One of the things I will be doing in this Devil in a Blue Dress thread will be to assemble quotations from a stack of books I have read on the matters surrounding pop culture. I thought I would share them with you as I gather them, although with minimal comment. The comment will come later if I get a chance to assemble all this in a book. So here is the first of the quotations. To keep you from having to hop around the web site tracking the ibids, I will have the full footnote info with each citation.
“Commerical fantasies of rebellion, liberation, and outright ‘revolution’ against the stultifying demands of mass societry are commonplace almost to the point of invisibility in advertising, movies, and television programming. For some, Ken Kesey’s parti-colored bus may be a hideous reminder of national unraveling, but for Coca-Cola it seemed a perfect promotional instrument for its ‘Fruitopia’ line, and the company has proceeded to send replicas of the bus around the country to generate interest in the counterculturally themed beverage. Nike shoes are sold to the accompaniment of words delivered by William S. Burroughs and songs by The Beatles, Iggy Pop, and Gil Scott Heron (‘the revolution will not be televised’); peace symbols decorate a line of cigarettes manufacture by R.J. Reynolds and the walls and windows of Starbucks coffee shops nationwide; the products of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft are touted as devices of liberation; and advertising across the product-category spectrum calls upon consumers to break rules and find themselves” [Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997), p.4.]