Do you like Reggaeton?

This was a question an old friend asked me while visiting in L.A. We’re both from Boston, where most people have never heard of Reggaeton. And I hadn’t either, until I moved to Southern California.

If you don’t know what Reggaeton is, it’s:

A form of urban music that became popular with Latin American youth in the early 1990s, and, after mainstream exposure in 2004,  spread to North American, European and Asian audiences. Reggaeton blends the West-Indian music influences of reggae and dancehall with those of Latin America, such as bomba, plena, salsa, merengue, latin pop, cumbia and bachata as well as that of hip hop, contemporary R&B, and electronica, combined with rapping or singing in Spanish. While it takes influences from hip hop and Jamaican dancehall, it would be wrong to define reggaeton as the Hispanic or Latino version of either of these genres; reggaeton has its own specific beat and rhythm, whereas Latino hip hop is simply hip hop recorded by artists of Latino descent. Reggaeton’s origins represent a hybrid of many different musical genres and influences from various countries in the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. The genre of reggaeton however is most closely associated with Puerto Rico, as this is where the musical style became most famous, and where the vast majority of its current stars originated.

Here’s an example, Daddy Yankee’s “Rompe”:

I’d heard the term, Reggaeton, out at certain parties in L.A., but I didn’t really know what it was until KXOL-FM relaunched in 2005 as Latino 96.3, bringing the Reggaeton format to the airwaves. After a while, I’d been finding myself stopping the dial scan every so often at 96.3 to catch the end of some song even though I couldn’t understand the lyrics. My answer to my friend at the time was  that I didn’t think I’d heard it enough to fully like it yet, but I probably would.  It didn’t occur to me until my friend pointed it out, that it was a strange way to respond to a question of music taste.

Not too long after I fist started going to raves, back in high school, I discovered Jungle. If you don’t know what Jungle is, it’s a type of electronic dance music which emerged in the mid 1990′s as an offshoot of the UK rave scene. Encompassing drum and bass, oldschool jungle, and ragga,  the genre is characterized by fast breakbeats (typically between 160–190 bpm) and heavy sub-bass lines.

Here’s an example, Aphrodite’s “Bomber Style:”

When I discovered Jungle, I had only just gotten into a relationship with hip hop a few years prior, when I started 9th grade at a public, urban high school, and then fallen into the questionable companionship of entry-level rave trance (a la Paul Oakenfold, etc.), so when I first heard this stuff, it sounded way too fuckin’ cacophanous and chaotic and fast and just plain weird. I distinctly remember a time when I just didn’t get Jungle. I didn’t get how to understand it. I didn’t get how to like it. And I sure as hell didn’t get how to dance to it. Then my best friend at the time, who’d been going to raves before I started, and had once been a ballerina, showed me. You just had to move a different way. You had to get onto a different rhythm. And as soon as I figure it out, I started to really like, and then just completely LOVE Jungle. By the time I’d started hearing Reggaeton, I knew from past experience that if I listened long enough to start to understand the sound, I would come to like it.

It turns out the line between being unfamiliar with something, and not liking it is very slim, indeed. In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell writes about how the Aeron chair, which would eventually redefine the entire office chair category, was originally despised and deemed ugly when it was first market tested. The Aeron was a complete departure from the office chair norm, and didn’t mesh with the prevailing cultural proclivities for seating comfort in general (think: La-Z-Boy recliner). But after two years, the Aeron became the most popular chair in Herman Miller history, and the most widely imitated office chair in general. How did something that was once considered ugly become beautiful?

Gladwell writes:

Office chairs in people’s minds had a certain aesthetic. They were cushioned and upholstered. The Aeron chair of course isn’t. There was nothing familiar about it. Maybe the word ‘ugly’ was just a proxy for “different.” The people reporting their first impressions misinterpreted their own feelings. They said they hated it. But what they really meant was that the chair was so new and unusual that they weren’t used to it…. Buried among the things that we hate is a class of products that are in that category only because they are weird. They make us nervous. They are sufficiently different that it takes us time to understand that we actually like them.

The problem with market research is that often it is simply too blunt an instrument to pick up this distinction between the bad and the merely different.

And perhaps nowhere is that nervousness more acute, or that distinction more obscure than when it comes to music.

In his recent New York Times piece about Pandora, the internet radio application based on the Music Genome Project, which decodes the essential components of songs as though they were bits of genetic information and suggests new music users might like based on strictly auditory criteria, author Rob Walker (whose book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between Who We Are and What We Buy, I’ve written about a quite a bit last year) references neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music:

Much depends on culture. Just as we’re hard-wired to learn a language, but not to speak English or French, our specific musical understanding, and thus taste, depends on context. If a piece of music sounds dissonant to you, it probably has to do with what sort of music you were exposed to growing up, because you were probably an “expert listener” in your culture’s music by about age 6, Levitin writes.

By the time I was six years old, 85% of the music I had heard was classical violin. My mother is a violinist, and when I was younger, performed with many orchestras and symphonies, both in the former Soviet Union, and then in Boston, where I grew up after we emigrated. She has also been teaching violin for longer than I’ve been alive, and as a child the sound violins was so constant and ubiquitous around the house that I developed the capacity, which I retain to this day, to sleep right through an afternoon full of violin lessons going on around me. The other 15% of the music of my early childhood consisted of Russian folk-rock music by the likes of Vladimir Vysotsky (imagine a  Russian sort of Bob Dylan — in fact, the genre Vysotsky defined is precisely what Gogol Bordello is currently perpetrating as a zany new indie sound, which I gotta say is pretty freakin’ weird to witness.) I didn’t really start hearing ANYTHING even remotely in the vicinity of contemporary popular American music until I got to the U.S. (by that time I was almost 7), in large part due to the efforts of the Soviet government to achieve that goal.

Anyway, the point is, the music that I was acculturated to became wholly irrelevant in the new culture I found myself in just at the moment when I had become an “expert listener.” When everything sounds dissonant, nothing sounds dissonant. Not any more dissonant than anything else, anyway. I suspect, much in the same way new languages become a lot easier to learn if you’d had to learn a new one when you were little, new music sounds and genres, for me anyway, are a lot easier to learn to understand, and ultimately appreciate because of this history. It’s why the question “What kind of music do you like?” has always made me uncomfortable. I have watched as other people draw on instantly accessible answers, but for me, sentences like  “I like hip hop” or “I like electronic music,” have become learned responses, like fragments memorized from a phrase-book for emergencies in a foreign country. The answer to that question is never really about what kind of music you happen to find structurally, acoustically, or thematically appealing, anyway. No, what that question is actually asking is: “What kind of music do your friends like?”

As Walker writes:

It’s the “social” theories of music-liking that get most of the attention these days: systems that connect you with friends with similar tastes, or that rely on “collaborative filtering” strategies that cross-match your music-consumption habits with those of like-minded strangers. These popular approaches marginalize traditional gatekeepers; instead of trusting the talent scout, the radio programmer or the music critic, you trust your friends (actual or virtual), or maybe just “the crowd.”Pandora’s approach more or less ignores the crowd. It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit. The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like. More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That’s all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora’s approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it.

One of my co-workers, a married dude, loves the Calvin Harris station on Pandora, which is basically straight up Gay House (that’s Gay House as in the music genre, not the epithet). Were the station defined by its cultural information, as opposed to strictly by sound, it’s much more probable he’d simply assume this wasn’t for him, and not venture any further. Which, as Walker writes, raises some interesting questions:

Do you really love listening to the latest Jack White project? Do you really hate the sound of Britney Spears? Or are your music-consumption habits, in fact, not merely guided but partly shaped by the cultural information that Pandora largely screens out — like what’s considered awesome (or insufferable) by your peers, or by music tastemakers, or by anybody else? Is it really possible to separate musical taste from such social factors, online or off, and make it purely about the raw stuff of the music itself?

What Pandora’s system largely ignores is, in a word, taste. The way that [Pandora founder Tim] Westergren might put this is that it minimizes the influence of other people’s taste. Music-liking becomes a matter decided by the listener, and the intrinsic elements of what is heard. Early on, Westergren actually pushed for the idea that Pandora would not even reveal who the artist was until the listener asked. He thought maybe that structure would give users a kind of permission to evaluate music without even the most minimal cultural baggage. “We’re so insecure about our tastes,” he says.

(Or as Gladwell might put it, “nervous.”)

While his partners talked him out of that approach, Westergren maintains “a personal aversion” to collaborative filtering or anything like it. “It’s still a popularity contest,” he complains, meaning that for any song to get recommended on a socially driven site, it has to be somewhat known already, by your friends or by other consumers. Westergren is similarly unimpressed by hipster blogs or other theoretically grass-roots influencers of musical taste, for their tendency to turn on artists who commit the crime of being too popular; in his view that’s just snobbery, based on social jockeying that has nothing to do with music. In various conversations, he defended Coldplay and Rob Thomas, among others, as victims of cool-taste prejudice.

He likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in to complain that he started a station based on the music of Sarah McLachlan, and the service served up a Celine Dion song. “I wrote back and said, ‘Was the music just wrong?’ Because we sometimes have data errors,” he recounts. “He said, ‘Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’ I said, ‘Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?’ He said, ‘No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.’ We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: ‘Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.’”

This anecdote almost always gets a laugh. “Pandora,” he pointed out, “doesn’t understand why that’s funny.”

Much as cultural information attaches to music, music attaches information to culture. Piggybacked like parasites onto unwitting sound-waves are all manner of cultural and identity definitions. The “What music do you like?” question is also intended to be responded to as: “What scene are you in?” After all, you don’t just like hip hop or punk or emo, you ARE hip hop or punk or emo.  And even with mainstream artists, saying you’re a fan of Garth Brooks or Adam Lambert or Muse or Jay-Z is more than simply giving an example of the sort of musical style you enjoy, it’s an admission of your cultural affiliation, of your individual and social identity.

As Walker writes:

The cliché that our musical tastes are generally refined in our teens and solidify by our early 20s seems largely to be true. For better or worse, peers frequently have a lot to do with that. Levitin recalled to me having moved at age 14 and falling in with a new set of friends who listened to music he hadn’t heard before. “The reason I like Queen — and I love Queen — is that I was introduced to Queen by my social group,” he says. He’s not saying that the intrinsic qualities of the music are irrelevant, and he says Pandora has done some very clever and impressive things in its approach. But part of what we like is, in fact, based on cultural information. “To some degree we might say that personality characteristics are associated with, or predictive of, the kind of music that people like,” he has written. “But to a large degree it is determined by more or less chance factors: where you went to school, who you hung out with, what music they happened to be listening to.”

Basically, what “scene” you were in. And social groups tend to very easily become self-selecting, especially online. In a recent NPR story, “Facebook, MySpace Divide Along Social Lines,” social media researcher danah boyd talks about the findings she’d first brought to light two years ago on the way the online social world is dividing up — just like the real world — into self-segregated communities: “The fact is that young people, and for the most part adults as well, don’t really interact online with strangers. They talk to people they already know. And when you have environments in which people are divided by race, they’re divided by class, they’re divided by lifestyle, when they go online, those are also who they’re going to interact with,” says boyd.

As I have long asserted, myself, from my contrasting experiences in the worlds of independent music and corporate marketing, boyd suggests that one of the reasons so many business analysts are writing off Myspace is because THEY don’t belong to the social groups that use it. “Millions of daily users are still logging in [to Myspace],” she says, “and it’s really interesting how many people in very privileged environments know not a single one of them.”

In his book “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google,” Nicholas Carr talks about this exact phenomenon, and sees a far darker possible outcome:

Not only will the process of polarization tend to play out in virtual communities in the same way it does in neighborhoods, but it seems likely to proceed much more quickly online. In the real world, with its mortgages and schools and jobs, the mechanical forces of segregation move slowly. There are brakes on the speed with which we pull up stakes and move to a new house. Internet communities have no such constraints. Making a community-defining decision is as simple as clicking a link. Every time we subscribe to a blog, add a friend to our social network, categorize an email message as spam, or even choose a site from a list of search results, we are making a decision that defines, in a small way, whom we associate with and what information we pay attention to. Given the presence of even a slight bias to be connected with people similar to ourselves – ones who share, say, our political views or our cultural preferences –

(or our musical tastes)

we would end up in ever more polarized and homogeneous communities. We would click our way to a fractured society.

As the entire web becomes one ever-expanding, amoebic social application, it becomes increasingly harder and harder to “log out” of this cultural segregation that seems built in to the very nature digital space. In a recent New Yorker article on Google, Ken Auletta, writes:

The more “personalized” [the consumer data that Google collects each day], as [CEO] Eric Schmidt said, the better the search answers. “The more we know who you are, the more we can tailor the search results.” [Google co-founders, Larry] Page and [Sergey] Brin often say that their ideal is to devise a program that provides a single perfect answer.

This preoccupation with mathematical efficiencies triggers various alarms. In “The Big Switch,” Nicholas Carr writes that Google would like to store as much information as possible about each individual — what might be referred to as “transparent personalization.” This would allow Google to “choose which information to show you,” reducing inefficiencies. “A company run by mathematicians and engineers, Google seems oblivious to the possible  social costs of transparent personalization,” Carr writes. “They impose homogeneity on the Internet’s wild heterogeneity…. As the tools and algorithms become more sophisticated and our online profiles more refined, the Internet will act increasingly as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop, constantly playing back to us, in amplified form, our existing preferences.” Carr believes that people will narrow their frame of reference, gravitate towards those whose opinions they share, and perhaps be less willing o compromise, because the narrow information we receive will magnify our difference, making it harder to reach agreement.

As much as there is a conservative pull within us to seek out the familiar and the safe, the example of Pandora shows there is an equally as great liberal a pull to discover and explore the new (altho that balance may be different from one individual to another). There are  already so many social sites and applications being developed to enable the former, what we need now are more UNsocial ones. Applications that offer us the opportunity to discover and explore the new and unfamiliar, applications that allow us to confront diversity, and offer us new ways to expand our tastes and define ourselves.

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That’s right!

Britney Spears’ new album is called Circus, and this is incredibly interesting to me.

Once upon a time, I used to be the production manager for a circus called Lucent Dossier–

This troupe is actually part of a whole larger Circus performance subculture that has been growing on the West Coast for years. San Francisco’s The Yard Dogs Road Show, El Circo, and Vau De Vire Society, Santa Barbara’s Clan Destino, L.A.’s  Mutaytor, Cirque Berzerk, and Lucent Dossier, these are just a few of the major acts that are coming to mind, but there are untold scores of others. With its own distinctive music, style, and nightlife, the Circus scene’s cultural influence has been steadily spilling over into mainstream fare for a while.

In 2006, Panic! at the Disco cast Lucent Dossier in the music video for their first big hit, I Write Sins Not Tragedies. When Panic! went on the road later that same year they brought Lucent along, and called it the “Nothing Rhymes With Circus,” Tour–

–which, according to the Washington Post, offered “a far superior take on the warped circus theme Motley Crüe was going for in its latest tour.”

Oh, yes…that’s right. A year prior, Motley Crüe–who would become no strangers to the stylings of Lucent Dossier, themselves–reunited, and you know what their comeback tour was about?

Here’s a hint:

The Circus subculture infiltration, I should mention, has by no means been limited to music. With such proximity to the entertainment industry, it’s been showing up all over the place. Captivating gamers at E3, holding it down at Red Bull’s nightlife spectacle, Ascension, even America’s Next Top Model weighed in with an “homage” of sorts to the style earlier this year–

–but none of this is really comparable in scale to an endorsement from the Princess of Pop herself.

Despite the inescapable reality that it’s blatantly far from any kind of original album or tour concept, Britney Spears still chose to go with Circus anyway. Clearly there is something about Circus that continues to resonate with performers, but there is also something about our current culture, that the Circus theme persists in being so damn appealing. It should have long ago gotten played out, and yet here it is again, and again. It would be easy to contend that Circus is just an overly-tenacious current trend (and I know a few Circus professionals who do), but I see it is as the manifestation of a cultural response to a slew of far greater–and much less fickle–social trends.

In Freaks and Fire: The Underground Reinvention of the Circus, J. Dee Hill delves into the history and sociology of the Circus subculture:

Traditional forms of the tribe, like the village, have almost completely disappeared. Fewer and fewer people live in small communities where their daily interactions bring them in contact with the people they are deeply connected to, either spiritually or economically. Workers in modern corporations are replaceable and no longer bound to each other by the experience of a shared interdependence. The modern individual is preoccupied simultaneously by isolating, immediate concerns of personal survival and the larger, often intangible concerns of war, terror and economic change as transmitted by a now-seamless global media network. The intermediate space of community is not easily reached.

Not by accident, many of the newer, emergent forms of culture include a specifically tribal aspect. A return to tattooing, sacrification, fire performance and drumming, as well as a renewed interest in ritual, has occurred side-by-side with the formation of intentional (if temporary) communities such as the Rainbow Family gatherings and Burning Man festival, all of which focus on celebrating and integrating the peculiarities of their varied members.

It was at these kinds of festivals, in clubs and at underground raves, that alternative circus acts began appearing in the early 90′s. The performers were young, crazy “freaks” without any formal training who used circus costumes, skills or themes as performative means for expressing their own exaggerated personalities. Many went on to gain formal training or to study the history of the genre, but essentially their relationship to conventional circuses resembled that of outsider art to mainstream art circles. They didn’t really relate to the modern-day circus. They took their cues from something much, much older: the caravan-pulling gypsies.

The gypsies, shunned by society at large, but fiercely loyal to their own clan, were the most tribal group in all of Europe. It was these wanderers who first produced circus-like entertainment in the medieval townships, along with strolling players and minstrel shows. It wasn’t until the 1770′s that Englishman Philip Astley fused military equestrian drills with acrobatics and other entertainments to form the modern circus.

The phenomenon of alternative circus performance can be seen as the theatrical dimension to one generation’s wholesale rediscovery of the concept of tribe.

In other words, kids originally began forming Circus performance troupes as an extension of creating urban tribes:

According to French sociologist Michel Maffesoli, urban tribes are microgroups of people who share common interests in metropolitan areas. The members of these relatively small groups tend to have similar worldviews, dress styles and behavioral patterns. Maffesoli claims that punks are a typical example of an “urban tribe.”

20 Years later, instead of forming punk bands, party kids were forming circuses. And in an age where no one thinks twice of breakdancing or skateboarding, does circus art seem all that unexpected?

In the past decade we’ve also seen the arrival of social media, and “Performative means for expressing exaggerated personalities” as Hill put it, isn’t just for the Circus anymore. It’s what makes the social web go round, too. In Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before, Jean Twenge and her coauthors analyzed 15,324 responses to the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, completed by college students between 1987 and 2006. The survey is considered the most popular and valid measure of narcissism, and features statements such as “I think I am a special person,” “I can live my life anyway I want to,” “If I ruled the world, it would be  better place,” etc. According to the results:

The trend was extremely clear: younger generations were significantly more narcissistic. The average college student in 2006 scored higher on narcissism than 65% of students just nineteen years before in 1987. In other words, the number of college students high in narcissism rose to two-thirds in the space of less than twenty years.

While Myspace, Youtube, blogs, and all the rest, aren’t responsible for the origins of this narcissism trend, they absolutely help enable its progress. “Narcissism is the darker side of the focus on the self,” writes Twenge, and our constant interaction with social media is an indulgence in self-focus. All of us have been affected by the process of maintaining our online presence.  Even if we’re not all live-streaming our entire existence, we upload photos of our lunches or puppies for our network to see, we write blogs about experiences that we planned to blog about even as we were having them, we leave comments for friends just so other people will see them, we fill in our favorite movies and books and music in the appropriate boxes on various profiles, aware of what our choices say about us. In a sense, all of this is a performance. We are already constantly performing our selves, and Circus represents the ultimate performance platform.

Not surprisingly, we also crave attention. After all, what’s the point of being the spectacle if no one is watching? “Given the choice between fame and contentment,” writes Twenge, “29% of 1990s young people chose fame, compared to only 17% f Boomers.” No doubt, the 2000′s generation would score even higher.

Writing about narcissism and fame, Danah Boyd, a researcher of digital youth practices, asks, Why is it that people want to be famous?:

When i ask teens about their desire to be famous, it all boils down to one thing: freedom. If you’re famous, you don’t have to work. If you’re famous, you can buy anything you want. If you’re famous, your parents can’t tell you what to do. If you’re famous, you can have interesting friends and go to interesting parties. If you’re famous, you’re free!… [However] Anyone who has worked with celebrities knows that fame comes with a price and that price is unimaginable to those who don’t have to pay it.

The idea of “freedom” is a huge aspect of the appeal embodied by the Circus since way before its modern “reinvention.” Circus has long represented freedom from normal society’s rules. The ultimate outlaw lifestyle. And like celebrity, it too has extolled its own price. No surprise then that celebrities from Motley Crüe to Britney spears should find this theme so relatable.

While I don’t doubt there will be much talk of shark-jumping going on within the Circus underground (after all, just how underground-y can it be if Britney’s fans get into it?), to me, both the alternative and the mainstream reincarnations of Circus are on the same continuum. More than just a subculture or a concert tour fad, Circus has come to articulate something about the nature of our relationship with various social trends shaping the modern experience.

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- Andy Warhol

It is totally disconcerting to discover a book that pretty much compiles your insights and articulates them back to you. Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy & Who We Are, by Rob Walker, delves into many of the exact same observations as I have witnessed amid the ecosystem of contemporary culture, marketing, and identity. Reading it feels something like discovering America’s Next Top Model is biting your personal fashion style, I would imagine. Sure, it’s incredibly validating to see your own insights coming at you from a New York Times Magazine writer, but it’s sorta frustrating to have to know that they’re not just yours anymore.

In social science there is probably nothing as revelatory as a contradiction exposed. That the emperor is not wearing any clothes is much more stunning a revelation than any critique of the fashion aesthetic. And it’s contradictions that Walker is interested in:

There was one specific incident that finally made me reconsider what I thought I knew about consumers, marketers, and even myself. This was the news that Nike had bought Converse.

To me, Nike’s famous swoosh logo had long been the mark of the manipulated, a symbol for suckers who take its “Just Do It” bullying at face value. It’s long been, in my view, a brand for followers. On the other hand, the Converse Chuck Taylor All Star had been a mainstay sneaker for me since I was a teenager back in the 1980′s, and I stuck with it well into my thirties. Converse was the no-bullshit yin to Nike’s all-style-and-image yang. It’s what my outsider heroes from Joey Ramone to Kurt Combain wore. So I found the buyout disheartening…. but why, really, did I feel so strongly about a brand of sneaker–any brand of sneaker?

As a consumer behavior columnist, Walker had observed as “the steady march of progress that had been reshaping media and technology for years broke into a sprint, through the rapid rise of devices and innovations like TiVo, the iPod, increasingly sophisticated cell phones, YouTube, Facebook, and so on.” He notes that according to many marketing experts and consumer-culture observers, this new landscape had created a “New Consumer:”

A clever creature armed with all kinds of dazzling technology, from ad-blocking gizmos to alternative, grassroots media. This added up to what professional zeitgeist watchers–

–and i’d like to add, none too few self-congratulatory alternative cultures–

like to call “a paradigm shift.” “Consumers don’t march in lockstep anymore,” one celebrated trend master declared. “We are immune to advertising,” other experts announced. The mindless “mass market” had been shouldered aside by thinking individuals: “Consumers are fleeing the mainstream.” Somehow we had all become more or less impervious to marketing and brands and logos; we could see through commercial persuasion.

The trade, business and mainstream press–

–as well as no shortage of idealistic social media folks–

have seconded this judgement. Thanks to “the explosion in information available to shoppers,” The New Yorker argued, “brand loyalty is in fast decline,” and “the customer is king.” The Economist, too, pointed to super-informed shoppers who have acquired “unprecedented strength” in their dealings with commercial persuaders and approvingly quoted a famous ad executive announcing: “For the first time the consumer is boss.” Advertising Age soberly informed its readers that because of “the power of the public,” consumers have lately obtained “increasing sway … over any product’s success”–in fact, the consumer is in control.

The only problem with this was that it did not match up particularly well with the realities of the marketplace that I was writing about every week in The Times Magazine.

It’s one thing to conclude that the advertising business is evolving with the new media landscape. But these giddy claims go well beyond that….

Meanwhile the number of brand messages we are exposed to goes up, and so does the amount of trash we produce. And on a more personal level: Have you noticed any decrease in the number of times you buy something you were sure you would love, only to regret it later or simply forget about in the back of a closet? There you are, contemplating the limitless and ever shifting choices in what to drink, what to wear, what to drive, what to buy. It is literally impossible to try everything for yourself. Be honest: As you navigate this brand-soaked world, do you feel in control?

Sure, we tell pollsters and friends that we’re sick of being bombarded with advertising, we’re indifferent to silly logos, we’re fed up with rampant materialism. In reality, one of the most significant changes I’ve observed over the years that consumer behavior has been my primary beat is something that goes well beyond the long-standing human tendency to enjoy acquiring things.

The change is particularly noticeable among many of the younger people I’ve met. Frequently, these smart and creative young people were quite happy to inform me that, yes, they were immune to commercial persuasion–that they saw right through it, as the experts liked to say. Meanwhile, they were playing key, active roles in helping certain products and brands succeed.

They were in the vanguard of what looks an awful lot like an increasingly widespread consumer embrace of branded, commercial, culture. The modern relationship between consumer and consumed is defined not by rejection at all, but rather by frank complicity.

This goes against what we’d want to think of ourselves, and of individuality. We want to think that our highly-attuned “seeing through”ness, and our distinctive tastes have set us apart, granted us superiority over the tastelessness of lowly label whores. We want to think that expressing our identities, and asserting our belonging within a particular cultural community is unrelated to, and, in fact, an escape from brand-consciousness. We want to think we are–as 77% of the respondents in a formal poll mentioned by Walker considered themselves to be–far smarter and savvier than most consumers. Which is a mathematical impossibility.

The truth of the matter is that actually we don’t really know ourselves that well at all. That’s the “Secret” in “The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are.” We have come up with enough misconceptions about the relationship between, as Walker calls it, the consumer and the consumed, that the real mechanics of this interchange are happening beyond our consciousness. We’re not aware we’re naked beneath our fancy new clothes.

“Symbols matter to us,” Walker says:

Meaningful symbols (logos included) get created–and even when we claim to be immune from such things, we often participate in that meaning-creation ourselves….In the 21st century we still grapple with the eternal dilemma of wanting to feel like individuals and to feel as though we’re apart of something bigger than ourselves–and that, most of all we all seek ways to resolve this fundamental tension of modern life.

In Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter delve into the social psychology history of individuality, excavating its modern beginnings from the wreckage of the post-WWII distrust of “mass culture.” They propose that witnessing how conformity had devastated Europe as enforced by the Nazis, plus the results of the Milgram experiment, which exposed some nasty realities about our human relationship to authority, “led conformity to become the new cardinal sin in our society.” By the time Walker gets around to weighing in on it, this manifest individualist destiny has become an American right.

Enter “The Pretty Good” problem, as Walker calls it. Or as Alex Bogusky says: “All products are excellent.” It’s no longer about what’s better than what, or what’s more reliable, or what’s more effective. It all works, it’s all really good. The way you choose between all this totally dependable functioning stuff is, essentially, based on what expresses you.

“Buying a $5,000 handbag just because it’s a status symbol is a sign of weakness,” Walker quotes a particular “keen observer of branded culture”: Miuccia Prada. “Presumably” Walker suggests, “buying a $5,000 Prada bag is okay, if you’re doing it for the right reasons–quality for instance.” But I don’t see anything ironic in Prada’s remark. It’s probably the way anorexics think about the eating habits of the obese. In between those extremes though, weakness or not, we all have to eat. And we all feel we have to express ourselves, define ourselves, locate ourselves, even, on the cultural spectrum. How do we do that in our modern world?

Well, like, take the gutterpunk bike messenger dude Walker comes across while investigating the resurgence of Pabst Blue Ribbon’s popularity, getting a PBR logo brand–that’s skin brand–the size of his back. This may seem a bit excessive, but “Pabst is part of my subculture,” he says. More specifically, it can function as a symbol of a subculture, and skin branding as a means of expressing both a personal commitment and community loyalty is actually not at all uncommon among fraternities. In the absence of a Greek letter, endorsing a brand–that’s logo brand–can, and often does, become adopted as a symbol of belonging to a culture or community. You might not have gotten a skin brand or bought a $5,000 handbag, but all of us have purchased things not just for our own “personal narrative,” as Walker suggest, but because they represented our culture, our context, where we belong.

This is actually the part in the book where Walker’s assessments start to fall apart, I think. Unlike his research on the consumer adoption of corporate brands, in chronicling “underground brands”–by which he means, essentially, lifestyle symbols developed by independent entrepreneurs–he doesn’t mention any research from talking directly to the adopters of these brands, and thus fails to convey that the adoption of both kinds of brands happens basically for the same reasons.

He gets part of it right. Many underground brand creators:

Clearly see what they are doing as not only non-corporate, but somehow anticorporate: making statements against the materlistic mainstream–but doing it with different forms of materialism.

Take a minute to get acclimated to the irony if you need to, but that’s not the real contradiction here. This is:

Perhaps the threat that brand-smart young people really pose to commercial persuaders is not that they have stopped buying symbols of rebellion. It is that they have figured out that they can sell those symbols, too.

What the exact definition of an “underground brand” is–beyond being created by “brand-smart young people”–is never actually defined, and that may be the root of the oversight. Walker’s case studies for underground brands are pretty much exclusively clothing, or even more precisely, t-shirt labels, but I’ve seen the same phenomenon play out with underground music brands bands, and events. A community, weather it’s mass or niche, Greek or gutterpunk, needs symbols, and the difference between how an “independent” maker of symbols behaves vs. a “corporate” one, is that the corporate one answers to Wall Street.

You can argue that size matters. That somewhere along the slippery slope a brand is either big or small, but I would imagine even small Wall Street-beholden brands would behave the same way big ones do. And conversely, as Walker himself talks about, though doesn’t quite process to it’s logical conclusion: to stay competitive, Wall-Street brands are starting to behave like indie ones. Scion’s success via alternative marketing, which Walker calls “murketing,” happened not because it invented its own grassroots community from scratch, but because it leveraged the communities around existing independent brands in much the same way a concert venue leverages the community around a music act.

Talking to independent brand creators, Walker says, “Made me realize that it wasn’t just commercial culture that the brand underground was co-opting–it was the most exclusive and elevated form of it.”

Which is kind of like saying that an indie-rock band “co-opts” Elton John. I think music fans are only too happy to have more options.

It’s not culture that’s being co-opted, it’s industry. An indie band “co-opts” the music industry, and indie brands “co-opt” the industry of commercial persuasion itself. This isn’t a “threat” to commercial persuasion, as Walker suggests, but an expansion, an upgrade. Commercial persuasion, v. 2.0.

Or whatever.

“It’s time to set aside the old conspicuous consumption argument that consumer behavior is all about status–all about badges,” Walker writes. “If the underground logo is a badge, it’s one that is most noteworthy for how few people can see it.”

Uh-huh…

The average underground logo–just like many corporate ones–may be more subdued than, say, the narcissistic in-your-face mania of Louis Vuitton’s logo, but the underground brand is a badge, and it’s one that is most notable for how meaningfully it expresses a community. (By the way, that requires visibility). It may not be all about “status” but it IS all about identity.

Suddenly, the book is not so disconcerting after all.

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used to be that if you were a musician the only way you could get ANY kind of significant distribution for your music was through a record label. cassettes and cds made it easier, but you were still at the mercy of the bureaucratic limits of physical distribution, and the price-tag for quality production was still insurmountable for most independent artists. when judged by the standard of the pro-quality sound and behemoth distribution bestowed upon label-produced music, independent options didn’t really compare.

(to make a long story short, i’m gonna skip over the way that punk and underground hiphop have functioned for the past several decades for the moment, and just flash forward to:) and then the internet came along, and all of that changed. not only could any dedicated producer get the pro music production software he (or she) needed for relatively cheap (or, you know, free), but the barriers for distribution got plowed down. you, as an unsigned, independent music producer–if you’re particularly talented–are now completely capable of producing music that sounds just as good as anything a label could create, and–if you’re particularly clever–that is disseminated damn fiercely.

and while all kinds of independent options were springing up like mushrooms after the online rain, and while tower records announced it was going out of business in october of 2006, just a month after wired’s “the rebirth of music” issue pointed out that the “music” industry had become simply the “plastic disc” industry, what also happened was that the music industry became a publicly traded industry.

you ever think about that?

that the major culture creation industry answers to shareholders every quarter–and i mean, ALL of it, not just the labels, the live concert promotion industry too–what that all means?

every business wants to make a profit, but when wall-street gets all up in this piece, it’s all just about making sure that stock is going up every quarter, and that means you can’t take long-range risks. a mainstream venue is no longer just a building, it’s an investment bank, and every band is valuated on their prior ticket sales track record. if you were paying attention, you noticed that in the course of this paragraph your saturday night concert ticket just became about that wallstreet stock ticker.

it’s a bit weird, huh?

there’s a lot of complaining that goes on about this situation, but personally, i think this is the best thing that could have ever happened as far as subcultures go.

since artists can now completely bypass labels and still grow a fanbase, this means that it’s possible for an act to be selling out underground parties from vancouver to san diego, and the publicly-traded music industry wouldn’t even KNOW they exist. it just became that much easier for communities to grow around music that has completely flown below the mainstream biz’s radar. and not just grow, but flourish. and then all of a sudden there’s a need for booking agents, managers, venues, labels, and of course, marketers too. all of it. the underground becomes a whole economy unto itself.

not that underground music is anything new by any means, but i think the degree to which this non-publicly traded music is now able to spread, and the extent to which the “underground economy” has the opportunity to expand, is completely unprecedented. by underground economy i don’t mean an illegal black market, i mean simply the economy that develops around independent culture creation. this isn’t people playing make-believe, waiting around, hoping to be “given a shot” by the majors. these are legitimate livelihoods, these are unmistakably careers, and what’s facilitating them shows no signs of slowing down.

over the course of the past year i’ve personally watched the mainstream and an underground start to collide on a business level, and i’ve been simultaneously in a front row seat on both sides of the battle line. i’ve seen major concert promoters cluelessly offer artists a tenth of what they easily command in their underground economy because they had no idea they were worth that much. i’ve seen underground producers get offered laughable deals that came from people thinking they are doing them some kind of favor. and i’m not even trying to be clever when i say that it just doesn’t seem to occur to them that musicians not represented by some kind publicly-traded entity would have anything better to do with their time. time is money everywhere, and money isn’t any less green in the underground economy, you know.

the whole thing reminds me of an eddie izzard routine about how england conquered the world with “the cunning use of flags.”

“That’s how you build an empire. Sail halfway around the world, stick a flag in. ‘I claim India for Britain.’

And they’re going, ‘You can’t claim us. We live here! There’s 500 million of us.’

Do you have a flag?

‘We don’t need a bloody flag, this is our country, you… bastard!’

No flag, no country. You can’t have one. That’s the rules…that…. I’ve just made up! ”

except the underground, now more than ever, very much does have a claim to its territory on the cultural landscape. and while the music industry continues to cut costs on its own product like it’s disposable, to the rest of the consumer goods industry underground culture is becoming an indispensable marketing tool.

a couple of months ago the wall street journal wrote:

At Nike, the drive to recruit under-the-radar influencers is on the rise and a key part of the company’s strategy.

Mr. Parker (Nike’s CEO) sees the challenge thusly: “The question is, how do you not let your size become a disadvantage? How do you keep an edge, a crispness, a relevance?”

Though far from mainstream, Mr. Cartoon rivals Nike’s high-profile jocks for influence among a certain crowd that is young, Latino and hip-hop. His ink-on-flesh flourishes are popular with rappers like Eminem and 50 Cent. Born Mark Machado, Mr. Cartoon has also written comic-book style graphic novels and created a brand called Joker to sell T-shirts and baseball caps with his designs. Nike’s Mr. Parker, who met Mr. Cartoon several years ago, calls him an “aesthetic influence and a friend.”

In addition to Mr. Cartoon, Mr. Parker has fostered Nike collaborations with a New York graffiti artist named Lenny Futura, the industrial designer Marc Newson and a pair of twin Brazilian muralists known as Os Gêmeos.

Following his own instincts, Mr. Parker has moved to aggressively link Nike with those who can help maintain the company’s standing among what he calls the “influencers of influencers.”

“I have a personal interest in popular culture and the influence of culture on the consumer landscape,” says Mr. Parker.

funny…didn’t that used to be what the music industry used to be interested in? i could have sworn….

so the music industry stopped being about culture and became about product, and the product industry became about culture. major labels started treating underground artists like they were doing them a favor by even deigning to acknowledge their existence while major brands have started seeking to develop partnerships with them. well, i didn’t just make up these rules, but it sure does seem to have gotten all turned around, doesn’t it?

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today on the website for the san francisco green festival conference i discovered a publication called what is enlightenment magazine, published by enligntennext, which is “defining the contours of a new revolution in human consciousness and culture.” (it’s essentially not doing anything different than any punk band or public enemy-era hiphop act professed to be doing. it’s just targeting a different audience.)

my first encounter with companies targeting this demo was when we were soliciting sponsors for LIB and were approached by the “enlightenment card”:

(in case you’re wondering, yes, the card IS real, no that ad is NOT a joke, and we said “no, thank you” to the offer.)

while on the one hand, i’m trying to think of where else do sheltered caucasian people get to evangelize a brand of appropriated cultural imperialism with such tactless self-righteousness and get away with it, on the other hand, from a technical standpoint, i’m completely impressed.

this is everything i preach about identity marketing in action.

in robotics, there is a theory of the “uncanny valley“:

The hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being’s, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.

This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a “barely-human” and “fully human” entity is called the Uncanny Valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is “almost human” will seem overly “strange” to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction.

maybe there is an uncanny valley in the process of identity expression as well. the more a brand or a product makes it easier for people to express their identity the more palatable it is, until maybe it hits a certain point where it becomes so blatant that its appeal suddenly drops off. however, as this brand’s identity-expressing qualities continue to become more innate and nuanced, and less overt it once again becomes appealing. maybe it could be called the uncanny “wannabe valley,” the place in brand authenticity/relevance that will likewise “fail to evoke the empathetic response required for productive human-brand interaction.” (cuz brands are robo–i mean, people too.)

one of the explanations for the uncanny valley phenomenon is that the robots stuck in no-man’s land elicit revulsion because they look “dead,” and biologically we’re wired to have an aversion to corpses, cuz stickin around doesn’t bode so well for the immune system. (makes you wonder tho if necrophiliacs collect weird lookin robots). but when it comes to identity, the brands (and people) stuck in the uncanny wannabe valley turn us off because they’re “fake.” in a similar sort of way, biology may have led us to respond with distaste to “fake” people (and by proxy brands now) because they are untrustworthy. from a social selection standpoint, they may even be community saboteurs.

the funny thing in all of this is that there’s nothing actually WRONG with the enlightenment card except its name. if you have to have a credit card, why NOT get one that’s gonna let you earn points towards, like, trips to spas in costa rican rain forests, right?

while no doubt one person’s fake is another person’s orgasm, it just feels like confusing a lifestyle for an expression of “enlightenment,” is kinda, um, you know…. BOGUS!

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1. billable: this had me at the built-in timer thingie, that tracks how long you’ve been working on a service for a particular client. i’m hoping it’s going to be the harness i need to keep from falling into the precipitous “i don’t know when i’m working and when i’m not” abyss.

2. legalzoom.com – hocus pocus… DBA! plus, if you type in “vandals” in the discount code section, you get ten bucks off. yeah, that’s right. vandals. joe escalante’s punk band is now your coupon.

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it actually made me want to buy dr. bronner’s soap! and i NEVER wanted to buy it before, cuz the packaging is so personality-less, and spouts those weird quasi-culty hippie messages.

but hey, anything punk-rock endorsed can’t possibly be as hippie as i thought, right? and their great sense of humor totally absolves them of their merchandising sins as far as i’m concerned.

they had me at: “driving while weird.”

i’m absolutely stealing that phrase from now on.

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