Copyright Village Voice Dec 2, 1997Commodify Your Dissent Edited by Thomas Frank and
Matt Welland
Norton, 287 pp., 15 PaPer The Can st of Cool By Thomas Frank
University of Co, 287 pp., $22.95
Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
By Dave Mickey
Art Issues Press, 216 pp., S7.95 paper
Put on the new Spice Girls album, Spice World, and you'll instantly feel like you're at a party that's been going on for hours, for millions of units sold. Is "Spice Up Your Life" bastardized salsa? Lambada? From reading the celebrity press, you might know that each of these women has a name, and a nickname, and a look related to the nickname, but who could tell their voices apart? Fans of riot grrrl grimace at the group's "Girl Power" sloganeering. "Do It," after all, with its rebel lyrics (She rules are for breaking. . / Free what's in your soul . . . / Freak out lose control"), actually began life as a Pepsi adand now the joke goes aspires to be a Nike ad.
New Spice Girls are thrown at us all the time; they're part of the onslaught of modernity, like the Internet, mutual funds, and Slimfast. Each one promises to change your life, arriving cloaked in the rhetoric of democracy (or its feeble cousin, "empowerment"), but the hard sell isn't tough to spot-someone's reaping more benefits off these products than you ever will. One natural impulse is to resist: don't have to watch MTV or drink that silly shake. But it isn't so easy. Ignore pop, computers, and everything else and you'll not only miss out (as with the stocks boom), you'll have become a total stodge.
Others try the opposite tack, looking for the cutting edge that hasn't yet been hyped to death. Ironically, it becomes hard to tell these dissidents from the advance agents of capitalism, out seeking untapped markets. Money, culture, and democracy combined make up a maze that can't be escaped. And no one looks sillier running that maze than the left, which hates money instinctively but also fears being seen as elitist. A couple of years back, The Nation ran a cover story called "Hip Is Dead: Why? To show how hip they were.
The author of that screed was Tom Frank, founder and principle contributor to the most cynical new journal of the 1990s, The Baffier, which bills itself as "The Journal That Blunts the Cutting Edge" and which has just published its first anthology, Commodify Your Dissent. Founded by a bunch of indie-rock-loving Chicago grad students, The Baffler has pushed one proposition over and over: countercultures like the beats, hippies, alternative rock, or cyberpunk aren't truly subversive, they're the "self justifying ideology of the new bourgeoisie," which these days specializes in quasi-rebellious "difference," Details and Pearl Jam style, instead of old-style mass culture "conformity."
As an analysis of capitalist niche marketing the argument is undeniable, and not particularly original, owing its backbone to the "post-Fordist" theories of writers like David Harvey. What's new is the bile The Baffler directs at the fake subversives they see all around them: sneaker salesmen, Gen X theorists, cultural studies professors who claim that ordinary people make creative decisions within the maze of commodity culture, defenders of Madonna, Quentin Tarantino, Donna Tart. Why, Frank and his cohorts icily demand, don't these self-satisfied hipsters ever notice the reality this "carnivalesque" behavior glosses over: the "droning dictation of business interests,' the rising income gap, the revolt of the elites into gated communities.
Unfortunately, the B<er crowd live in a gated community of their own, whose hipper-than-the-hipsters are all certain that "our youthful vision of the world was influenced more by [the punk band] Minor Threat than by the Partridge Family" Behind their commercialism-proof screen doors, they view ordinary people with the kind of scorn that generated cultural studies in the first place. She consumer, feeling that life has become easier in the land of superstores and familiar logos, responds eagerly to the promise that nothing need happen in life that is not the finely contrived end product of an agency meeting" Still, the people who make the journal's skin crawl are the culture traitors, like an ad copywriter toasted in The New Torker for his punk rock record collection, or William Burroughs signing an endorsement deal.
The Beier keeps on message, never mentioning race, gender, or sexuality in its relentless assault on poseurs. But they intrude on commercial culture all the time. If, for instance, you want to claim that all transgressive pop is now ripe fruit for marketing departments, why is hiphop still so touchy that Time Warner was forced to sell Interscope? Keith White offhandedly disses Details as "the Pearl Jam of the magazine world,' yet, far from wearing flannel, the campy Downtown publication was the first mainstream men's magazine styled to at least partially include its gay readership. Might there actually be a girl or two out there who's going to be somehow, dare I say it, empowered by the Spice Girls' impudence? The Baffler functions as the youth culture-bashing corollary of leftists who attack identity politics as a betrayal of the working class (not that the journal's writers ever exactly seem blue-collar).
Speaking of those Spice Girls: a couple of years ago, I was attacked in The Baffler for a Voice article I wrote arguing that, given the commercialization of indie rock as "alternative, it was time to discard indie notions of purism and seize whatever cultural power presented itself. Alternative was too ridiculous to salvage, The Ba$er rejoined, and why would anyone aspire to end up a beer-commercial farce like the Rolling Stones? We can still argue about what happened-whether the boldest new artists created a stylistically new pantheon (Courtney Love, the arriviste stars at the Beastie Boys' Tibetan concerts), or whether the commercial backlash against alt-rock proved that average fans came to feel as fed up as The Baffler.
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But the more important lesson, the Spice Girls lesson that neither of us especially predicted, is that mass culture didn't need alternative. If Pearl Jam (who probably dig The Baffler, the same way Bush, a band mocked in its pages as obvious phonies, chose to be engineered by Steve Albini, whose rant against major-label abuses remains the most convincing article The Baffler ever published), RE.M., and U2 willfully choose to record "difficult" music, a Hanson or Fiona Apple emerges from the wings. Then what happens to The Baffler's critique: think the Spice Girls feel as selfconscious as Eddie Vedder might about "Do It, which as Frank points out is a Yippie credo turned sneaker slogan?
In sync with the release of The Ba_lr anthology (this business baiter knows how to promote himself), Frank has also published The Conquest+Cool, a revisionist history of the 1960s. Guess what: hippies weren't the outlaws they thought they were. Not only did capitalists quickly cash in, but some led the way, seeing themselves as agents of modernity too, and smitten with a vision of an America interested in products beyond another gray flannel suit. Documenting ad campaigns for Volkswagen and the Pepsi Generation, Frank proves conclusively that the enthusiasm of hip corporations helped put the Age of Aquarius over the top. Since nearly all post-baby boomers share his conviction that "the relics of the counterculture reek of affectation and phoniness" there's an easy kick to reading this book and imagining, say, David Crosby wincing.
But please, Frank's argument is exactly equivalent to proclaiming that the '90s rediscovery of protoelectronic lounge music means rock wasn't the only form of radical '60s pop. The proper answer is sure, and so what? Rock was the one that mattered. Frank's pious certainty that true radicalism is commercial-free-the book's moral is Through it all, capital remained firmly in the national saddle"-leaves him unable to separate historic events from sideshows. By his own account, the painfully hip ad campaigns of the '60s faded like Nehru jackets with the first economic downturn; is it really arguable that the counterculture's underlying values were so easily dislodged?
Only a teenager looks to social and cultural movements for purity. Since Hofstadter, it's been argued that Andrew Jackson's pro-growth policies did little for working people; does that make the swagger of Jacksonian democracy, which underlies rock, an absolute sham? It's ahistorical and effectively apolitical to think that all commodities whistle the same tune. Hugh Hefner, Madonna, and the indie hiphop mogul Master P each traffic in the carnivalesque, but their origins and significance are hardly identical. For better or for worse, the language in which indi,,duals, from a marvelous diversity of backgrounds, express their sense of freedom in our culture is intimately tied to a language that sells products. If it makes Frank feel any better, conservatives don't like that any more than he does.
At one point in Commodify Your Dissent, Deta/is is ridiculed for the statement "Mass taste is perverse and unpredictable, [but] that's also why keeping tabs on it is so much fun." Sorry: I couldn't agree more. (For what it's worth, the new Spice Girls album was a surprising initial flop.) We may wish that Coke versus Pepsi didn't sometimes seem like the most charged political clash going, but a capitalism that appropriates difference is an improvement on a capitalism that enforces conformity. Put another way, I'm more heartened to see rock, or the Web, shooting popular culture upward than top-down admiration for Bill Gates and Ted Turner as the only true punks. Much as I and The Baffler love indie rockers like Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments and Barbara Manning, that's not a world, it's a bubble. I'd respect Frank and his pals more if they learned to tell Sporty Spice from Scary, and got their souls dirty.
Judging from his new essay collection, Air Guitar, Dave Hickey has spent his time around Baffler types, teaching in academia where the kneejerk attitude remains: "All the cruelties and inequities of this civilization derived from the greed and philistinism of shopkeepers." But as a former art gallery owner and scuffling Nashville songwriter (not to mention '70s Village Voice rock critic), and a "petitbourgeois tradesperson" at heart, he knows too well that such a definition of culture leaves his butt back in Texas.
To be fair, Hickey scorns advertisers and "blockbusters" too, saving all his love for the kinds of merchants, fans, critics, and artists who roll the dice, pitting their conviction against everyone else's indifference. Money isn't what gives art its value (or takes it away), he concludes: what's crucial is the accumulated social effect of aficionados throwing their weight behind an article, and making it a safe investment. Actually, I'd say that, on a mass scale, the process that turns Alanis Morissette from a large seller to a superstar mostly works in the same way for nonspecialists-music lovers dragooning their less involved friends.
But Hickey's too charitable to thoroughly mass phenomena for me to quibble. One essay celebrates Las Vegas as a town where outsiders can get work around the clock and dress however they like, having escaped "Hometown, American (a place The Baf^ thinks disappeared when Miller Lite ads started copying Beck, but which Hickey knows intimately). Liberace is saluted for his "honest fakery" and for showcasing the closet to millions-while remaining an upstanding American. There's even an attempt to explain how Perry Mason reruns act as a surrogate family for people without day jobs.
One of the reasons for The Bats chic is that it's an academicky take on culture that isn't written like an anatomy textbook. But after Hickey, you notice the dourness that their blunt prose conceals: any willingness to play with words, crack wise instead of allknowing, allow that being cultured the right way ought to read like the best job imaginable. Hickey doesn't just find a unique argument for appreciating Norman Rockwell (the painter's ability to unveil the exceptionalism of "normal" American life), he comes up with his own Rockwellian prose poem: a memoir of a jam session he witnessed in Fort Worth growing up. His ranging, dandyish voice is a double throwback, to two traditions that deserve revival: the early rock criticism of books like Richard Meltzer's Gu/cher and the early American cultural studies of books like Ned Polsky's Hustlers, Beat, and Others.
Reading Air Guitar, I realized that I'd never heard a cultural critic talk about commodities as unblushingly as Hickey does, thoroughly assuming their intricate immersion in democracy, as when, revamping Churchill with a typical flourish, he speaks of "money, which, I always agree, is the worst way of discriminating among individuals, except for all the others." Isn't it obvious that the products of consumer capitalism are themselves discriminated against, intellectually, all the time? Hickey notes the associations that drew him toward the art gallery world: "Danger, glamour, queers, women, and Jews." The latter three groups have often been associated with the debased, the easily manipulated, the unproductive. How easily such epithets slide over into the language of anticonsumerism.
I'd never claim to be immune from cynicism about the new celebrities and new objects of commerce constantly being tossed our way; that would be inhuman. But wouldn't it be nice if leftists, of all people, could find a way of describing and living with such phenomena without lapsing into bigotryt's final frontier?
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