Harry Potter meets Sir Mix-A-Lot
I recently ran across this funny t-shirt design, which some college friends pointed out in an email list we all share, and it has stuck with me as a wonderful example of where fat old mass culture and our new, more nimble and infinitely more fragmented niche or slice culture intersect.
Take a look:
The t-shirt is distributed by Café Press, which empowers individuals to design shirts, mugs and other things and profit from them, much like Threadless but without the community-voting aspect.
Digging into this image, it alludes to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s 1992 rap hit, “Baby Got Back,” which is an over-the-top enthusiastic celebration of the large buttocks of some women. The famous first line of the song is “I like big butts and I cannot lie” (see hysterical full lyrics here).
On the t-shirt, instead of butts its books, and while the Harry Potter subtext is not overt the Rowling door-stop novels intended for children and young adults were the first books that leapt to my mind.
I’ve been thinking about this shirt all weekend, and over the next few posts I’m planning to tease out why this shirt is an important signpost about how much we still depend on fat old mass culture for resonance and recognition, even though that fat old mass culture is wasting away quickly.
More to come.
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