Culture As Advertising.

luka

luka

Well-known member
I've been meaning to start a thread on commodified London, a glossy repackaged version of London street culture with the poverty and desperation airbrushed out. A Shoreditch box park vision of creatives in box fresh Nike Airs, smiling, multiracial, good looking and cool exemplified in my mind by an addidas advert that was inescapable on youtube a few months back and soundtracked by Ms Banks-Chat to Mi Gyal.

This is that thread but with a broader remit, inspired by corpsey saying in the Marvel movies thread

"“Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. Advertising effaces any support and any depth, signifying a reabsorption of everything into the surface and plunges us into this stupified, hyperreal euphoria that we could not exchange for anything else.”

This process was what Barti was getting at in the Jamaica is Dun Out Here thread. The conversion of the island into a Lilt advert.

One reason I like YouTube is that unlike spotify you can still find things which are not a corporate product and lifestyle advertisement. Street music which is not an audition for radio one xtra. Etc etc.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Sidenote post: Not denying your claims but you can find a lot of music on Spotify which isn't going to be played on mainstream radio. There's loads of drill on Spotify, for example. But I do take your point re: Youtube. There almost certainly aren't the weird depths on Spotify that you get on Youtube.

I was wondering last night if there has been a YouTube style service for audio rather than video. One which can get around copyright claims by making the content user-platformed.

YouTube strikes quite a good balance atm between user-uploaded stuff and 'official' corporately mandated stuff.

I don't support artists are making money off Spotify OR Youtube, so perhaps the only difference is a question of what is 'allowed' on there.

While obviously there was a lot of radical rap music back in its early days (and not relegated to the fringes, as it is now), there seems to me to have been something inherently capitalistic about rap music from the start ('the hustle') which made it easy to co-opt and exploit in this way. Rappers can be pseudo-drug-dealing, pseudo-sociopathic, gun-toting, tattooed, philandering and police-hating - and still not be remotely scary to the mainstream, because they love flash cars, designer clothes, all sorts of commodities, capitalism itself.
 
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luka

luka

Well-known member
A lot of our threads have been about music's collapse into the postmodernist paradigm having been, right up until very recently, the last real bastion of modernism proper. One of the fascinating things about postmodernism is that it seems to describe perfectly the effects of the Internet despite preceding it by quite some time.

Rinse fm pop. Pastiche pop in general. These are eminently post modern phenomena.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
And the advertisers are getting even more savvy, with red bull music academy being take seriously rather than just as a corporate tie-in, Nike and Colin Kapernick, that Adidas Peckham thing in the ad. Establishing themselves as just another organic part of the environment that has always been there, rather than an invasive virus. Living inside the mind of Diplo.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
The last time I tried to discuss this I got shot down by Padraig who said culture has never been anything but advertising and the underground has never existed. It's a serious argument and I appreciate that it may be impossible to make a clear demarcation here.

Corpse makes the same point when he says uk drill is on spotify (and has corporate sponsorship and, I presume, record company dark money in some cases)

I'm sticking to my guns however.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.

surely there used to be a lag period between culture emerging and being coopted. obviously it was always the case that when marketeers find out about something, they coopt the shit out of it, but there's now no breathing space. i'm curious about the argument that grime, say, was merely advertising in 2002/3
 
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Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I don't think music has to be advertising, by any means. I think the sort of 'street' culture you're talking about tends to be (even if only modestly) capitalistic, in the sense that people want to make music and be paid for it (if only in order to be able to make more music).

I was reading Ballard's introduction to 'The Doors of Experience' the other day and he talks about how the entertainment/media has 'engirdled' the earth, so that the only way to escape fiction is to pursue/plumb the inner depths. I only bring that up because I think people growing up today are more completely engirdled and enveloped by advertising, due to the internet and smartphones in particular. More and more of our lifestyles are 'owed' to capitalism. Even as it drives us mad (the depression spike since smartphones, e.g.) we feel increasingly dependent on and defensive of it. And also capitalism has evolved to appear 'value-driven' - if a corporation is publically liberal that's enough for it to escape censure. What I'm getting at here is that kids who are raised today are less likely than even I was to think Nike is bad.

Anyway I'm gonna stop musing half-bakedly cos I really understand fuck all about capitalism compared to a lot of people on here.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
I don't think street music is the only outside (to the extent to which an outside is possible) Two other habitual moves are to look 'outside the western box" as Charles Olson put it (and as Patty was advocating recently) or towards the experimental and academic.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Also corpse there's no one here, least of all me, with the slightest inkling of what capitalism is. We are all utterly in the dark. It's just a name we give to our historical situation.
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
this came up as one of those 10 second adverts before youtube videos the other day and i really thought it was an advert for coke.


watching it now, it does look an awful lot like product placement.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
baboon2004 said:

surely there used to be a lag period between culture emerging and being coopted. obviously it was always the case that when marketeers find out about something, they coopt the shit out of it, but there's now no breathing space. i'm curious about the argument that grime, say, was merely advertising in 2002/3
Click to expand...

Padraig makes this argument more than once, most recently on the 'New Stuff' thread... around page three I think. ...
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
What are things that advertising cannot be -

for example, in the "PC" era, if a song is offensive to a minority group, it can't be used to advertising, other than for a fringe ideology perhaps?
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
You can't market using greek music in this country because our ears have evolved to reject it as unholy
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
my rap rituals thread was an attempt to move beyond the "we can't stick it to the man any more" narrative and find aesthetically redeeming qualities in it.

raekwon's "27 inch zenith believe it" is rather poetic when taken outside the context of a tv. to declare an emotional or spiritual zenith to be only 27 inches is a off kilter and perplexing it makes you think. nowhere near tall enough to say it's a triumph but on the other hand not short enough for it to be ironic.

"pull up in a demon on god" is a rather rich idea when we're not perceiving it as a dodge demon.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
No banter please lads this is a serious intellectual thread. The corpsey quote I opened the thread with makes a distinction between surface and depth and says advertising can only ever be surface, transforms everything into surface. Fashion does the same thing. Meaning is drained away. There's a seductive side to this. An appealing playfulness and semiotic literacy.
 
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