would argue that destina and barkley's "Want" does this, with a female singer representing the voice of the demons (in canon) and the desiring female watcher (metatextually), but the vid very clearly identifies "I" as the watcher, the desirer, the writer/reader, and "you" as the Winchesters--the subject of the source narrative is made the object of the viewer's desire. Equally clearly, the "I" of "Bricks" shifts but generally belongs to the Winchesters either collectively or individually.
Bricks
Going by the Google cache of the page (http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:wAwebSx_2rAJ:mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/videos/2008/01/31/bricks-a-supernatural-vid-by-luminosity/+http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/videos/2008/01/31/bricks-a-supernatural-vid-by-luminosity/&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a): Stein's analysis is theoretically unsound and politically reprehensible. First of all, "Bricks" isn't a counternarrative, like "The Beautiful Struggle" is, and I think it just plain misses the point of the vid to posit it as oppositional to its source canon. (And Stein's analysis of the canon is dubious -- she's on a lot sounder ground when she calls SPN fetishistic of white masculinity than when she attempts to read it as situated in (racial) Otherness -- but it would take volumes to describe the problems with SPN and race, so I am just going to focus on the reading the vid.) I would argue that the vid doesn't "transgress" racial and gender boundaries by using a mashup with Aretha Franklin anymore than 50s rock stars who used black female backup singers to add "vocal texture" to their hits were "transgressing" race and gender: in both cases, black women are only present as support, object, Other. The subject remains white and male. Especially given the relationship between visuals and music in vids, in which the song is typically used to express something about the visual source, giving the visuals a kind of primacy of interpretation, what the vid does is use Franklin's voice as the voice of the Winchester brothers (and Stein fails to mention that it's followed up/chronologically preceded/displaced by or shown to be grounded in the Metallica lyrics which speak in the voice of John Winchester -- the voice of the father is shown as the ground and basis of the voices of the sons). This tells us something about the Winchesters. It tells us nothing about Aretha Franklin. It's not intended to, and it's fallacious to claim it is. But it doesn't change the limited and politically restricted role of black people, women, and black women in the universe of show or vid.
Voice/vocals/lyrics *can* be deliberately opposed to visuals in a way that interposes an omitted subjectivity--I would argue that