Cool Customers

Part two of a series on consumerism, counterculture, and (we're getting there, I swear)hip hop.

Read Part One


The perfect read to accompany Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic is The Conquest of Cool by Thomas Frank. This is a book about advertising, but it's sure to be more interesting to almost anyone reading this blog (be you a hip hopper, a dropout, or a contrarian egghead) than any other book about advertising out there. This is the story of the events that took advertising from the pseudoscience and nauseating Rockwellian fantasies of the 1950s to the sneering, winking, downright rebellious advertisements of the late sixties (and the early nineties, and pretty frequently since then). This is (though it doesn't deal with the subjects directly) an explanation of why Sprite chose to highlight underground rappers for its mid-'90s spots, of why Coke pitched the comically blase "OK Cola" around the same time, and why commercials to this day are so frequently more entertaining than the shows they sandwich.

The standard story of this transformation told in academic and countercultural circles is that of "co-optation" – the idea being that advertising firms have long cherry-picked superficial aspects of the counterculture, and later youth culture, as a way to get the kids (and adults) to buy products. But Thomas Frank, editor of the Baffler, constructs a new, far more complex history. As combative as the title is, the process Frank describes is not one with any clear cut aggressor, conqueror, or even victor. Rather, it is the story of how divergent segments of the larger culture, specifically the counterculture and the decidedly more straitlaced world of advertising, converged at a specific point of time, the 1960s, with far-reaching results.

Frank first describes to us the Madison Avenue of the 1950s, a place that gave birth to the images of the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and the Organization Man – a world of hierarchy and regimentation, in which the philosophy behind ad-making maintained that it had been honed to nearly-scientific levels of precision, with ads made according to an assembly-line like set of rules. Into this came Doyle Dane Bernbach, an upstart agency with a completely different philosophy about creativity, whose arrival was marked by a groundbreaking campaign for Volkswagen in the late fifties and early sixties. In contrast to the white-picket-fence idealism of previous car ads, the Volkswagen ads took such bold steps as highlighting the car's unchanging 'ugliness', directly lambasting American automakers for their campaigns of planned obsolescence, and, perhaps most boldly, explicitly selling Volkswagen as a car for those alienated from the conformity of the era.

This was the watershed moment – a group of ad writers fed up with the status quo of their corner of the world tapped into a wider dissatisfaction within the populace, ultimately changing both advertising and the culture as a whole. There is a bitter pill for proponents of the old co-optation thesis: in Frank's interpretation, the Bug, that seemingly primordial symbol of hippie freedom, became a counterculture symbol largely because of the advertising campaign that cast it as such. This was the origin of the dynamic that still drives much advertising, the first time a product was pitched, not as a way to join some idealized 'in' crown, but as a way to break away from the herd. This was the birthing moment of what we see everywhere today: consumption presented as the path to individuality and rebellion.

Soon, outright countercultural imagery and rhetoric started showing up, as in a 1965 Calvert's Gin ad prominently displaying the slogan "Resist the Rising Tide of Conformity." From there, it's a hop, skip and jump to 1969, by which time Madison Avenue looked a lot more like what we would expect today – copywriters and art directors dressed like freaks, with "youth" increasingly the watchword. Frank tells several anecdotes that convincingly establish that, far from co-optation, this revolution was the result of an essential consensus that emerged between Madison Avenue and the counterculture itself. Admen, having recently escaped from the culture of the Gray Flannel Suit, genuinely thrived on the air of revolution that prevailed in the country, and touted it in their ads with an enthusiasm that often defied reason. Frank in particular points out advertising's thorough neglect of the 'silent majority' during the period – almost noone was writing ads aimed at football players and general's sons, who doubtless still had money to spend. But of course the country’s values at the same time were shifting, and as 'youth' and 'rebellion' were started to become virtues in and of themselves, it simply became unnecessary to target your ads to anyone but the young and rebellious – even the most aged and strait-laced began to covet these values, and spend accordingly.

More than just defining the ‘rebellious’ identity of individual products, though, this shift affected much deeper habits of consumption. Towards the end of the book, Frank turns effectively to the fashion of the late sixties to illustrate the point. Like advertising, men's fashion had long been a staid, methodical industry, with styles changing over the course of six or seven year cycles, as opposed to the one-year cycles of women's clothing. The turning point came when the 'mod' look that had originated on London's Carnaby Street made the trip to the States. We would recognize mods today as near-metrosexuals, fops with discriminating and fast-shifting tastes that could not have contrasted more profoundly with the staid grayness of their parents' generation. Despite their association with the counterculture, they were very much consumers, concerned with products and looks and styles – Frank describes the booming business in Mod that smaller boutiques throughout the country did in 1966 and part of 1967, thanks both to more legitimate young turks and the fast-growing number of oldsters who were finding a new sense of vitality, meaning, or just fun in such "youth" trends. Mod burned itself out quickly, but this was not seen by the fashion industry as a bad thing – in fact, such quick-cycling trends were just what the industry needed for rapid expansion.

The Mods were not embodiments of true political rebellion – they liked (and, in certain current incarnations, still like) speed, chicks, and scooters. They did break down barriers, but as with most movements of the sixties, their priority was to break down barriers of consumption – to create a space in which people could wear, listen to, or snort what they liked. Then as now, the convenient bogeyman of the past, and all it embodies, was the default perpetrator of oppression, and newness itself became an act of rebellion. Other industries quickly fell in line behind fashion, collectively promoting a mindset that showed just how ham-fisted Detroit’s “planned obsolescence” programs were. Rather than producing products that failed, frustrating the consumer while forcing a follow-up purchase, industry worked to convince people that any product more than a year old was yesterday’s news, outdated, old hat – and worse, simply by virtue of its age, part of the dreaded establishment. In order to be a revolutionary, one could consume only the newest products. 'The Fifties' almost magically persist in our culture, constantly churning out new images of calculating scientists, expressionless corporate drones, and stodgy deans against which we can rebel. The past, today and forever, is straight-laced, dictatorial, and unfeeling, while the present is youthful, freewheeling, and actively insurrectionist. And of course, to be part of today, to be part of the permanent revolution, you must consume today's amazing new products, its beautiful new fashions, and its happening new music.

The story that Frank tells is not one in which conniving admen clumsily regurgitate the superficial trappings of fads. Instead, the most daring of them anticipated, perhaps even in some small way precipitated, the social schism that defined the second most culturally important decade of the 20th century (the most important, of course, being the '20s). In diving so headlong into the ideology of rebellion, through their enthusiasm rather than through scheming, they tapped into a deep, dark, unspoken truth about counterculture, one which the counterculture of the '60s failed, or perhaps refused, to recognize: that the rhetoric of rebellion is the most powerful device ever conceived for selling people shit they don't need.

Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic

Part One of a Three-Part Series on Consumerism, Subculture, and Hip Hop

I just finished reading Daniel Harris' 2000 book Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism. A quick review in Austin's BookPeople store turned me on to it, because it's very clearly part of the cultural conversation that I'm most interested in taking part in – that surrounding the myths we create for ourselves regarding our own lifestyles. Harris applies an obviously considerable intelligence to the search for the real meaning of things like sleekly-designed hair dryers, sunglasses, knit cozies, and kewpie dolls, grouping such manifestations of our psyches into categories like "Coolness," "Cuteness," "The Romantic," "The Natural." Each of these 'aesthetics' gets a chapter, and the book moves forward at a fierce clip. The most refreshing part of the critique is that it diverges so clearly from cultural criticism's tendency to focus on the outlandish, subcultural, or "hip", instead devoting most of its energy to the banal, everyday, and bourgeois. But while it may be part of the right conversation, the book is ultimately an expression of resignation, a bemoaning of the ultimate corruption of our society that I'm not quite willing to endorse yet.


Harris is an unrelenting grouch, a bitter old queen ceaselessly on the attack against any surface which is designed to lend more to an object than mere functionality, perhaps to beautify it, or even invest it with some deeper meaning. Take, for example, his assessment of thrift store shopping – a case in which I am admittedly far from neutral, since my closet is full to the brim with secondhand jewels. I think Harris is spot-on in his evaluation of the practice as a sort of reconstruction of consumerism as an infinite quest for the secret, ephemeral prize, a chase for the most unique object possible in a world where everything you're likely to find in a department store has a certain undeniable sameness. But I refuse to accept his assessment that this is nothing more than a sanitizing of the act of consumption through play with the imagery of poverty, a superficial "pose" that leaves its adherents in the thrall of big-ticket items and high technology. It's that too, but rather than admitting of the practice's multidimensionality, Harris chooses to discrimahate, just 'cause he done read a book or two. He refuses to even entertain the possibility that thrift store shopping can create an interruption in the standard structure of consumption by disconnecting the purchasing act from marketing, that it can, even if only for a few people, for a few moments, open a space that may ultimately allow for a larger questioning of consumption patterns. He doesn't even grant that it presents a genuine possibility for those without the resources of the middle class to assert some aesthetic creativity in a world where we are increasingly told that individuality is only within the reach of those who can afford $100-an-hour stylists and prêt-a-portet.

In similarly dour terms, Harris denounces cyberpunk fiction as a feeble attempt by programmers and geeks to depict their introverted, cubicled existence as rebellious, and lambastes "quaintness" as an attempt by suburban housewives to invest with the patina of pioneer hardship a role that the advance of home technology has rendered "irrelevant." These two bits of ignorant chauvinism are unforgivable, both morally and critically – how are we to understand the culture of technology if we deny its pioneers with any agency beyond a desire to "look" like rebels? If we ignore the innumerable and very real statements that have been made in the computing community, through word and action, about the economic structure of modern society, and the rules governing various types of property? And how in God's name are we to understand the aesthetic desires of suburban housewives if we regress to a Kramdenesque imagining of them as bon-bon popping, soap-opera devouring layabouts with nothing better to do than discover new ways to turn leftover egg crates into wonderful centerpieces? Harris' rock-solid viewpoints, uncomplicated as they are by real knowledge of what he's talking about (a lack demonstrated nicely when he describes Quake players "entering the cockpits of their attack ships"), make for rants of sometimes astonishing political shallowness.

However, the book is nonetheless vital for anyone interested in thinking about the small ways in which shifts in our material and cultural lives reflect or reinforce changes in the way we think about the world as a whole. Harris describes the evolution of machine interfaces from hefty button-and-switch affairs to ever less tactile touch-screens and heat sensors, and asserts that this indicates our further distancing from, and mystification regarding, the machines that fill our daily lives. He equates the evolution of "cuteness" (exemplified in doe-eyed Hummel figurines and reticent baby animals) as an attempt to push back into the bottle the genie of children's psychological complexity. He is at his most devastating when dealing with elements of life further from the cultural – sites where commerce is most specifically catering to individual psychology, as in his grim assessment of the modern romance industry, or in his methodical breakdown of sanitized "zaniness" as a method for our culture to dispose of the truly divergent as mere "characters." In a near masterstroke, he pinpoints the growing tendency for people to rely on zingers and "crazy" behavior in the workplace or other interpersonal situations as ways to mark themselves out as 'different' without substantially rocking the boat. This is something I've experienced firsthand – one of my co-workers is constantly, jokingly chiding the rest of us for being "a mess," insisting that we "not get into any trouble," 'cause you know, we're all just so crazy! I feel like my own claim to "difference" is being hardy-harred into irrelevance, just another collection of quirks.

But while I certainly appreciate this sort of perceptive analysis, and agree with Harris frequently, the weight of his insight rests entirely on the negative, as he enters the fray with the clear goal not of analyzing how pop culture and consumer culture function, but of exposing them as a depthless black malignancy in the heart of modern society. Harris simply dismisses out of hand the possibility that any form of consumption can be a legitimate form of expression, much less rebellion, which is a failing not so much in that it's necessarily untrue, as in that there's so much to be discovered on the way to proving it. I'll come back at y'all in a couple of days my take on another entry in this conversation, which is, if not quite so nuanced and insightful, considerably more carefully researched, and interested in delving into its subject to a level that Harris doesn't dare – Thomas Frank's "The Conquest of Cool."