The Brand of Putting Me Off My Breakfast
Because Seattle isn't really brimming right-wing neo-fascists, there are only a few nearby cafe conversations that send me into boiling rage.
Such as the the one to my left - about high-end luxury good and general content marketing opportunities in "cutting edge music," creating "a page of you love us, we love you, give us your information" (quoting here) web content connected to distribution of music through multi-layered corporate co-sponsorship, scalable marketing and brand enhancement. What has me worried is that the one part of this conversation is being conducted with someone who works at KEXP, trying to lure her into this swamp of cult-capitalism, inspiring her to use her knowledge to create dynamic marketing opportunities between authentic music niches and cloven-footed demons spewing fire and black bile, sucking the marrow from the sacrums of the dead. Sorry- typo there, I meant "scalable marketing."
This blather is interrupting its strip mining of the last little pebbles of authentic American culture only with a self-congratulatory dusting of coolness. Nice soul patch, Bro!
Look, I'm not against advertising per se. Sell me things. Fine. Some things I can use. What I'm against is modern Advertising's inexhaustible greed and reach, it's unquenchable consumption of every shred of love and hope and feeling we still possess, the endless dissociation of our best ideas and efforts and imagination from their substance, and the subsequent attachment of our whole culture to cigarettes, soda, mutual funds, and ski resorts (these are topics at hand, over there, at the vacuum-souled round table.)
Marketing utterly dominates our national cultural production - dancers, actors, writers, musicians, artists. What's the percent of artists sucked into this sinkhole- 70? 80? 95%? 99%? To people like this, Art is only, and ever, a niche branding opportunity. They smart enough, and they can't seem to see what they're doing, or have rationalized the damage long ago.
This is the enemy. This is the shard of ice stabbed in the soul every goddamn day, crystalizing out of the spit of every cold media mouth. This is the cult of Product, demanding its human sacrifice.
It's all I can do to digest my rhubarb bar.
We'll now they're leaving. Someone's late. Music isn't going to just kill itself.
posted by JAB at 10:24 AM
8 Comments:
I would argue that the video game business (just as the animation studios did in the previous generation) have done more to employ artists than you give it credit for.
Yes, it's not without problems. Yes, it's "work for hire"
But it's still work. And not entirely soulless.
Annoying, but nothing a kick-in-the-nuts, worst-in-thirty-years recession won't cure.
I have no objection to work-for-hire, none at all- I'm not infrequently in the position of training people to work in advertising.
What's turning my stomach is what is becoming a near total displacement of culture as a whole by marketing; the replacement of citizenship by consumership, the replacement of communities of human beings by demagraphics of purchasers. These are becoming the primary way our culture is understanding itself, not a mere strategy of improving business.
Most of our images, most of our music, most of our cultural efforts of all forms are now pushing consumer branding, drilling it into both our individual and social identities, pushing out, I believe, our impulses to love, to compassion, our desire for acceptance, experiment, and human connection.
This is at a completely different scale than even in the recent past. This is not painting billboards, designing better tables and chairs, interesting looking cars, innovative video games, making awesome snowboard logos, or coming up with fun jingles to pay the bills.
This is, I believe, at a level now where marketing is materially displacing our ability to create and understand ourselves as a society. It is becoming a consumer culture that supplants all culture.
What you need is HEAD ON-APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD, HEAD-ON-APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD 1-888-345-9267, THAT'S 1-888-345-9267, 1-888-345-9267
I have two retorts to the Viceroy's cogent remarks:
1) I really don't mind ads like this - they are only what they are; they don't search out and corrupt love and beauty and spirit. They don't tap our compassion and associate it with cotton, or relentlessly gouge out the slightest resistance to comsumer culture by co-opting it. HEAD-ON still just says: try this, remember it. That's fair play.
and 2, the one I've been waiting for an excuse to use:
2) ASS-ON. APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE ASS HOLE. ASS-ON. APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE ASS HOLE.
Trollbait McTavish posts this from his dorm:
"You know who else was an artist?"
Dr X!
Shh...or someone's going to base a cutting edge underground marketing campaign on his ass.
Of course, if they do, he can use "Ass-ON"
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