Apr 18 |
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MARKETING CULTURE * * * Hack journalists and politicians alike rely on a catch-all sentiment to add pep to their message: be alarmed, for something has changed. Leaving aside the usual variations (taxes higher than ever, more criminals camping outside your door), few versions of this mock authoritative voice add zing better than one bemoaning the demise of culture. But apart from the grave pronouncements of a dwindling legion of harrumphing pundits and the sweaty grunts of David Frum, word on the ground is that culture is good business. News anchors duly monitor weekend movie grosses, novelists become brands unto themselves, the Internet teems with learned fanatics devoted to exotic entertainments of every stripe. Culture? You’re soaking in it. It’ s when you try to qualify it that things get dodgy. In academic arenas, applying intrinsic value to cultural entities became a no-no about ten years ago: why distinguish high and low culture when, say, a Herman Melville novel is no more significant than, say, a Moby remix? Free for all! Roaring out of a university near you came a new “discipline” called cultural studies, with a new set of gurus, buzzwords and ’tude. First off, the outré notion that mass culture is dispensed from above to dupe and pacify a gullible population had to be trounced. Why, individuals were in fact radicalized “agents of change,” empowered by mass culture, able to converse with its providers, to defy with dollars and vote with the remote. Friends: just by enjoying pop culture you’re sticking it to The Man. As radical as these ideas announced themselves to be, they sounded an awful lot like Third Wave, “thriving on chaos” marketing bumpf. For all the purported outrage at commercialism and use of tropes such as “late capitalism,” much cultural studies theory wouldn’t seem out of place at a Tom Peters revival meeting, where the consumer’s perceived sense of participation is central to the dance of branding, psychographics and churn. Enter onetime Canadian Malcolm Gladwell, whose New Yorker beat has him writing sharp commentary on the “media-spindustrial complex,” and, along with the mavens of cultural studies and PR think-tankers, he has no time for conspiracy theories of mass-media cultural dominance or the duping of the public. Sure, he’s impressed when it happens, but he doesn’t believe in it. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell examines a variety of seemingly unrelated phenomena, each involving the small turning into the big (bigness is here equated with media coverage). One day a brave pioneer walks through Soho wearing Hush Puppies: next thing, everyone is wearing them. The thinking here is that every kernel of an idea has some measure of “stickiness,” which can be tinkered with and tailored for likely explosion into mass culture. Apparently nothing can happen without the assistance of powerful agents known as “connectors.” This is a tarted-up study of the power of word of mouth and the contagion of good ideas, but the writing is tight and the stories rather fun. It’s a clever work, likely invaluable to those looking forward to a fully branded world. And just as you’re sitting there, trying to imagine what little thing you could do tomorrow that would ripple through all eternity, in skips John Seabrook’s Nobrow, sprightly contender for least essential read of the year. To summarize Seabrook (I’m trying really hard not to be reductive here): “The lines between high and low culture are no longer clearly defined. Incidentally, I spend money on an astonishing variety of cool products.” Nobrow is a faintly clever play on words presented as breakthrough cultural theory. All of us, we are told, participate in a Nobrow moment each time we witness a collision between pop culture and the sort of “high” culture that once distinguished Ivy-league easterners like John Seabrook from hoi-polloi. I’m as eager as anyone to read clever observations of life in the swirl of culture, and Seabrook does have the enjoyably breezy, chit-chat style of Tina Brown era New Yorker – where this book began – but he keeps flying off the rails with ludicrous declarations (“Ralph Lauren was a threat to my father’s identity as an American aristocrat”) and a peppering of brand names and celebrity sightings so dense that fifty pages in, my eyes were automatically skipping past proper nouns. I expect if the precious lush-life signifiers and unctuous name-dropping were judiciously edited out, we’d be left with, well, a New Yorker article of reasonable length. And in this corner, indie publishing diva and Broken Pencil editor Hal Niedviecki – conspicuous of late for cooking down ’zine culture into digestible chunks for Toronto yuppies in the National Post – tries his hand at wrestling down the whole highbrow/lowbrow pop/indie/commercial five-headed beast in We Want Some Too. It’s an impressive effort. Niedzviecki has a sure grip on the “lifestyle culture” of a thirtyish Canadian male who’s read a ton of ’zines and grown up with TV and is fascinated with pop and media. Being one of those, I read it with my fist in the air shouting “go Hal!” But he’s awfully free-and-loose with the royal “we” in the declaration we organize and make sense of “our” lives via the products we buy and the culture we consume. It seems to me the intended audience for We Want Some Too, those who simply don’t give a shit about pop idiocies like shouting “I am” with a bottle of beer, are the least likely to take these generalizations seriously. Throughout, it’s taken as given that everyone is creative and talented enough to be rich and famous. In the end, rather than making sense of this “lifestyle culture,” one is led to feel better about never having been a star. That’s the frustrating bell that keeps ringing through each of these books: culture is evaluated strictly by how it converts to cash, success is measured by buzz, and dissent – if it arises at all – is nothing but a quaint accessory hauled out as necessary to signify edge. --- Books discussed: The Tipping Point
Nobrow
We Want Some Too
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