MORAL PANICS: TRENDS and CALIFORNICATION

1. Your posts need to be more detailed. Use your own words. If you quote, give the source (Harvard referencing system HERE from the University of Exeter)
2. Illustrate what 'Californication' means with images.
3. Link 'Californication' to to Adorno.

'Californication

The process by which the American television and film industry, for the most part based in California, spreads their own highly sexualized, consumer driven, version of American culture that heavily emphasizes sex, violence, celebrity, and youth as both virtues to be extolled and goals to be achieved. Ignoring and often doing everything in their power to blur, if not erase, the dividing line between the fantasy of the cinemas world view and reality. This process has become pandemic with the proliferation of reality television wherein a person can achieve "Californication" without possessing any real talent but rather just the ability to make a fool of themselves on a world wide stage (See: Snookie)

e.g.The sudden popularity of this actress is merely a case of "Californication".

Source: Urban Dictionary

The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication is a portmanteau word that combines the words ‘California’ and ‘fornication’. Its use is comic and satirical: by combining the two words, the group are implying that life in California, with its values and  behaviours processes and shapes its inhabitants in a particularly damaging way (one that destroys them), that its excesses have an impact on people in the way that Adorno warned against.

In our music video treatment, for example, we make reference to the shallowness and self-obsession of Californian life, such as its preoccupation with plastic surgery, self-image and conformity to the California scene for fear of feeling an outcast or alien. Distorted reality can cause people to take risks with cosmetic surgery, with its drive towards conformity and idealized facial / body features; sometimes the outcomes are horrific, sometimes merely clone-like.

 In our music video, we have people spending money unnecessarily that they don’t need to spend, such as pimping out their car, throwing money out of the windows of cars, adoration of brand names (such as our scene with store shopping bags), coveting of other people’s things.

Most people who are not from California imagine it to be sea, sand and healthy living. The Red Hot Chili Peppers seem to be challenging this perception of Californian life by presenting its darker side, its seedy shallowness, narcissism and materialism. Therefore, I would argue that the band’s lyrics alert us to one of the areas that are the subject of moral panics surrounding young people nowadays: the way that they are controlled by the mass media, from advertising to films, games and music.

Film Californication

Expose on plastic surgery

2014 Californian Calendar