Dismantling the Guitar Hero? A Case of Prodused Parody and Disarmed Subversion

A ‘shreds’ video combines existing live music concert footage, predominantly including a famous male rock guitarist or guitar based rock group, with a self-produced overdubbed soundtrack. The result is a musical parody that exists in an intersection between production and consumption and works as a within-genre evolution. The shred is controversial and its most popular instalments have been pulled from YouTube on claims of copyright infringement. This paper examines shreds as a form of multimodal intertextual critique by engaging with the videos themselves, as well as audience responses to them. As such, the applied method is genre analysis and multimodal semiotics geared towards the analysis of intertextual elements. The paper shows how prodused parody exists as a co-dependence between: (1) production and consumption; (2) homage and subversion; (3) comprehension and miscomprehension; and (4) media synchronicity and socioeconomic dis/harmony. The paper also discusses how shreds can be interpreted as tampered-with gender performances. In conclusion, it becomes clear that the produsage of shred videos is part of ‘piracy culture’ because it so carefully balances between the mainstream and counter-culture, between the legal and the illegal, and between the commoditized artefact and networked production.