The Walking Dead ft. Beyoncé

Beyoncé and The Walking Dead represent two quite different aspects of today’s popular culture. While Beyoncé is focussed mainly on music, dancing and empowering women, The Walking Dead is based on a series of comics by Robert Kirkman about survivors during a zombie (or should I say ‘walker’) invasion.

The Tumblr blog Survivor – Beyoncé vs. Zombies by UK illustrator Ali Graham is dedicated to creating cartoon mash-ups of Beyoncé’s video clips and scenes from the Walking Dead – both of which are American based.

“If I were a boy”

Here, we see Beyoncé portrayed as Rick, one of the main characters in The Walking Dead. The caption If I were a Boy is both the title and main lyric of one of her songs and relates to the video clip in which Beyoncé, like Rick, is a police officer. By using one of the iconic stills of Rick, but casting Beyoncé, Graham has appropriated both texts and created a different meaning…

The Character Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead

The word mashup originated from pop music where the lyrics from one song were combined with the backing track of another song to make something new. It is ironic in this case as Graham has instead mashed-up the video clip rather than the song itself. This links directly to Axel Bruns’ idea of produsage – where the audience becomes both the user and producer of a particular form of media and constantly builds and improves content that already exists. Bruns and Jacobs note that our society has become ‘produsage based’ where “users are active produsers of a shared understanding of society which is open for others to participate in, to develop and challenge, and thus to continually co-create”. We are no longer restricted to passively absorbing what we see or hear, we are more inclined, if not encouraged, to take it and make it our own.

The audience is a key player in this idea of produsage and Graham demonstrates this in her blog. Though it may seem comedic, this blog shows the audience’s response to an idea Beyoncé has always enforced: being a strong and independent woman. By placing Beyoncé in a powerful and authoritative role, Graham has captured Beyoncé’s message and brought her own interpretation to it. It highlights this process of giving back; of understanding and then recreating. Not only has Graham brought her own ideas to the texts, she has also enabled those who may have been fans solely of Beyoncé or solely of The Walking Dead to come together and appreciate both these texts in a new way.

Tumblr itself has acknowledged our society’s fascination with recreation, with its tagline “Follow the world’s creators.” But then with this idea of ‘creators’ where do we draw the line at originality? Does it mean that something is original only if no one else has done it before? By taking nothing from a previous form of media? And if not then will original thought eventually cease to exist?

And on the other hand, if we are so keen to put our own spin on certain media, what do we get in return? Why aren’t we simply satisfied by what someone else has probably worked most of their lives to establish?

But perhaps the real question isn’t why do we want to re-interpret what someone else has created, but rather, why not?