Orientalism and Hyperreality in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ 133

Orientalism and Hyperreality in
Desert

Rose
Olivia Bloechl
University of California, Los Angeles

The commercial success of the 1999 duet between British pop star Sting
and Algerian räi star Cheb Mami, ‘‘Desert Rose,’’1 was symptomatic of a
growing fascination among North American and European consumers for
an ‘‘Arabic flavor’’2 (Desert Roses and Arabian Rhythms Vol. I) in pop
music. In addition to heightening non-Arabic-speaking consumers’ aware-
ness of North African and Middle Eastern pop artists, ‘‘Desert Rose’’ gave
rise to several spin-off compilations with titles such as Desert Roses and
Arabian Rhythms and Arabic Groove. When Arabic Groove became
Putamayo World Music’s best-selling album ever, the label’s head, Dan
Storper, noted in an interview that ‘‘I instinctively feel a demand for
contemporary Arabic music from all ages and ethnicities—like those
moments in the mid-90s when Celtic music became widely popular and
Latin music in the late 90s’’ (Bessman). Perhaps capitalizing on this
demand, ‘‘Send Your Love,’’ the lead single from Sting’s 2003 release,
Sacred Love, featured a swirling countermelody that alluded to ornamen-
tation styles in classical Arab music. Sacred Love also found Sting col-
laborating with flamenco guitarist Vicente Amigo and sitarist Anoushka
Shankar, perhaps attempting to replicate the ‘‘exotic’’ appeal of Cheb
Mami’s contribution to Brand New Day.
The late 1990s were tumultuous for relations between Middle
Eastern and western nations, and we may seek a partial explanation for
the rise in the commercial fortunes of ‘‘contemporary Arabic music’’ in
political events that focused western media attention on Arab-Muslim
cultures. As is widely recognized, the most significant political situation
in the region was the ongoing Israeli occupation and settlement of lands
claimed by the Palestinians, an occupation supported by the United States
and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom. The 2000 Middle East peace
summit hosted at Camp David by then-US President William Jefferson
Clinton heightened international awareness of the conflict, and attacks
carried out as part of the second Palestinian Intifada and Israeli military
responses have drawn frequent news coverage. Beyond Israel/Palestine,
134 Olivia Bloechl

the Saudi-led terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on US targets drew

heavy media attention, as have subsequent attacks in Bali and Madrid.
Finally, the Persian Gulf War of 1991 and the US/UK-led invasion of Iraq
in 2003 were possibly the most heavily mediated conflicts in history, and
at the time of writing, Iraqi resistance to the American and British
occupation of Iraq receives near-daily coverage, as civilian and military
death tolls continue to rise.
European and American colonial history from the 1500s onward
has demonstrated a direct relationship between state-sponsored violence
and the development of consumers’ taste for products or behaviors repre-
sentative of a violated people.3 In view of the long history of British and
American colonialist consumption, we may reasonably suspect that the
changes in consumption patterns noted by Storper (Bessman) were related
to these nations’ most recent neocolonial enterprises in the Middle East. In
the United States, for example, consumers’ demand for cultural products
of and information about the Middle East expanded exponentially near the
turn of the twenty-first century (Ali; Howell and Nawotka; Lindeman),
even as the bombings in Iraq’s no-fly zone intensified, the nation reacted
to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the state prepared to wage
outright war on Iraq. At the same time, musical artists associated with the
Middle East or Islam were typically promoted as cultural mediators whose
music was an opportunity for mutual enlightenment and the exchange of
goodwill. In February, 2003, for instance, the popular Iraqi singer Kazem
al-Sahir, whom an ABC News byline dubbed ‘‘The Iraqi Elvis,’’ was touted
as ‘‘a de facto cultural ambassador of his embattled country’’ who ‘‘will be
bringing Iraqi culture to American audiences during his latest US tour’’
(Jacinto). Although relatively benign in itself, in the face of impending
war with Iraq, this advocacy of cultural exchange through music effec-
tively shifted Americans’ attention away from the possibility of popular
resistance to the actions of the state and toward a consumerist experience
of cultural difference.
British or American consumers’ desire to possess cultural artifacts
associated with the Middle East must be further contextualized as part of
the living history of Orientalism, which, as Edward Said famously argued,
developed as a network of hegemonic institutions, ideologies, and imagin-
aries that allowed the subjugation and possession of an ‘‘Orient’’ by a
colonizing ‘‘Occident’’ (Said). ‘‘Desert Rose’’ would seem to fit this
pattern, with its explicit allusion to well-worn Orientalist imagery and
musical gestures. Its English lyrics evoke ‘‘dreams’’ of a seductive veiled
Orientalism and Hyperreality in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ 135

woman, a fascinating and threatening desert landscape, and a chimerical

oasis, tropes beloved of nineteenth-century Orientalist representation and
consumption (Behdad; Bongie; Campbell). The musical contrast estab-
lished between Sting’s unembellished, diatonic melody and Cheb Mami’s
melismatic, microtonal line further frames Mami’s voice as an ‘‘exotic,’’
feminized object of a desirous auditory. The music videos for ‘‘Desert
Rose’’ in turn associate these structures of desire with tourism, another
legacy of colonialism: Sting is shown touring the Mojave Desert in a
Jaguar, camcorder in hand, before arriving at a concert venue in Las
Vegas, where Cheb Mami and a crowd of attractive dancers await him.
Identifying Sting with the occidentalized lyrical and filmic ‘‘I,’’ the videos
effectively displace this persona’s desired objects—the veiled woman, the
desert, the oasis, and Mami’s voice—onto an imagined Oriental ‘‘else-
where’’ (Feld 148).
Despite its obvious debt to imagery, musical gestures, and modes
of experience derived from Orientalist cultural forms of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, ‘‘Desert Rose’’ is fundamentally the product of
an intersection between fin-de-mille´nium neocolonialism and modes of
signification and experience dominant under global capitalism in the same
period.4 I am concerned here with an apparent reconfiguration of
Orientalism in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ in accordance with postmodern forms of
mediation and the political neocolonialism that, in a sense, they enable.
This reconfiguration, I suggest, is representative of much recent pop music
that traffics in cultural difference.
The central problem, as I see it, is the wide range of meanings
possible in such music and the unpredictable relationship of these mean-
ings to structures of power, particularly neocolonial power. The signs of
the Orient/Oriental in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ have a history that connects them to
romantic and modernist colonial ideologies, and the complementary rela-
tionship between US or British neocolonialism in the Middle East and
consumers’ taste for associated cultural products suggests a continuing
correlation. Nonetheless, the song’s mediation of these inherited signs
disables ideological critique by rendering their history of complicity
with colonial regimes irrelevant. The technologies that mediate the lyrical
subject’s ‘‘dreams’’—the automobile, the video camera, and audio tech-
nology—are evident in the music videos, and this focus on mediation
prevents an absolute authentication of the song’s imagery by highlighting
its existence as simulated spectacle. ‘‘Desert Rose’’ itself thematizes the
impossibility of its own signs and images, with its emphasis on the
136 Olivia Bloechl

illusoriness of its subject’s ‘‘dreams’’ (Sting sings, ‘‘I realize that nothing’s
as it seems’’). In the world of ‘‘Desert Rose’’ and similar media, the
violence of colonialism, if it is remembered at all, does not necessarily
disturb the circulation of Orientalist signs, whether musical, lyrical, or
visual. Instead, colonial violence is absorbed and returned to the song’s
economy of ‘‘dreams’’ and desire.
‘‘Desert Rose’’ mystifies its own relation with neocolonial power
through its simulation of identity, difference, and power itself. This post-
modern type of process has been theorized by sociologist and cultural
theorist Jean Baudrillard as hyperreality, a term that, in Baudrillard’s
writings, connotes contemporary formations dominated by the orders of
reproduction, simulation, and the model, rather than production, represen-
tation, and the original.5 Hyperreal processes, according to Baudrillard,
offer an experience or epistemology that (i) decontextualizes subjects from
the everyday world; (ii) fascinates subjects with an apparent superfluity of
meaning through replicated images, signs, or surfaces; and (iii) thereby
entangles subjects in simulacra of presence, which simultaneously show
their own absence.
Hyperreal processes are not identical with postmodern consumer-
ism, but they are shot through with the effects of global capitalism, and
vice versa. The homogeneity of mass-produced objects and images (enfor-
cing reproduction of a model over production); the irrelevance of use-
value to the value of an object (circulated as pure sign); and delocalized
production, capital flow, and consumption (allowing the unimpeded cir-
culation of signs liberated from any original referent) are among the more
obvious correlates (Baudrillard 1990d: 99–127; Grace 6–35). In particular,
the slow transformation of locality as a meaningful dimension—a hall-
mark of hyperreality as well as globalized capitalism—has a number of
marked effects, including the emergence of delocalized consumption as a
preeminent site of subject formation, in which subjects derive identities
from the objects, or ‘‘lifestyles,’’ they purchase and interact with other
subjects not as ‘‘knowing agents with their own biographies and dreams’’
(Rodaway 264) but as shifting configurations of object identities. For
Baudrillard, such subjects are not in a position to act as willful political
agents, to interact as individuals with other individuals, to enunciate
meaning or produce value—all of which fall within a classical definition of
the subject. Rather, they are fundamentally apolitical, functioning as masses,
inarticulate by virtue of a superfluity of messages, and reproductive of signs
Orientalism and Hyperreality in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ 137

of value: in short, ‘‘neither subject nor object’’ but something else

(Baudrillard 1983a, 1988b: 11–27).6
In the following discussion, I analyze the close relationship
between the Orientalism in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ and its hyperreal signification,
which presents consumers with the scenario of an occidentalized subject
(the lyrical and filmic ‘‘I’’) constituted in desirous relation to seductive,
Orientalized objects. The hyperreality of the ‘‘Desert Rose’’ texts consist,
first, in their modeling of a transient subject removed from ordinary space
and time and oriented in relationship to technologically-mediated virtual
spaces. Second, the hyperreal subject of ‘‘Desert Rose’’ is seduced by a
superfluity of replicated sounds, images, and objects. Finally, these abun-
dant but elusive objects entangle the subject of ‘‘Desert Rose’’ in endlessly
fascinating simulacra of presence.

. . . Shimmering Like a Perfect Mirage

The musical and visual evocation of hyperreal spaces is a pre-
dominant effect of ‘‘Desert Rose.’’ Hyperreal spaces abound in these texts.
In the video, these include desert vistas and highways, the Jaguar, a
concert venue, and the Las Vegas strip. The song lyrics evoke the desert
and desert oases (‘‘I dream of gardens in the desert sand’’), the biblical
Garden of Eden (‘‘This memory of Eden haunts us all’’), and the veiled
body of an anonymous woman (‘‘This desert rose/Each of her veils, a
secret promise’’). The liner notes for the spin-off compilation, Desert
Roses and Arabian Rhythms Vol. I, in turn generate exotic visions of the
‘‘Maghreb’’ and the ‘‘Middle East,’’ promising to convey consumers-as-
tourists ‘‘across the sand, through the crowded souks and the streets of
the old cities, to where tomorrow waits.’’ The liner notes imply that these
are effects of the music: ‘‘soaring melodies and pulsing rhythms, the
romance of the voice . . . pulls like a siren.’’ Cheb Mami’s voice, as
heard on Desert Roses, ‘‘speaks beyond language, languid and sensual, a
dream of the East’’; the ‘‘melody and vocals’’ of the dance remix of ‘‘Desert
Rose’’ are ‘‘as lush as an oasis’’; and a track by Kazem al-Saher,
‘‘La Titnahad,’’ ‘‘burns like the desert sun’’ (Desert Roses and Arabian
Rhythms Vol. I).
The music of the original version of ‘‘Desert Rose’’ itself seems to
evoke hyperreal spaces consistent with the song’s text and the marketing
copy on the spin-off album. The instrumental introduction has a multi-
layered texture, with wind-like sounds and a drum track supporting a
138 Olivia Bloechl

pulsating melody and a synthesized extended sigh motive. The pulsating

melody consists of an ascending four-note line, repeated every four meas-
ures for the duration of the introduction. Aside from its harmonic function
as an ostinato, this melody contributes a rhythmic and dynamic mimicry of
spatial distance: each new pitch in the melodic line is repeated immedi-
ately, often several times, and the dynamic level gradually diminishes,
creating an echo effect. The extended sigh motive heard in measures 3–4
also evokes spatial distance, reproducing a type of sound effect associated
in film and commercial soundtracks (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, for
instance) with the western American frontier. The sound effects of blow-
ing wind reference desolate natural spaces more directly and, together
with the other textural layers, create a cinematic feel.
After four measures, a pedal unison on the tonic is introduced in
the bass, grounding the sound harmonically, and in the sixth measure,
Cheb Mami enters with an extended descending melismatic line. Mami’s
melody, essentially a vocalise after the repeated first pitch, is given reverb
and concludes with an echo effect, enhancing the instrumentals’ mimicry
of spatial distance. Its register and timbre distinguish Mami’s vocalise
from the supporting texture, and its high pitch expands the total dimen-
sions of the soundscape. Emerging from the homogenous textural back-
drop as an apparent singularity, Mami’s elaborately embellished melody
presents an ‘‘exotic’’ profile in the context of the instrumental opening.
This exoticism is only heightened with the entrance of Sting’s vocals.
The instrumental introduction evokes extensive spatial horizontal-
ity generically associated with the western American desert, but the
entrance of Mami’s vocalise and subsequent solo stanza broaden the
song’s associations. The initial vocalise and Mami’s subsequent vocals
are explicitly associated in the song and videos with the desert, and they
are implicitly associated with North Africa and the Middle East. The latter
association is partly due to Mami’s identity as an Algerian expatriate and
partly due to the perceived Arab genealogy of Mami’s vocal style. The
imperative according to which Mami’s music is essentially associated with
a non-western locality is a persistent characteristic of the discourse sur-
rounding world beat, as Taylor (16–17, 21–28) and others have shown. By
this logic, Mami’s vocals serve as a sounding metonym for exotic locality
(Taylor’s ‘‘authenticity of positionality’’), regardless of their actual style
or hybrid roots.
This indissoluble connection to place is a primary index of exoti-
cism in a system of globalized capitalism that has tended to transform
Orientalism and Hyperreality in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ 139

local difference by commodifying it, only to turn around and market it as

‘‘authenticity’’ (Erlmann; Guilbault; Lipsitz). In such a system, as in
‘‘Desert Rose,’’ the value of Mami’s vocals is based on their reproduction
of signs of authenticity, inflected here as locality. This, again, is in spite of
the fact that Mami is an Algerian expatriate living in Paris at the time of
writing, whose music combines elements of North African, Caribbean,
European, and American styles and is distributed globally to diverse
audiences. However, marketed to western pop audiences and juxtaposed
against Sting’s vocal style, Mami’s voice will tend to signify an ‘‘else-
where’’ that, in this instance, is a postmodern version of the Orient.
A predisposition to experience exoticist signs as vehicles to an
imagined ‘‘elsewhere’’ is part of the legacy of colonialism (Feld 148).
‘‘Desert Rose’’ generates a dazzling array of ‘‘elsewheres’’ metonymically
related to Mami’s vocals. These virtual spaces include the Mojave or
Sahara deserts, foremost, but also postmodern and premodern oases (Las
Vegas, Eden), and the veiled body of an anonymous woman, figured in the
videos as the masked female driver. Each of these virtual spaces has the
capacity to signify an ‘‘Orient’’ in relation to the implied occidental
positioning of the desiring subject of ‘‘Desert Rose.’’
As in certain modes of modernist Orientalist discourse, geograph-
ical specificity is irrelevant to the reproduction of signs of the Orient in
‘‘Desert Rose.’’ The ‘‘dream’’ that the song summons requires no mooring
in actual locales. The Orient has had a critical function in western imag-
inaries as an indeterminate terrain invested with a colonialist ideology,
expressed as a will to knowledge or as insatiable desire for the other.
Necessarily abstract—even when produced in hyperbolic detail—the
Orient of high colonialism is an ideological space that shifts with the
perspective of the Orientalist (Said). We might understand the ‘‘Orient’’
conjured by ‘‘Desert Rose,’’ in partial contrast, as a holographic nonspace:
neither geographical nor fully ideological, if ideology is understood as a
scheme of ideas used to justify or compel subjective action.
It is the latter part of this formulation that does not seem to fit
‘‘Desert Rose,’’ which reproduces decontextualized musical, verbal, and
visual signs of the Orient/Oriental while obviating any connection to
political colonialism. Certainly, an identifying feature of ideologies is
their self-masking, but it is not clear that the evocative, disjointed surface
of ‘‘Desert Rose’’ coheres on the basis of a hidden system of ideas nor is it
clear what subjective action (the will-to-power of the classical subject)
it could compel, because if Baudrillard is right, subjects situated as
140 Olivia Bloechl

consumers under global capitalism (or hyperreal subjects) tend to be

seduced into passivity in relation to systems of objects (1983a, 1990c,
1990d: 35–61). The sole action prompted by ‘‘Desert Rose’’ is a mimicry
of the desiring consumer subject that it models. In this configuration, the
position of the classical subject is untenable (1990c: 117).
One of the most striking effects of ‘‘Desert Rose’’ is the cinematic
vividness with which it evokes—musically, visually, and verbally—while
the objects of this evocation remain elusive. Compiling image upon image
and presenting copious fleeting associations, ‘‘Desert Rose’’ creates the
appearance of a superfluity of meaning, or of spatial depth. However, the
signs of authenticity displayed in such profusion in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ are also
shown to be models, that is, always already subject to reproduction, which
effaces an authenticity dependent on an order of original production.
Particularly important in this regard are Cheb Mami’s vocals that
are privileged in the ‘‘Desert Rose’’ texts as the consummate object of
desire, even as they are associated metonymically with the other objects
figured in the song’s texts and visuals. In addition to transferring value to
the Jaguar and other objects, Mami’s music and image transfer value to
the British pop star. One of the means of this transfer is the complex
process by which Mami’s melismatic, ornamented vocal style is both
exoticized in relation to Sting’s vocal style and assimilated by it. Mami
opens the song, as noted, with a sinuous vocalise-like melody followed by
a solo stanza sung in an Algerian dialect of Arabic. Sting’s strophic
melody occupies much of the rest of the song, with the notable exceptions
of the bridge and conclusion, where Mami again performs highly embel-
lished melodic fragments. Sting’s strophic vocal part is simpler than
Mami’s melodies, with a syllabic music/text relationship and a repetitive
phrase structure (a b a b0 ) whose ‘‘a’’ phrases have short, melismatic
cadential formulas. These can be heard as mimeses of Mami’s melismas,
echoing them, but with a difference: Sting’s cadential formulas are
diatonic, rhythmically simplified versions of Mami’s melismas, with a
much contracted pitch range. They are, moreover, identical, whereas
Mami’s vocalises are varied in their content and structure, with some
repeated motifs.
Although there is no mistaking Sting’s cadential formulas for
Mami’s melismas, the formulas in Sting’s melody refer to Mami’s orna-
ments as their distant abstraction. Sting’s mimicry enhances the aura of
authenticity that envelops Cheb Mami’s vocal style in the song, at the
same time transferring some of that value to his own vocals. There is a
Orientalism and Hyperreality in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ 141

powerful urgency about maintaining the distinction between Mami’s and

Sting’s vocalities: an aura of originality must be maintained around
Mami’s voice in spite of its manifest abstraction and reproduction. Yet
the distinction between the two always threatens to collapse, because once
something is subject to reproduction, its originality becomes chimerical.
The appeal of this and other popular music that displays signs of
difference, I suggest, rests on the paradox that the only authenticity that is
of value in global capitalist markets is the authenticity that appears in the
presence of its own abstraction: the HYPERreal. Baudrillard (1988a: 70)
likewise noted that ‘‘the only . . . spectacle that is really gripping is the one
which offers both the most moving profundity and at the same time the
total simulacrum of that profundity.’’ The simulacrum of authenticity
must be maintained as the operator of value, but true singularity is
incomprehensible because it cannot be abstracted or reproduced. Indeed,
absolute singularity, like absolute simulation, would be fatal to the
hyperreal subject.
The authenticity of the object and, by extension, of the subject is
thus the paramount simulacrum generated by hyperreal processes, and it
accounts for their powerful appeal. Baudrillard characterizes this as a
process of seduction, which consists neither ‘‘of a simple appearance,
nor a pure absence, but the eclipse of a presence. Its sole strategy is to
be-there/not-there, and thereby produce a sort of flickering, a hypnotic
mechanism that crystallizes attention outside all concern with meaning’’
(1990e: 85). Seduction, according to Baudrillard, is the potential revenge
of the object, by which it elicits fascination and desire, ‘‘letting the other
believe himself to be the subject of his desire,’’ while betraying the subject
in the end by disappearing. Homi K. Bhabha points to this as the challenge
that the mimicry of the colonial subject holds for the colonizer, the threat
of ‘‘an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a ‘partial’ pre-
sence,’’ a presence that Bhabha (1984: 127) glosses as both ‘‘incomplete’’
and ‘‘virtual.’’
The relationship of Sting’s cadential formulas to Mami’s ornamen-
tation in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ is relevant here, particularly the conclusion of the
song, when Mami sings a descant over Sting’s melody. The previous
mimetic relationship between Sting’s and Mami’s vocalities is intensified
as Sting’s vocal mimicry ‘‘appears’’ in the proximity of its object. Yet
subject and object are confused in hyperreality, as in the colonial mimicry
that Bhabha described. Who is to say that Sting’s persona is the subject of
mimesis and the voice of Mami’s persona its object? As Sting’s vocality
142 Olivia Bloechl

reproduces Mami’s (with a difference), so in the concluding strophes

Mami’s voice often parallels Sting’s at the interval of a third, mimicking
its contours but disturbing its diatonicism with microtonal embellishments.
Toward the end, Mami’s descant shadows Sting’s melodic line, reversing
the subject/object relationship implied by Sting’s earlier mimicry. Mami’s
voice doubles Sting’s as Sting’s voice doubles Mami’s, and paradoxically,
this mutual doubling—this multiplication of signs of presence—enhances
the aura surrounding each of them.
At the conclusion, as at the beginning of the song, Sting’s voice is
absent, and Mami performs mnemonic fragments of prior melodic figures.
The video casts this moment dually, first showing Sting in the desert with
video camera in hand, as before, and then onstage with Mami, eyes closed,
absorbed in a ‘‘dream’’ that is unambiguously associated with Mami’s
voice. The video envisions closing scenarios in which the desired voice is
both absent and present, disembodied and embodied. It is significant that
the final images show Sting in his Jaguar, ‘‘dreaming’’ again. Having
found and lost the object, are we to assume the subject is moving on to
the next scenario of desire? What kind of subject is this that is authenti-
cated solely in the process of desiring elusive objects?
The key distinction established between the two personae in the
song’s music, lyrics, videos, and marketing copy is that of a desiring
subject and a signified object of desire. Despite its tendency to identify
Sting with the privileged subject, these positions are not assignable with
any fixity in ‘‘Desert Rose’’—the objects are plural, as are the subjects,
and ultimately, the subject/object distinction is itself obscured. The critical
effect is not the video’s assignment of its personae to the position of
subject or object, but, rather, its presentation of a scenario in which
desiring subjects are seduced by an abundance of deferred objects. That
these objects, sounds, and spatial images remain elusive is necessary to the
sustenance of the lyrical ‘‘I,’’ for whom an ever-receding object-horizon
seems a constitutional necessity, as it is necessary to the replication of the
consumer subject modeled in ‘‘Desert Rose.’’

The Postcolonial Transvestite

A version of this desiring scenario that is prominent in ‘‘Desert
Rose’’ is the musical and cultural transvestism of a subject that temporarily
distances himself from himself7 through a process of self-exoticization,
thereby becoming his own object of desire (Behdad 59–60). I describe one
Orientalism and Hyperreality in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ 143

example of this impulse to transvestism mentioned above, with Sting’s

mimicry of Mami’s ornamentation. One of the most striking moments of
transvestism on the part of this persona is in the concert/club footage,
when Sting sways his hips and appears to play imaginary castanets in time
to his and Mami’s duet toward the end of the song. His personification of
feminized body movements and exoticized percussion performance (dis-
tantly echoing Carmen?) are in a sense the ultimate projection of a
possessing desire, because they allow him to momentarily inhabit the
imagined pleasure of the object objectified, to become the object of his
own fascination.
We viewers are not fooled by this halfhearted transvestism. The
ludic veiling of the privileged, desiring subject may reverse its hegemonic
gaze for a moment. It may even be a source of pleasure (as Tori Amos
sang, ‘‘Put on your makeup, boy, you’re your favorite stranger/And we all
like to watch, so shimmy once, and do it again’’) (Amos). A parallel
moment of scopic reversal is shown in the music video, when Sting’s
persona turns his digital camera on himself, shifting the camera’s viewing
screen toward the video camera lens (lip-synching, ‘‘I realize that noth-
ing’s as it seems’’). Yet this subject-qua-object never relinquishes the
possibility of reversion: he can temporarily don other, less privileged
identities without risking the loss of privilege associated with his own
‘‘real’’ identity, whereas less privileged subjects or, indeed, objects are
forcefully restricted to a ‘‘real,’’ veiled identity that is nonetheless as
fantastic as that of the privileged transvestite. Sting’s persona can and
does turn the camera back, resuming his surveillance of the desert land-
scape and the female chauffeur. He can and does resume a white European
masculine posture and scopic privilege, as when he directs unrequited
glances at Cheb Mami during their concluding duet (singing, ‘‘This mem-
ory of Eden haunts us all’’). He can, in other words, revert to full (white
male) subjecthood in an instant.8 Simulation, for the privileged subject, is
the place you like to visit, but you would not want to (nor do you have to)
live there.
Sting is not the only transvestite in ‘‘Desert Rose.’’ Other personae
who display transvestism include Cheb Mami and the masked female
chauffeur. Mami is implicitly associated with the chauffeur in the videos,
because both possess something valued by the desiring subject: Mami’s
voice, alternately singular and doubled, and the driver’s hidden visage,
with its promise of feminine beauty. The allure of both objects inheres in
144 Olivia Bloechl

their ‘‘veiled’’ quality, which is construed in the song as masking a hidden

reality.
This pan-transvestism deconstructs the subject/object distinction
by showing these positions as available to every persona in the video
and, implicitly, every consumer. Yet not all members of postmodern
consumer societies have access to subjecthood or to the pleasure of
transvestism. For this reason, it would be a mistake to perceive in this
fluidity of subject/object either their total erasure or their disinvestment
from power. Although ‘‘subject’’ and ‘‘object’’ appear to circulate as signs
‘‘liberated’’ from any essential relation in hyperreal processes, with the
result that hegemonic power relations may potentially be suspended at
certain moments, the order of simulation instituted in ‘‘Desert Rose’’
carries its own violence. In other words, we should not look to find the
enlightenment dream of objects-becoming-subjects realized in hyperreal
processes. If anything, hyperreality effects a proliferation of objects and a
flickering dissolution and reconstitution of the subject—conjuring its
mythic powers of production, enunciation, self-consciousness, and action,
while showing these as effects. The subject does not properly disappear,
but it is unsustainable as a position of power over an object, because
classical dialectical power relations depend on the maintenance of a
subject/object polarity. This does not mean that power completely disap-
pears in hyperreality any more than the subject disappears. Rather, power
relations, like the subject/object relation, are simulated, or circulated as
signs.
Given these conditions, we may productively scrutinize who is
granted access to signs of subjecthood and objecthood in hyperreal pro-
cesses, where, when, and under what conditions (Luke). Also, what value
do these signs carry, in their particular configurations? The transvestite
personae in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ are not identical, and their access to signs of
subjecthood is not equal. Nowhere in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ are any of the
primary personae other than Sting shown dreaming of deferred objects.
With that assumed position of desiring subject, as depicted in ‘‘Desert
Rose,’’ comes the pleasure and privilege of desiring oneself as object.
Power is enforced, on the other hand, in the imperative to forego the
mobility between orders of simulation and reality that the privileged
subject takes as his birthright: a compulsion to collude in the performance
of a ‘‘real,’’ irreversible identity.
Baudrillard notes that power, which mastered the art of simulation,
always reverts to the real when faced with the (dis)simulation of the
Orientalism and Hyperreality in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ 145

object. It is for this reason that ‘‘in the end, power is so much in tune with
ideological discourses and discourses on ideology, that is, they are dis-
courses of truth—always good for countering the mortal blows of simula-
tion, even and especially if they are revolutionary’’ (1994: 27). Power, and
with it the order of the real, is instituted inasmuch as objects are compelled
to presence, to really be there, available to the subject. When the object
disappears or mimics the subject or its powers, power is shown to be
chimerical, a simulacrum of itself.
Against power’s institution of itself as real, what critical or per-
formative strategies might undo or at least interfere in its fascinating,
phantasmatic authentication of veiled objects and hegemonic subjects?
How might we ask this question specifically of popular music media?
We might, as a beginning, ask . . .

What Do Rock Stars Dream Of ?

Midway through the Jaguar S-series commercial, luminescent text
appears on-screen, stating that ‘‘everyone dreams of becoming a rock
star.’’9 Shots of Sting entering a Las Vegas club shift to footage of Sting
listening onstage at the club, eyes closed, as his own voice is heard on the
soundtrack. The text reappears several seconds later, asking, ‘‘What then
do rock stars dream of ?’’ Several answers follow. First, we hear Cheb
Mami’s voice join Sting’s with the next line of the song (‘‘The shadow
veils a secret promise’’), whose downbeat is timed to coincide with the
appearance of the question. Second, we see images of the Jaguar flash on
screen, interspersed with shots of Sting ‘‘dreaming’’ onstage and, finally,
in the back of the automobile. Partial ‘‘teaser’’ shots of the Jaguar in action
appear first, and only gradually are we allowed to see a full distance shot
of the automobile. The commercial veils and unveils the Jaguar, and its
unveiling is timed to coincide with the renewed presence of Mami’s voice,
following its absence in the preceding phrase and the English lyric’s
evocation of the veil trope.
The density with which the commercial compiles signs of desirable
objects is gauged to fascinate supersaturated television viewers, and the
success with which it did so is at least partly indicated by Brand New
Day’s markedly stronger sales following the airing of the commercial
(Bauder; Guzman). If the emphasis shifts toward situating the Jaguar as
the ultimate desirable object in the commercial, its conjuring of a scenario
of consumer desire nevertheless takes its cues from the music video. The
146 Olivia Bloechl

genres of commercial and rock or pop video are conflated here: portions of
the video resemble an auto commercial, and the commercial references the
video, with its concert footage. Mimicking and, ideally, replicating sce-
narios of desire are clearly the foremost processes in both.
To track the movement of desire in the ‘‘Desert Rose’’ videos is to
trace their shadowy formation and dissolution of subjects and objects. This
type of inquiry is critical to interventive strategies of hearing, viewing,
analyzing, or performing hyperrealist musical media, particularly those
that circulate signs of cultural, racial, or sexual difference. Feminist
sociologist Meyda Yêgênoglu, citing Spivak (1983), recommends as a
strategy of resistance that we ‘‘pose the question of the itinerary of
man’s desire in an attempt to deconstruct the imperial European subjec-
tivity.’’ She recommends, as I read it, a strategic simulation—that of the
(veiled Muslim) woman as subject, returning the objectifying question/
gaze directed at her by the Orientalist, male or female: namely, ‘‘What
does (veiled) woman want?,’’ which is just another strategy of unveiling.
Yêgênoglu argues that ‘‘the feminist gesture requires asking the question
that will allow the woman the subject status and the positioning of a
questioning subject: What is man? What does he want?’’ (Yêgênoglu
1998: 58, 55).
The Jaguar commercial asks a version of the latter question,
though no doubt to a different purpose. In the commercial, the question,
‘‘What then do rock stars dream of ?,’’ is not an interrogative, but
an indexical gesture toward the spectacle of the Jaguar/voice object com-
plex. It directs and seeks to enhance the circulation of consumer desire.
The ‘‘dreaming’’ or the mechanism of desire itself is not the object of
the question, and in fact it must remain at least partly hidden for the
commercial/videos to produce the intended effect, which is the replication
of consumption (Campbell 1987).
We can expect to find in the Jaguar commercial’s posing of this
question an anticipation of strategies disruptive of the desiring subjectivity
it seeks to replicate. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (112) notes that
desire is produced out of a resistance: ‘‘when it encounters resistance from
the other, self-consciousness undergoes the experience of desire.’’ Bhabha
has likewise theorized the ‘‘negating, splitting moment of desire’’ (1990a:
195) as a hallmark of the ‘‘ambivalence of colonial discourse’’ (1984:
125), remarking that ‘‘in the objectification of the scopic drive, there is
always the threatened return of the look’’ (1990b: 84). The fracturing of
the subject in the process of identification is, certainly, a foundational
Orientalism and Hyperreality in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ 147

insight of poststructuralist theories and is basic to techniques of decon-

struction, which have in turn been adapted by postcolonial theorists as
strategies of resistance to neocolonialist knowledge. In setting into motion
mechanisms of consumer desire, the Jaguar commercial necessarily con-
jures the question/gaze that interrogates its process of desire in return:
‘‘What is the rock star/consumer? What does she/he want?’’ Returning the
interrogative question absents the object and returns it as a simulated
subject, doubling the desiring subject and thereby displacing it. That this
impertinent questioning is itself displayed in the Jaguar advertisement and
returned to the economy of desire that generated it is again a mark of
hyperreality.
‘‘Without imagining desire, one cannot imagine the resistance the
otherness might generate against the subject. If the Western subject’s
relation with its Oriental other is not given and determined once and for
all, it is precisely because desire, as the moving motor of the subject,
posits its own object in an effort to constitute its own identity [my
emphasis]’’ (Yêgênoglu 61). Yêgênoglu’s metaphor conflates desire and
the subject as twin processes reproductive of an object that is also indis-
tinct from this process, catching something of the uncanny quality of the
predicative object, desire of which conjures the phantom subject.
We may regard Mami’s voice similarly, as it is figured in the
videos. I have shown that this vocality, like Sting’s, is doubled, contra-
vening an imperative to originality, which may be read partly as an
imperative to a singular embodied origin of the voice. None of the voices
in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ fulfills this imperative. Reproduction and digital mani-
pulation routinely alienated voices from visibly performing bodies in the
late twentieth century. Nevertheless, the trajectory of rock star/consumer
desire in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ is traceable in its figuration of the voice as an
organic presence identifiable with a single performing body, a nostalgic
hearing/viewing that the videos acknowledge as unsustainable (through
their foregrounding of the digital video camera, for instance).
The ‘‘otherness’’ of the Oriental voice is thus figured in part as a
musical embodiment innocent of mediating technology. The videos show
Sting’s persona touring the ‘‘digital desert’’—an arid landscape mediated
by digital technology and traversed by a cyborg subject whose knowledge
and mobility are enabled by technological extensions. That this landscape
is imagined in the video as a desert is consonant with an Orientalist fear
of and fascination with the desert as ‘‘the brink of the Oriental reality’’
(1994: 57). The desert as a space of absence, which the desiring subject
148 Olivia Bloechl

apprehends via mediating technologies of surveillance and traversal, is

contrasted in the video with a concert space of abundant bodily, vocal
presence, minimally mediated by analog technologies (the microphone
and scratching station). Musical support is visibly provided in this setting
by acoustic drums and violin, played by musicians in exoticized costumes,
including a female violinist in a spangled, midriff-baring costume that
recalls Orientalist fantasies of the harem.
The idealization of this space of live performance, versus an
isolated auditory space mediated by digital technology and the subject’s
imagination, is consistent with Goodwin’s (269) argument that live per-
formance retains its appeal for consumers because it offers ‘‘the only truly
original aura available in mass-produced pop—the physical presence of
the star(s).’’ Sting’s arrival at this concert space consolidates and legit-
imates his persona’s status, much as his musical chops and aging pop star
aura are enhanced in proximity with Mami’s talent and international star
status. The ‘‘Desert Rose’’ videos present as an ultimate rock star/con-
sumer destination a live concert space overflowing with signs of authentic
presence. Although the authenticity lent by the proximity of Orientalist
signs—projected in the videos onto the visibly musicking bodies of Cheb
Mami, the drummer, and the violinist—could hypothetically be otherwise
provided, the presence of ‘‘Oriental’’ otherness in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ is a
potent and canny guarantor for the scenarios of consuming desire it
conjures. As Baudrillard (1990d: 45–46) points out, ‘‘man surrounded by
his objects is par excellence master of a secret seraglio.’’
In ‘‘Desert Rose,’’ ‘‘imperialist nostalgia’’ (Rosaldo 69) recon-
figures in digital territory, as a desiring auditory that conjures and mourns
the loss of the chimerical presence of the digitally fragmented and recon-
stituted voice. The fact that the object of this fascinated elegy, as heard in
‘‘Desert Rose,’’ bears the mark of one of the west’s arch-‘‘others’’ in the
1990s—the Arab or Muslim ‘‘Oriental’’—needs to be understood as key to
its processes of signification and its commercial success in the United
Kingdom and the United States. As noted, the release of ‘‘Desert Rose,’’
with its ‘‘dream’’ of exotic Arab-Oriental authenticity, coincided with a
period of heightened political tension among the United States, United
Kingdom, and Israel and the Palestinians, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq. It
would be overly simplistic to attribute the success of ‘‘Desert Rose’’ in
western markets—and these by no means represent the totality of its
consumer base—solely to the fallout of coincident transnational politics
and economics. Likewise, however, it would be irresponsible to ignore
Orientalism and Hyperreality in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ 149

what seems to be another instance of the liberal west’s resurrecting a

palatable figure of difference, even as the political and economic struc-
tures that sustain its dominance continue the work of absorbing and
transforming singularity through the violence of neocolonialism and a
voracious capitalism.
I do not want to present ‘‘Desert Rose’’ as additional evidence of a
one-sided cultural imperialism of ‘‘the west’’ in relation to ‘‘the rest.’’
Such a vision is inadequate to the fact of globality as negotiated in relation
to specific localities. Nor do I imagine that consumers simply receive the
Orientalist signs in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ uncritically, without a process of
meaning-making that rebounds on, perhaps resists, and certainly contri-
butes to the work of ‘‘Desert Rose’’ itself. Addressing such questions in
relation to ‘‘Desert Rose’’ would involve, as a beginning, an investigation
of its reception in Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, or the UAE—all stops on the
Brand New Day tour—or its reception in Arabic-speaking immigrant and
transnational communities in Paris, London, Montreal, Detroit, or New
York. This would be a beginning. But I am wary of such a mode of
questioning if it is simply a matter of searching for authentic resistant
voices among postcolonial bourgeois consumers, which is just another
form of unveiling.
To illustrate the difficulty of such an enterprise, I would point to
one notable reception context, in which a prominent Arab-American
organization celebrated the signification of ‘‘Arab’’ difference in ‘‘Desert
Rose’’ using a rhetoric of multiculturalism. The Arab-American Institute
Foundation (AAIF) presented Sting with the prestigious Kahlil Gibran
Spirit of Humanity Award in 2001, commending him for his ‘‘commit-
ment to indigenous people and the environment as well as his efforts to
promote cross-cultural understanding,’’ the former apparent in his found-
ing involvement with the Rainforest Foundation and the latter in his
having ‘‘brought Arabic music to the top of US pop charts with the song
‘Desert Rose’ ’’ (Salan). Sting shared the stage at the AAIF awards gala on
May 5, 2001, in Washington, D.C., with then-Secretary of State Colin
Powell, who took the occasion to promote the George W. Bush adminis-
tration’s actions in relation to the escalating violence in Israel/Palestine
and the precarious situation in Iraq (see Powell). Kahlil Gibran awards
have also gone to MTV, Reebok International, the Ford Motor Company,
and Exxon Mobil, to name a few of the corporate recipients. Sponsors
have included the Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Chevron
Texaco, Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum, Saudi Aramco, the Liberty
150 Olivia Bloechl

Media Corporation, and the embassies of the Gulf Cooperation Council

(AAIF Web site n.d.).
This assemblage reflects the AAIF’s status as a prestigious non-
profit organization with powerful alliances, located in a center of global
power, Washington, D.C. In such a context, the simultaneous embroilment
of ‘‘Desert Rose’’ in discourses celebrating ‘‘diversity’’ and ‘‘cultural
interaction’’ (AAIF Web site) and those advocating continued violence
against Arabic-speaking peoples in the name of ‘‘peace,’’ ‘‘democracy,’’
and ‘‘free enterprise’’ (Powell) is to be expected. As Gayatri Spivak (1999:
353–58, 396–99, 402) has noted, liberal discourses of multiculturalism are
a dominant paradigm through which transnational capitalisms neutralize
challenges to their expansion into new markets, although multiculturalism
can be used strategically if it is combined with ‘‘global socialist aware-
ness.’’ Still, the apparent harmony among, on the one hand, the efforts of
an agency dedicated to education and activism on behalf of Arab-
American communities—a project of wedging open access to hegemonic
subjecthood—and, on the other, a diplomatic agenda on behalf of an
openly neocolonial US administration and its corporate beneficiaries
gives pause to easy pronouncements about ‘‘resistance’’ vis-à-vis
‘‘difference.’’
To state what is apparent, there is no veiled authentic other in this
reception context or, perhaps, anywhere else. There are simulations of
identity, difference, and power multiplied exponentially that lend them-
selves, unequally, to myriad adaptations, appropriations, mimeses, and
reproductions from all sides and that have an unpredictable, compromised
relationship to forms of power (the domain of the real, in Baudrillard’s
terms). Simulations of the Orient/Oriental that circulate in this economy
also exist in an unpredictable relation to power, which is why recalling
their part in the ideologies that sustained high colonialism only speaks in a
limited way to their present circulation in mass media.
This is the challenge facing those who would trace the movements
of hyperreal Orientalism, racism, or misogyny in pop music products
across the global marketplace: to find ways of tracking the displacement
of the self-same subject in the predicative movement of desire. Spivak
(1983: 191) phrases the deconstructive question thus: ‘‘What is man that
the itinerary of his desire creates such a text?’’ The critical moment that
this question aims at is the becoming of hegemonic desire, which is a
formative moment for both subject and object, therefore for relations of
power. In her later writings, Spivak has developed this as a strategy that
Orientalism and Hyperreality in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ 151

applies to colonial or neocolonial texts the ‘‘impossible (because historic-

ally and discursively discontinuous) perspective of the native informant-
turned-reader rather than evidence’’ (1999: 33). Crucially, she emphasizes
that this method ‘‘is structural rather than historical or psychological,’’ an
attempt to ‘‘animate’’ simulations of resistant reading out of the traces of
displaced singularity (which Spivak renames the ‘‘native informant’’) in
colonial or neocolonial texts (1999: 50, 153). This is analogous to
Yêgênoglu’s strategic simulation—as I read it—of the veiled Muslim
woman as subject of the Orientalist texts that attempt to unveil her.
What movements of displacing desire would such a reading animate
in ‘‘Desert Rose?’’ I conclude this section by returning to one such micro-
movement in the Jaguar commercial discussed above. Between the
appearance of the statement, ‘‘everyone dreams of becoming a rock
star,’’ and the ‘‘hook’’ question, ‘‘What then do rock stars dream of ?,’’
we see images of Sting onstage, listening, eyes closed, as his own voice,
doubled at the third, is heard on the soundtrack. Straddling the statement
and the question, this model of desirous listening shows the alpha subject,
Sting, dreaming . . . of becoming a rock star? The movement of displace-
ment is enacted in the splitting of a subject who listens desirously to the
digital reproduction of his own voice. That the reproduced voice doubles
audibly over itself is symptomatic. The doubling of this vocal subject is
the moment that the question returns from the place where the object
should be: ‘‘What does man want?’’ The supplement of Mami’s vocality in
the following phrase, heard a third above Sting’s melody (where his
doubled voice left off ), is at once what was displaced in the preceding
phrase and what displaces the subject in the present, by failing to close the
rupture of the subject position. Multiplied signs of presence—what the
subject dreams of—fail the subject in the end. The (voice-)objects’ failure
to remain within the circumference of desire ‘‘unsings’’ both subject and
object (Abbate).

The Revenge of the Object

Pushed into retreat by analysis, the objects become reversible, just
like appearance; pushed into retreat by meaning, they metamor-
phose. The subject of analysis has become fragile everywhere, and
this revenge of the object is only just begun. (Baudrillard, Fatal
Strategies)
152 Olivia Bloechl

Baudrillard’s lines have a melodramatic ring to them, as if the

processes of simulation he evokes were a bad B-movie. The dramatic
element of simulation is a large part of the fascination of hyperreal
processes, including Baudrillard’s own writings. But if this simulation
has a ludic quality, it is never far from a deadly seriousness. Insofar as
power employs and reviles simulation, its stakes are real (as those of us
privy to the US corporate news media at the turn of the millennium can
testify). The genius of simulation, certainly, is that in hyperreality you
never can tell what is real and what is not. This is the problem of
simulation’s ambivalent relation to power.
I will conclude with a story that illustrates this problem as it relates
to popular music in postcolonial contexts. In a collection of travel essays,
Video Night in Kathmandu, journalist Pico Iyer describes his impressions
of what he terms the ‘‘virtuoso mimicry’’ of popular music performers in
Manila in the mid-1980s. ‘‘We Are the World’’ was heard everywhere in
the Philippines when Iyer visited, and he comments on the skillful covers
of other American popular tunes performed in Manilan bars. Iyer finds the
precision of the Manila performers’ covers deeply disturbing; failing to
find marks of original artistry, he labels them ‘‘professional impersona-
tors.’’ In one pub, he reports:

almost everyone . . . came up to deliver flawless imitations of some

American hit. And almost everyone had every professional move
down perfectly. They knew not only how to trill like Joan Baez and
rasp like the Boss, but also how to play on the crowd with their
eyes, how to twist the microphone wire in their hands, how to
simulate every shade of heartbreak. (Iyer 172–73)

If Iyer’s unease over the skillful manipulations of the performers

resembles patriarchal fears about female dissimulation or colonial anxi-
eties about the dissembling native, this is characteristic of his text, which
struggles with the spectacles of American hegemony and the daily counter-
hegemonic acts that he witnesses in his travels in Asia, while succumbing
frequently to a confessional nostalgia for authentic natives. (Iyer’s
expressed identity as a postcolonial transnational may factor here.) For
example, Iyer’s response to an anonymous Chinese singer’s mimicry
expresses regret that he does not seem able to discern an authentic subject
behind the mask of impersonation: ‘‘Yet what his own voice sounded like
and what his own personality might have been were impossible to tell.
Orientalism and Hyperreality in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ 153

And when it came to improvising, adding some of the frills or flourishes

that his culture relished, making a song his own, he—like every other singer
I had heard—simply did not bother’’ (173). This proliferation of musical
copies seems to lack the consequence of an enunciating subject transpar-
ently expressing his sincere feelings. Having heard an unusual rendition of
the Beatles song ‘‘Help,’’ Iyer remarks despondently that:

then I heard the song delivered in exactly the same way, with
exactly the same heart-rent inflections, in a small club in Baguio,
and then again at another bar: all the singers, I realized, were not in
fact creating a new version, but simply copying some cover
version quite different from the Beatles’ original. All the feelings
were still borrowed. (173–74)

He concludes the passage on a melancholy note:

This development of musical mannequins struck me as strange,

especially in a country that understandably regarded its musical
gifts as a major source of national pride. I could certainly see how
the Filipinos’ brilliance at reproducing their masters’ voices, down
to the very last burr, had made them the musical stars of Asia—the
next-best-thing, in fact, to having a real American. But as a form of
self-expression, this eerie kind of ventriloquism made me sad.
(174)

The Manilan singers, in Iyer’s narrative, blur the lines between

human and machine, as if the performers ‘‘reproducing their masters’
voices’’ were old-fashioned Victrolas or new-fashioned digital recordings.
These cyborg ventriloquists connote, for Iyer, the lack of a centered
originary subject: they are ‘‘the next-best-thing . . . to having a real
American.’’ Contrary to his desire to find an authentic Filipino nationalism
embodied in musical performance—What is the itinerary of this ( post-
colonial migrant) man’s desire?—Iyer finds instead uncanny echoes of
American imperialism. These postcolonials have not learned their former
masters’ lessons well, or rather, they have learned them too well. Instead
of differentiating like proper postcolonial subjects, they, according to Iyer,
expertly double the master’s voice, depriving American tourists of the
pleasure and absolution of intact nativity. I have no idea of these Manilan
performers’ intentions or pleasures in regard to their own performances, or
154 Olivia Bloechl

even whether Iyer’s story is true. But the narrative itself is symptomatic of
late twentieth-century desire for postcolonial music performance. The
outcome of that desire, in Iyer’s tale, is predictable: the authentic musical
body that the desiring auditory seeks to possess disappears. It is the
revenge of the perfect mimicry.
Baudrillard regards with horror what he sees as the contemporary
media cultures’ tendency to eliminate seduction—the object’s ‘‘eclipse
of a presence’’ (1990e: 85)—in favor of a totalitarian economy of
signs, in which artifice disappears entirely ‘‘in manifest naturalism’’
(1990d: 182–83). This is the condition of power mythologizing itself as
total—when objects are compelled to presence without relief. Against this
‘‘scandal which is unbearable,’’ Baudrillard recommends a return to
seduction: ‘‘we must reforge illusion, retrieve illusion—that ability, at
once immoral and malefic, to tear the same from the same which is called
seduction’’ (1990d: 182–83). This, coupled with the misogyny in
Baudrillard’s writing, has not endeared him to feminists, and rightly so
(see Gallop; Jardine; Morris). Baudrillard’s advocacy of the object strat-
egy of seductive mimicry directly contravenes the second-wave feminist
strategy of enabling women to transform themselves into subjects—a
revolutionary move by many accounts. Yet in Baudrillard’s theory, this
gesture is deeply nostalgic for a subject/object relation that mainly exists
at present as a simulacrum.
I agree with Victoria Grace (191) that if there is a challenge to
feminism in Baudrillard’s work, it is in his call for ‘‘a paradigm shift away
from feminism’s preoccupations . . . with the structure of the subject/object
dichotomy and with feminine subjectivity, toward an immediate engage-
ment with contemporary dynamics of simulation and the myriad of singu-
larities that remain irreducible to codification, models, and simulation.’’ I
would add, however, that such an exploration of simulation, as oppressive
and resistant strategy, is evident in some expressions of ‘‘third-wave’’
feminism and in the work of many contemporary pro-woman artists,
activists, and scholars who may or may not identify as ‘‘feminist’’
(Anzaldúa and Keating; Hernández and Rehman). And it is amply evident
in some resistant strategies of enslaved and colonized peoples and their
descendents—‘‘Signifyin(g)’’ (Gates), for example, or ‘‘trickster herme-
neutics’’ (Vizenor).
In the end, I too am suspicious of Baudrillard’s advocacy of
seductive mimicry, even as I clearly find many of his arguments along
those lines to be insightful and provocative. This suspicion is supported by
Orientalism and Hyperreality in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ 155

two observations: (i) objecthood is an unenviable position and mimicry, as

a resistant strategy, is often also a desperate one, and (ii) I echo Spivak
and many others in calling for continued efforts to actively assist the
conditions that will allow the disenfranchised, the indigent, the subaltern
(woman) to insert herself ‘‘into the long road to hegemony’’ (Spivak 1999:
310), with the understanding that this too is a call for a strategic simula-
tion. The necessary corollary being that man’s subjecthood is also always
a simulation, even when its effects are all too real.
Scholarship that tracks the movements of desire predicated in pop
musical signs of the Orient/Oriental—or other commodified signs of
cultural, gender, racial, class, or sexual difference—will benefit from
greater attention to the work of simulation in these texts, in its hegemonic
and counter-hegemonic forms. This may involve tracing our own desires,
as they are interwoven with the sounds and images we analyze, and
attempting to trace desires apparent in the listening/viewing habits of
other consumers—realizing that such attempts, with the critical desires
that predicate them, are also potentially strategies of unveiling. I have
offered readings here based on deconstructive practices, listening for the
sounds of objects voicing and unvoicing subjects and tracking the dissolu-
tion and reconstitution of these categories themselves. I close with the
small hope that this or other kinds of listening may offer undreamt-of
possibilities of pleasure and resistance.

Acknowledgments
A version of this paper was presented at the twelfth biennial
meeting of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music,
Montreal, Quebec, 2003. I am grateful to Robert Fink, Annie Janeiro
Randall, Patricia Schmidt, and Timothy D. Taylor for reading and com-
menting on this paper.

Notes
1. In this article, I analyze several texts collectively as ‘‘Desert Rose.’’ In
addition to the version of the single originally released for radio play, Paul Boyd
directed a promotional video, and Jaguar produced a commercial using footage
from the ‘‘Desert Rose’’ video. A spin-off compilation CD, Desert Roses and
Arabian Rhythms Vol. I (2001), featured a popular dance re-mix of ‘‘Desert
Rose,’’ which had its own video.
156 Olivia Bloechl

2. The liner notes of Desert Roses and Arabian Rhythms Vol. I praise
Victor Calderon’s dance mix of ‘‘Desert Rose’’ for ‘‘bringing in irresistible beats
while keeping the fresh beauty and Arabic flavor of the song intact, shimmering
like a perfect mirage.’’
3. The most obvious example of colonialist consumption is tourism,
about which there exists a large secondary literature (see Lew et al. 2004).
Examples of colonialist consumption from earlier periods of European and
American history are many. In the early seventeenth century, elite English men
adopted the asymmetrical hairstyle that Algonquin Powhatan men wore in the
Chesapeake Bay region (Kupperman). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries, the French Bourbon courts cultivated an insatiable taste for fashion, music,
and dance derived from southeast Native American, Turkish, Chinese, and
Japanese cultures. Well into the nineteenth century, English women clamored
for paisley (or Kashmir) scarves that had been introduced to Europe in the 1770s,
the same decade in which Queen Victoria had herself crowned empress of India.
Closer to our own era is the Indianist music that classical composers and popular
songsters offered to the American public around the turn of the twentieth century,
as the western frontier of the United States was colonized; and through the
second half of the twentieth century, the ‘‘liberal Western’’ served up noble
and ignoble ‘‘savages’’ for movie-goers’ consumption (Gorbman).
4. A growing body of literature has documented the effects that the
globalization of the music industry has had on music production, marketing,
consumption, and reception (see Erlmann; Fairley; Frith; Garofalo; Gebesmair
and Smudits; Lipsitz; Taylor 1997, 2001).
5. Simulations (Baudrillard 1983b) contains Baudrillard’s most concen-
trated remarks on hyperreality, in the context of his discussion of modes of
signification. Baudrillard also dealt with hyperreality in later writings on con-
temporary experience (Baudrillard 1988a, 1988c, 1990a, 1990b, 1990c, 1990d).
Baudrillard’s work, like that of many significant theorists, has undergone periods
of favor and disfavor in the English-speaking academic world. I revisit his
theoretical writing on hyperreality here in the persuasion that certain key points
are invaluable for understanding the intersection of Orientalism and postmodern
forms of signification that I perceive in ‘‘Desert Rose.’’ I do so, however, with the
understanding that many readers will have legitimate problems with this work
(for a sample of both supportive and critical writing on Baudrillard, see Gane). I
address the limitations of Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, as I see them,
toward the end of the article, particularly the problems that his work has
presented for feminist and other politically progressive scholars and artists.
Orientalism and Hyperreality in ‘‘Desert Rose’’ 157

6. The ‘‘subjects’’ I discuss here are those that seem to be modeled in

‘‘Desert Rose’’ and other hyperrealist pop texts. I am not trying to determine the
forms of subjectivity that may actually be constituted in the interface between
consumers and mass media products such as ‘‘Desert Rose.’’
7. I let the masculine pronoun stand so as to indicate the gendering of the
privileged form of this transvestism. Needless to say, women of relative privilege
may self-exoticize in an analogous way (see below, n. 8).
8. It is important to note, with Reina Lewis (1999, 2004), that white
women, particularly those of the middle or upper classes, have also historically
exercised this privilege in relation to women or men of color in colonial contexts.
Writing about the cultural transvestite veiling of British feminist and Turkophile
Grace Ellison in the early decades of the twentieth century, Lewis (1999) spec-
ulates that ‘‘the pleasure of cross-cultural dressing is in knowing that one is white
underneath the native garb . . . [Ellison] can enjoy the pleasures of cultural
transgression without having to give up the racial privilege that underpins her
authority to represent her version of Oriental reality.’’
9. I discuss the half-minute version of the commercial, which also aired
in a one-minute version.

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