“We Can Always Empathize with Ourselves”: Pastiche, Parody, and Rock Journalism in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and Kanye West’s Yeezus (2013)

Abstract

This article studies the hipster as the neoliberal offspring of the yuppie. In order to understand the pillars of these cultures, the focus is on their staging of a musicology. I use the term “musicology” here as an umbrella term for the musicological musings of representatives of each of the subcultures studied here. These often encompass approaches to the scholarly analysis of music as regards historical musicology, performance practice, or music theory.of this paper also studies the music industry’s corresponding modes of production by the lived experience of both the hipster and the yuppie subcultures. For a closer reading of these, the parodied rhetoric of music journalism in the novel American Psycho and its film adaptation will serve as a starting point to discuss the relevance of economic and cultural capital in subcultural style or fashion statements.