“This premise leads business writers to emphasize rapid product introduction as a key to corporate success. According to Peters, healthy corporations are roiling hives of gutsy executives called ‘product champions,’ each one enraptured by a delphic vision of superficial novelty — perhaps of a soft drink with an advanced sweetner or unprecedented hue . . …
As Ever, the Logic
“For all the tattoos, Details message is no different than any other lifestyle magazine: Who you are depends on what you consume, and how hip you are depends on how enthusiastically you keep up with the new. Nonconformity may be the language, but fashion is, as ever, the logic.” [Frank and Weiland, editors, Commodify Your …
Rock and Roll Samurai
“Despite the whirlwind of trends, Details retains a unifying philosophical viewpoint — the archetypical American male is a rebel consumer . . . ‘These guys are not only musicians, or even rock stars,’ the magazine affirmed, ‘but modern men, emblems of a new masculinity.’ These ‘rock and roll samurai live outside the law, but are …
Department of Hip Resources
“The people who staff the Combine aren’t like Nurse Ratched. They aren’t Frank Burns, they aren’t the Church Lady, they aren’t Dean Wormer from Animal House, they are not those repressed old folks in the commercials who want to ban Tropicana Fruit Twisters. They’re hipper than you can ever hope to be because hip is …
Dreadlocks at Taco Bell
“But one hardly has to go to a poetry reading to see the countercultural idea acted out. Its frenzied ecstasies have long since become an official aesthetic of consumer society, a monotheme of mass as well as adversarial culture. Turn on the TV and there it is instantly: the unending drama of consumer unbound and …
Aboriginal Hip
“The patron saints of the counterculture idea are, of course, the Beats, whose frenzied style and merry alienation still maintain a powerful grip on the American imagination. Even forty years after the publication of On the Road, the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs remain the sine qua non of dissidence, the model for aspiring …
Revolution Through Consumption
“What we thought was really eerie, though, was the way mass culture reflected the high critics’ priorities. While they spoke proudly of their own subversiveness and turned out account after account of the liberating potential of each act of consuming, the culture industry itself grabbed with both hands at the golden promise of rebellion-through-consumption. The …
Hip Off the Rack
“The sixties are more than merely the homeland of hip, they are a commercial template for our times, a historical prototype for the construction of cultural machines that transform alienation and despair into consent. Co-option is something much more complex than the struggle back and forth between capital and youth revolution; it’s also something larger …
The Un-Ad
“Bernbach was the first adman to embrace the mass society critique, to appeal directly to the powerful but unmentionable public fears of conformity, of manipulation, of fraud, and of powerlessness, and to sell products by so doing. He invented what we might call anti-advertising: a style which harnessed public mistrust of consumerism-perhaps the most powerful …
New Bait, New Hook
“No longer would Americans buy to fit in or impress the Joneses, but to demonstrate that they were wise to the game, to express their revulsion with the artifice and conformity of consumerism. The enthusiastic discovery of the counterculture by the branches of American business studied here marked the consolidation of a new species of …