Looking at Walter Benjamin’s article on “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” we can use his ideas and see how in today’s media we see reproduction of certain art forms, in our case the Jai Ho dance and music, and how they can have social and cultural significance (Benjamin, 1936). The original video is a celebration of the movie Slumdog Millionaire; it is not only part of the credits, but it is a celebration of the triumphs of the characters in the movie and a fun and entertaining way to end a movie. From that video, sparked several reproductions, which show how perceptions can change with replication, like Benjamin suggests, and how common reproductions are, especially with our mechanized forms of reproduction that we use today (Benjamin, 1936). None of the reproductions I will discuss are the same as the original, so they put the original in the eyes of viewers that would not have necessarily have seen it before, just like Benjamin spoke of in his article (Benjamin, 1936). These videos create a larger audience for the original and that is especially the case with the Pussycat Dolls video; it creates a more mainstream pop version of the song and video. It maintains a similar scene, but changes the lyrics and the general tone of the song. The audience has changes to a more North American, popular culture based group. The meaning of the original was to be victorious and celebrate the successes of the movie, as I said earlier, but the Pussycat Dolls version has transformed the first concept into a more love story oriented song. The song speaks of someone being another’s destiny, which was an idea in the film, but it has a much larger emphasis in this video (Vevo, 2009). This video is also much more sexualized and made a little more mainstream, the audience is different than those who would watch the first video, and I think that is what Benjamin was trying to say, he stated that the new versions of the original would broaden the spectrum which the original could not get by (Benjamin, 1936). I do feel the Pussycat Dolls video is monopolizing the idea of Jai Ho a bit just for a profit; by making it more globally friendly, you lose some of the cultural and social significance that the original had. Benjamin said that this is a strong possibility when recreating art; you tend to take away from the original and what it represented and create a bit of a joke out of it (Benjamin, 1936).
The third video, which is just a recreation of the dance, shows us how movies and youtube videos can influence our daily activities. These people have gone out of their way to memorize the dance in order to recreate a moment that they enjoyed. They want to show others that the dance is possible for all; they do not really put any strong emphasis on the importance of the song or lyrics, but that the dance was for all to participate in (Hagen, 2009). The last video truly shows what Benjamin is talking about. The Tamil dancers are celebrating, like in the original video, but they are putting their own cultural spin on the Jai Ho dance. They have created their own moves to the song, but have maintained the general uplifting aura of the song and movements. They, like in the original, are celebrating something, their own culture, and I think this shows that something like the Jai Ho video can be transformed cross culturally, without losing too much of its message (Khohar, 2009).
These videos are examples of what Benjamin was talking about; how reproduction is made and perceptions are changed once the replicas are seen (Benjamin, 1936). All pieces of art are reproducible, and we see this in these videos that one art form can transform into something completely different, depending on cultural interpretation.
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