June 26, 2008 by jenks

the empire’s new clothes

Once you ‘got’ Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.

– 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.

June 3, 2008 by jenks

growing up and the city

“I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.
– Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

I always find it fascinating when movies do things that executives didn’t expect. Entertainment, particularly the kind with narratives and characters, is like a Rorschach test where what we have to say about the inkblot and what the inkblot has to say about us are equally as meaningful. Thus when a movie manages to find an appeal beyond what was expected it can illuminate new cultural insight.

Here is the point at which I admit I love Sex And The City. And while I can’t say I’m a “huge” fan not because I don’t feel like I am one, but because I don’t think I am one in comparison to ACTUAL “huge” SATC fans, I will say I’m pretty excited to have a reason to be writing about it.

The series premiered on HBO in 1998, when I hadn’t even graduated high school yet, and at the time the show had absolutely no way to compete for relevance in my life against My So-Called Life. But then a couple of years ago an old friend of mine (who you should know is male, and straight, and works in real estate finance in NY) got me to watch a couple of episodes cuz he loved the show, and long before I went to see the Sex and the City movie this weekend, I’d actually managed to see every single episode of the show (thanks, Netflix).

It’s not just cuz the main character is a writer, and all the episodes were filtered through the perspective of a woman whose job was about observing and writing about social behavior (though, yeah, I did really dig that aspect). It’s because she was clever enough to make even cynicism charming, hopeful enough to still be curious, difficult enough to give her gravity beyond the frenetic giddy fashionableness. It’s because there’s not too many shows where four friends hanging out is consistently some of the funniest dialogue on a screen, and where decent, relatively normal people, dealing with lives complicated by emotions and nuance and relationships–rather than intrigue or crime or the paranormal–could continue to be genuinely interesting enough to be watchable for six years.

Of course, these decent, relatively normal people happen to be four urban, sassy, sexually uninhibited women, and the show happened to be on a cable network that blazed the trail on you-can’t-do-that-on-television television. So it’s no surprise that two weeks before the movie opened, the LA Times prophesied “Sex and the City” movie may lack wide appeal,” proclaiming:

Few films have polarized audiences more than May 30’s long-awaited cinematic adaptation of the influential HBO show. It’s easier to find $2-a-gallon gas than a straight man eager to see the movie. Older women (in Hollywood’s youth-obsessed view of the world, this means older than 30) hold a dramatically different view: When they are not posting online about their love of the series — “addicted” pops up with frightening frequency — they are organizing ladies’ night viewing parties around the film’s opening….

If “Sex and the City” can start attracting more teenage girls (and appeal to audiences in smaller cities), it just might have a shot at turning into a hit.”

The polarized reactions to Sex and the City–not just the movie, or the HBO series, but really the entire franchise–is not based just on gender, or even on age. When I asked a friend of mine if she wanted to go see the movie, she replied she didn’t think she could for “moral” reasons. Another texted back, “I never took you for that type.”

You’d think digging a show about smart, quick-witted, modern women, half hopelessly jaded half hopelessly romantic, talking about love, sex, and relationships over brunch, and reaping the sexual benefits and pitfalls of having happened to be post-feminist females wouldn’t be a bad type to be taken for. Especially by anyone else that fits that exact same profile. Yet that watching Sex and the City would seem somehow “immoral” even to another educated, liberal, sophisticated girl, speaks to a dramatic dissonance in the movie’s expected demographic.

LA Times movie critic, Carina Chocano, began her review of the film by admitting:

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to talk about the new “Sex and the City” movie without first mentioning… the rabid fan devotion [the HBO series] enjoyed; or the equally fervent antipathy (female and male) it inspired on socio-political grounds (sort of like the late-’90s equivalent of not letting your daughter play with Barbies)….

Which is too bad, because Michael Patrick King, who executive produced the show (with series creator Darren Star) and wrote and directed the movie, has done some brave, surprising things with it, mining territory that’s been all but abandoned by Hollywood….

“Sex and the City” can’t rightly be called a romantic comedy in the dismal, contemporary sense, though it is at times romantic and is consistently very funny. It’s also emotionally realistic, even brutal….

Yet despite the fact that for the majority of it’s 2 1/2 hours this is not a happy story, yesterday morning Marketing Daily proclaimed, “‘Sex/City’ Poised To Become Era’s ‘Feel-Good’ Movie.” And I, and no doubt everyone else who cheered when the usher at the Arclight who’d introduced the movie yelled, “Let’s escape reality!” as the lights went down, would agree:

Brands looking to sweep consumers off their feet to escape the recession, global warming and the war in Iraq might want to take a closer look at Carrie Bradshaw and friends.

“Sex and the City” is poised to become the new Depression Era feel-good movie that makes cash registers ring in shopping malls and along Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive. Such films tend to make consumers feel upbeat and not overly cautious about spending, according to marketing experts.

…Faith Popcorn, a trend spotter and founder of marketing consultancy BrainReserve, believes the “Sex and the City” movie comes at the perfect time for a nation exhausted politically, emotionally and financially. Marketers can use the good feeling gained from the movie to their advantage, she says, helping consumers temporarily escape tough times. The movie joins “My Man Godfrey,” “The Women” and other Depression Era classics that provided weary audiences with high-style fantasy relief.

Of course, as Chocano says:

The clothes, the restaurants, the apartments, the shoes — they’re all there, but then, even on the show, they were always the fantasy element, the sugar that helped the sometimes harsh emotional reality go down….

For a film that delights in indulging in frivolity at every possible turn, it examines subjects that most movies don’t dare graze for their terrifying seriousness. [How should women live their lives in a society that constantly limits them while pretending not to? What is the function of forgiveness, and why is it necessary for living?] And when it does, the movie handles them with surprising grace, wit and maturity. In other words, it’s a movie for grown-ups of all ages.

The Marketing Daily piece mentions how, “During the run of “Sex and the City” on TV, even women who couldn’t afford Jimmy Choo shoes bonded to an image that had them skipping lunch for two months so they could buy them. In one TV show episode, Sarah Jessica Parker’s character is about to lose her apartment and she recognizes that $40,000 went into buying shoes.”

These anecdotes, of both real and dramatized women, speak not so much to a childish frivolousness as to a rudderless adulthood. Cuz it’s a funny thing, this idea of a contemporary “adult”–whatever that is. We are the generation that won the fight for our right to party, after all, did we not? So that we could stay boys and girls for longer than anyone ever before. And so we have!

Then perhaps that is what it looks like now, adulthood: It doesn’t always have its priorities straight. It makes some bad choices, it has to confront compromise and make sacrifices. It fucks up and has to face the consequ–

Wait a second….

Oh, god damn it! That sounds just like OLD version of adult! What the hell?!

Beyond the frosted fashion glaze, and the wonderfully fantasy ending we can only truly appreciate after having first been taken through some nasty emotional lows, what is, in fact, quite shocking about Sex and the City, is the apparent movie-going hunger it’s revealed for characters that can reflect maturity with a right to style and joi de vivre. And there is perhaps nothing more timelessly “feel-good” than a concept like that.

After just three days, the movie that by some estimates was only expected to make $20 million its opening weekend, whose appeal to anyone but 30+ year old women seemed incomprehensible, that unflinchingly staked its flag in that grown-up territory Hollywood had pretty much abandoned, now “Ranks as the biggest R-rated comedy opening of all time,” According to the LA Times. “Among all R-rated films, it ranks at No. 5 behind largely male-driven films like “The Matrix” and “300.”

Chocano concludes her review saying:

As far as big Hollywood movies go, the idea that we might watch movies to empathize with characters whose lives are different from ours but whose humanity links them to us is all but lost.

That’s why it feels unnatural to say that what feels most remarkable about the movie is its unapologetic embrace of middle-aged women…. The fact that Carrie et al. are allowed to be funny, independent, complicated, sexual, cynical and happy still comes across as a delightful surprise.

She adds that what really made the show so loved by its fans is that despite whatever moments of silliness or cliche, ultimately, the show reflected a vision of real life, “one which doesn’t require its characters being frozen in amber after a fairy tale ending and allows life to go on, happily and unconventionally.”

I think to have considered Sex and the City as having no greater appeal than merely a poshed up “chick flick,” is just as erroneous as to consider it to be some un-PC farce “immorally” portraying women as ludicrous cartoons.

All of us who went to high school in the late 90’s had to look a decade back to find the movies (Heathers, Pump Up the Volume, Sixteen Candles) that defined a generation’s adolescence. (American Pie, aside, of course). Now in the next decade, I wonder if Sex and The City might pave the way for new stories and characters that can fill the void in contemporary cinema for movies that can define a generation’s coming to terms with its adulthood.

March 22, 2008 by jenks

culture seeks its level

In Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter explain that really, there was never any conflict between the two to begin with. Counterculture hinges on, and consumer culture consists of, the expression of your lifestyle/identity. Whether you’re choosing to wear Nikes, Doc Martens, or some crazy obscure Japanese brand that doesn’t even exist in the US, you’re deliberately saying something about yourself with the fashion choice. And regardless of how “counter” whatever culture you think you are, getting to express that about yourself requires buying something.

Yet the concept of a strict divide between the “mainstream” and “counter”–or “alternative”–cultures persists, and the distinction between these “affiliations” is now defined not by whether we consume, but by what. Identities hinge on particular expressions and symbols, such as music or fashion for instance. In a very simple sense, you are “mainstream” or “alternative” based on whether the way you choose to express your identity, your taste, is shared by a big group/culture, or a small one. Yet the trouble is that these expressions are given meaning precisely through their common significance within a group, if the group size changes, then so too does the meaning.

Last summer Danah Boyd wrote about the idea of “Pointer Remix“:

One way to think about remix is as the production of a new artifact through the artistic interweaving of other artifacts…. With this in mind, think about an average MySpace profile. What should come to mind is a multimedia collage: music, videos, images, text, etc. This collage is created through a practice known as “copy/paste” where teens (and adults) copy layout codes that they find on the web and paste it into the right place in the right forms to produce a profile collage. One can easily argue that this is remix: a remix of multimedia to produce a digital representation of self. Yet, the difference between this and say a hip-hop track is that the producer of a MySpace typically does not “hold” the content that they are using. Inevitably, the “img src=” code points to an image hosted by someone somewhere on the web; rarely is that owner the person posting said code to MySpace. The profile artist is remixing pointers, not content.

I kind of think of all culture creation/expression as a process of “Pointer Remix”— and when I say culture creation, I mean brand creation too. There’s a paragraph in Pattern Recognition where William Gibson lapses into fashion historian momentarily:

My God, don’t they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo knit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

And just as much as all labels are creating pointers, that’s exactly what we are buying. In fact, looking TO buy. Now, more than ever before, the possession of an “original” source is either impossible, pointless, or even irrelevant. In postmodernism’s revenge, even an “original” becomes a reference. A vintage dress is all about what it “points” to.

Yet as Boyd points out:

If the content to which s/he is pointing changes, the remix changes…. Say that my profile is filled with pictures of cats from all over the world. The owners of said cat pictures get cranky that I’m using up their bandwidth (or thieving) so they decide to replace the pictures of cats with pictures of cat shit. Thus, my profile is now comprised of pictures of cat shit (not exactly the image I’m trying to convey). This is what happened to Steve-O.

One of the most high profile cases of such content replacement came from John McCain’s run-in with MySpace profile creation. His staff failed to use images from their own servers. When the owner of the image McCain used realized that the bandwidth hog was McCain, he decided to replace the image. All of a sudden, McCain’s MySpace profile informed supporters that he was going to support gay marriage. Needless to say, this got cleaned up pretty fast.

Cleaning it up on myspace is easy. You can just go and find another image and use that, or, of course, you can host your own images, and that way be sure that the content being pointed to will not change without you knowing about it–but that defeats this metaphor, so pretend you didn’t just read it.

Cause what’s interesting to me is when this same phenomenon happens in a non-html-based context. Like, for example, if a priest gets outed as a pedophile. This kind of “content change” happens to real-life “pointers” all the time. Pointers that happen to be used as elements in the construction of identity.

Check this out, below is the ad campaign for the 2008 season of America’s Next Top Model:

(For the record, seeing this billboard is what inspired this whole post.)

There’s a few particular aesthetic elements to note here for the purpose at hand, and I’ll tell you what they are. The hats with the feathers, the general 1920’s and 40’s infusion with the high waists and cropped tops, and the whole cabaret/vaudeville overtone.

These are all elements of a style that’s been rocked in the scene around me for years.

If you’re interested in some history you might want to click here, but the quick version is it became a part of the aesthetic expression of a particular subculture with a significant presence all up along the West Coast. And then last week, at the intersection of Sunset and Vine a bus rolls past me carrying a whole tableau along its side of girls sporting this style. It was pretty startling to see it so out of context, since up until then I hadn’t seen this look used in any mainstream media or setting–anyone who can find links to other examples, post it in the comments, I’d love to see it.

While I personally have no idea exactly how the stylist team for ANTM got the idea for the particular creative direction in the ad, I think the possibility that this burgeoning aesthetic, with a major base of operations in LA, might have somehow made it directly onto their radar is hardly a long shot.

Boyd asks, “What happens when a culture exists that rests on pointer remix for identity construction?” Well, at least one side effect is that meanings of cultural expressions–and hence what they say about our identities–change.

One pretty consistent way this “content change” in the meaning of a cultural expression happens is in the process of becoming more exposed. It’s been going on ever since the first small local band blew up and became huge. Everything else about the music and the act might have stayed the same but the obscurity, and it’s the very “alternative”-ness itself that was a part of its meaning all along. The difference between being a fan of something intimate and distinctive vs. something mainstream and egalitarian could be kinda like waking up to discover your kitten pictures have turned into kitten poo.

Here’s another approach. In October of 2007, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote an article in the New Yorker about “How Indie Rock Lost Its Soul.” The premise of the piece is that in the 1990’s rock and roll, a genre that evolved out of a tremendous black musical influence on white performers, and became the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a kind of racial re-segregation in its style:

Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century? These are the volatile elements that launched rock and roll, in the nineteen-fifties, when Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the hips.

…It’s difficult to talk about the racial pedigree of American pop music without being accused of reductionism, essentialism, or worse, and such suspicion is often warranted. In the case of many popular genres, the respective contributions of white and black musical traditions are nearly impossible to measure. In the nineteen-twenties, folk music was being recorded for the first time, and it was not always clear where the songs—passed from generation to generation and place to place—had come from.

…Yet there are also moments in the history of pop music when it’s not difficult to figure out whose chocolate got in whose peanut butter. In 1960, on a train between Dartford and London, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, then teen-agers, bonded over a shared affinity for obscure blues records. (Jagger lent Richards an LP by Muddy Waters.) “Twist and Shout,” a song that will forever be associated with the Beatles, is in fact a fairly faithful rendition of a 1962 R. & B. cover by the Isley Brothers. In sum, as has been widely noted, the music that inspired some of the most commercially successful rock bands of the sixties and seventies—among them Led Zeppelin, Cream, and Grand Funk Railroad—was American blues and soul.

… In the mid- and late eighties, as MTV began granting equal airtime to videos by black musicians, academia was developing a doctrine of racial sensitivity that also had a sobering effect on white musicians: political correctness. Dabbling in black song forms, new or old, could now be seen as an act of appropriation, minstrelsy, or co-optation. A political reading of art took root, ending an age of innocent—or, at least, guilt-free—pilfering.

Himself a white musician/vocalist, Frere-Jones notes that adopting a black singing style even in his own band “seemed insulting.”

By the mid-nineties black influences had begun to recede, sometimes drastically, and the term “indie rock” came implicitly to mean white rock.

….How did rhythm come to be discounted in an art form that was born as a celebration of rhythm’s possibilities? Where is the impulse to reach out to an audience—to entertain? I can imagine James Brown writing dull material. I can even imagine the Meters wearing out their fans by playing a little too long. But I can’t imagine any of these musicians retreating inward and settling for the lassitude and monotony that so many indie acts seem to confuse with authenticity and significance.

While the article is specifically focused on the indie rock side, he readily admits that the segregation went both ways. Just as indie rock became “white rock,” “Black” music too began to occupy a space that may be more inaccessible and irrelevant to an outside audience now than it was during the 50’s. In an audio interview accompanying the article, Frere-Jones talks more about the results of the musical re-segregation from both angles. “Why is this a hit?” He jokes, about the absurdity of “Soulja Boy’s” success. “It’s just rapping over a ring-tone.”

Social and (after a series of lawsuits involving sampling) legislative forces gradually changed the sound of the music itself, and also of the “content” in the meaning of these musical pointers. As in: what does liking Indie Rock or Rock and Roll, and even Hip Hop at this point, convey about your identity now vs. what it would have 20 year ago? 40 years ago? Lose miscegenation and something that could once be relevant to a mixed audience becomes divisive.

Just as “Nation of Rebels” points out that there is no conflict between the counter and over-the-counter culture, I likewise see alternative and mainstream culture as just parts of a greater continuum, which ultimately, despite all the obstacles that societies, politics, economics, religions, and even individual personalities may put in its path, seeks its level at the greatest hybridity. “Content change” in the meaning of its expressions is as inevitable as the remixing of the expressions themselves.

In the meantime though, I’m gonna enjoy this kitten while it lasts.

February 18, 2008 by jenks

consumer insight is funny

“You’re just perpetuating the stereotype by acting all stereotypical.”
– deleted line from tony scott’s domino

i have no idea about the racial background of the individual(s) that publish stuff white people like, but does it even matter?

as lenny bruce said, it’s not the word itself, but the censorship of the word that gives it its power, so it’s not necessarily the people that buy a brand or product, but the perceived people who buy it that defines its identity.

as in, you may happen to LOVE rocking out to justin timberlake on your ipod, but would NEVER under ANY circumstances go to his concert (and subject yourself to dealing with the kind of people that would buy tickets to a justin timberlake concert.) i think this kind of disconnect is also what undermines a whole lot of consumer insight research. expecting people to consciously recognize what influences their purchase decisions is like expecting them to recognize, admit to, deny, not deny, accept, not accept, a whole lot of pressures and social expectations that masquerade as personal preference. as far as most people are concerned, all they’re really aware of is looking for a way to express themselves, not of the incessant negotiation of their compliance with and/or rebellion against barrage of cultural stereotypes.

we may buy the products or brands that express aspects of who we are, but in most cases the options we’re choosing from in the fist place have already been pre-selected for us by the purchase decisions of other people like ourselves. the question then isn’t, why did i make the choice to buy this or that, but rather does this or that seem like the kind of thing that someone like me would buy? the “why” is: because people like me buy it.

after all, god knows i love sushi, irony, and sarah silverman, and apparently, that’s no accident.

December 14, 2007 by jenks

“cake or death?” and other user experience design options to consider

after mentioning him in the previous post, i ended up going on what can only be described as an eddie izzard bender.

a self-identified “male lesbian,” and “action transvestite” (you know… “running, jumping, climbing trees… putting on makeup while you’re up there”: action transvestite), izzard is also fluent enough in english and french to do standup in both. so clearly the man understands a thing or two about the intricacies of hybridity and cross-cultural communication–phenomena that likewise are pretty fascinating for me.

i first saw dress to kill in 2002, and what forever earned my respect for izzard’s genius is when, during the encore, he actually performs a bit in french and manages to get everyone in the audience–and me watching–laughing hysterically. i don’t know french. neither does most of the rest of the english-speaking, san francisco audience where the show was recorded. yet in a feat of linguistic alchemy he somehow is able to completely pull it off. we’re watching him in a different language, and we totally get it. it’s such a bewildering display of how little a language barrier might actually matter in the process of understanding people who are unlike us that it feels like you’ve just witnessed a magician perform rather than a comic.

so somewhere in the course of the haze induced by binge consumption of every glorious, sexie, eddie izzard clip on youtube last weekend, i stumbled onto his website. i’m not entirely sure i remember how i got there, but i do remember flashes of what happened after. (note: this will be way funnier if you’ve actually seen eddie’s shows. since i had just watched several years of them before i arrived at the site, it was completely hilarious to me.)

when i went to sign up for eddie’s email list, i was faced with the following options:

Send me news and info about Eddie via Email

Only send me gig & appearance emails for my chosen country
Cake OR Death

when was the last time you were asked THAT before joining a mailing list?

and furthermore, what’s a nav. section called gonna lead you to?

click on it and an audio clip of izzard’s voice admits, “well, it was the pressy-makey-doey-things page…but that didn’t really fit it.”

maybe you might want to pressy-makey-doey up on eddie’s sexie fridge…

…where you drag words eddie utters during his show onto the jam smear on the fridge and then play them back to hear him say customized nonsense. (“jamtart arthur squeezy fishburger murderers catapult” is a good one).

but let’s back up for a second. maybe you’ve never seen eddie’s standup. maybe you came here because you’ve seen eddie in a movie, or on his TV show, the riches, and you’re trying to find out more about that. then you want the page. and when you click on it, eddie’s relentless, adlibbing audio which follows you around–as in real life so on the internet–announces in a tone of sophistication, “this is the acting page. it is a very serious page.” it, in fact, does look very serious. with a vogue-y black and white glamour shot of izzard. but when you look in the corner there’s a little purple beehive just below eddie’s face with bees buzzing all around it. drag your cursor over to it to find out what the hell that’s all about, and your mouse gets covered in bees!

you may have seen glorious. you may not. you may think that’s hilarious. you may not. but either way, at least there’s something different going on here. something unexpected. and it’s not some kind of slick design-gasm. it’s not trying to wow you with unprecedented feats of programming. no. the site actually comes off as a pretty uncomplicated bit of online real estate, but with these absurd little pressy makey doey game-y bits. and it’s great!

i think the most important question for anyone creating a website to answer has to be “what do you want the website to do?” and at the basic level this question is pretty easy to answer. sure you want it to provide information, to sell something, to connect people, to encourage participation, whatever. all that’s well and good, but as soon as it gets beyond the level of “what do you want it to do beyond simply function,” the vision for what’s possible becomes kind of polarized and discordant.

on one side of this mania there’s:

make more features!
make it slicker!
make it cleaner!
make it cooler!
make it bigger…

and on the other side is something my friend jesse shannon calls the “myspacification of websites,” where content management systems are churning out the online equivalent of cookie-cutter suburban tract homes. sure it might be super intuitive and user-friendly, and you might know where your neighbor’s bathroom is located when you come to visit without anyone ever having to tell you, but….isn’t there anything else to an online experience beyond features or navigability? beyond flash or content management?

how about “i want the website to entertain people.” or “i want it to make people laugh.” creating a FUN experience is just as valid as an easily-navigable, informative one, but between the designer, the developer, the information architect, and everyone else…. whose job is it to make sure a site is FUN?

i once got asked if the “this is not a trend” in masthead image on this site is supposed to be a reference to magritte’s “this is not a pipe.”

and while we may not all be looking for subliminal surrealist messages in our online experience, i think we are definitely looking for that kind of element of surprise, for unexpected juxtapositions, and even for non sequiturs sometimes, the same qualities that made the surrealist movement’s artistic expression so different from what had come before it. check out whateverlife.com on that note. the whole thing was originally created by a teenage girl who taught herself all the necessary design skills. not surprisingly, since there was no formal training which could instill upon her what a website SHOULD look or operate like, it looks completely different from any typical site.

perhaps it’s because we’ve always thought of the online experience as “browsing” that all we’ve been doing so far has just been making different versions of that one experience. maybe it’s time to re-imagine the whole thing. to integrate fun into its very functioning (as opposed to relying solely on the content), to reclaim it from its current humorless condition–and i mean, beyond just with LOLcats or cute hipster tech geek colloquialisms in dialogue boxes and error messages. if you’re looking at whateverlife and thinking, oh, so does this signify the next stage of a website experience?

instead think: maybe it just seemed like it would be fun.

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