Uncool
If you've been watching
television recently, you might have seen an ad featuring the Pentium computer
chip. This little morality play contrasts a ragtag group of aging flower
children with a gathering of young, glamorously dressed executives. When the
'60s veterans try to play some pitiful music, they are quickly drowned out by
the frantic brainstorming of their corporate descendants. The words "Make
Money, Not War" flash at the viewer.
These
days, it hardly raises an eyebrow when yet another '60s-style slogan enters the
corporate lexicon. Politicians might fault the decade for its legacy of
permissiveness and the pursuit of too much happiness, but Apple blithely urges
us to "think different," while Fruitopia's graffiti-strewn magic bus rolls
merrily across the screen.
In The Conquest of Cool , Thomas Frank offers an
indignant explanation of this state of affairs. According to Frank, the '60s
pageantry of rebellion was welcomed--and in some respects, anticipated--by
marketers and manufacturers. The real legacy of the Woodstock era, Frank
believes, was an all-embracing ethos of "hip capitalism" that holds us in its
paisley thrall to this day. (Had Dustin Hoffman known how cool these plastics
people were, he would never have been so confused about his future.) The world
has been made safe for stylish nonconformity, and the prospect of genuine
dissent has been banished.
Though
Frank says he aims to illuminate the entire world of "business culture," his
book actually concentrates on the image-conscious executives of the advertising
and men's-clothing industries. The story begins in the early '60s, when a small
band of Madison Avenue radicals launched the "creative revolution." Advertising
in the '50s had been a timid, stifling business. Admen populated their
creations with lab coats and graphs and prided themselves on the scientific
precision of their work. Detailed rule books expounded the doctrine of the
"unique selling proposition"--a clear, simple message that would establish the
superiority of a given product over its competitors. (Wonder bread "helps build
strong bodies twelve ways.") The results were humorless and hectoring, a
tedious, nonstop barrage that was better suited to a Mad magazine satire
than to the subtle task of infiltrating the wary consumer's mind.
By the end of the Eisenhower years, advertisers
were eager to shake up their industry and address the public's alienation. If
consumers were unhappy with the gaudy, chrome-plated excess of '50s
consumerism, if they resented the crude ministrations of Madison Avenue, then
this was something that advertisers needed to know, and to act upon. The trick
was to make the middle class's pervasive dissatisfaction with commercialism,
cheap goods, and planned obsolescence into an instrument of consumerism
itself.
The first and most
influential trickster was an adman named Bill Bernbach, whose famous campaign
for the VW Beetle began in 1960. Bernbach satirized the grandiose claims of
'50s advertisers by making a virtue of modesty: VW urged its customers to
"think small." Another client--Avis Rent A Car--boasted, "We're No. 2!" The
style caught on: Perhaps the most memorable example of commercial diffidence
was a 1961 ad for Fina gas stations, which humbly suggested, "If ... you need
gas or something, please stop in."
All this
self-mockery was typically accompanied by a subdued design; the consumer's
suspicions would be disarmed with light humor and quiet sophistication. But the
message was plain and clear: Individualism and nonconformity could sell a
product. Bernbach and his colleagues had discovered, as Frank puts it, "the
magic cultural formula by which the life of consumerism could be extended
indefinitely, running forever on the discontent that it had itself produced."
When the counterculture burst on the scene, advertisers simply found a new,
much brighter "palette" for the presentation of already established messages.
Before long, a sea of psychedelic ads flooded the nation, urging consumers to
"break away from the silent majority" or even to "impeach Miss America."
The marriage of counterculture and capitalism is hardly a
new subject, but Frank does provide a refreshingly unsentimental look at it. He
does not believe that sinister advertisers were simply trying to capture or
control an idealistic--and burgeoning--young audience. Rather, he argues,
Madison Avenue was sincere in its "cosmic optimism" about youth culture:
Marketers didn't want to contain countercultural energies so much as to release
them into the world at large. Ads with aggressively youthful themes were just
as likely to appear in Ladies' Home Journal or Look as in the
underground press. And those ads often hawked products that only the prosperous
and middle-aged would be able to buy. The point was not to sell to the young;
it was to create a vague but attractive image of rebellion for all to
enjoy.
Frank is a
young academic who is best known as the founder of a lively cultural criticism
'zine called the Baffler . For a renovated dissertation, The Conquest
of Cool is blessedly free of academic throat-clearing and professional
jargon. There isn't a dull page in the book. Unfortunately, Frank's frequent
generalizations about "the world of business and of middle-class mores" are far
less convincing than the particular stories he has to tell. The advertising and
fashion industries, after all, are not representative of "postwar American
capitalism." If there were any businessmen who didn't welcome youth culture,
they don't appear here. (We are told that the sales of men's hats fell
dramatically between 1964 and 1970--did hatters enjoy the decade too?) Frank
also ignores a more sober aspect of '60s revolt: the consumer movement.
Responding to public pressure, the Federal Trade Commission banned cigarette
advertising on radio and television in 1970, and established tough regulations
on "truth in advertising" shortly thereafter. Ralph Nader may not have been
"hip," but he was definitely a '60s character.
When it comes to the present, Frank paints with
particularly broad strokes. At his best, he deftly skewers the inanities of
corporate-sponsored dissidence. (The editor of Details is quoted as
asking himself, "How is a man rebelling today?") But the antinomian antics of
some Madison Avenue firms and glossy magazines hardly establishes that "rebel
youth culture" is "the cultural mode of the corporate moment." It may be fun to
say, as Frank put it in the Baffler , that William S. Burroughs'
"inspirational writings are boardroom favorites, his dark nihilistic burpings
the happy homilies of the new corporate faith." But what does it mean? Chances
are that when Nike put Burroughs in one of its ads, none of the company's
executives had even heard of him. As for "middle-class mores," a culture eager
to embrace the V-chip surely subscribes to other beliefs besides the
desirability of transgression at any cost.
In fact,
there is no dominant style to contemporary consumerism. Advertisers frequently
urge us to rebel, and they frequently urge us to conform. They encourage us to
indulge ourselves, and they exhort us to worry about our competence at work.
They appeal to patriotism and then to anarchism. The same psychographers who
identify a lucrative market of rugged individualists in one study will turn
around and identify an equally lucrative market of "neo-traditionalists" in the
next. Marketers will do anything that seems to promise a momentary fit with the
elusive Zeitgeist , or at least a surge of attention.
Rather than distinguish these varieties of consumer
experience, Frank stuffs everything into the boxes of "square" and
"hip"--receptacles that were already full back when the '60s dawned. (Frank is
hardly the first to note that the tastes of a "hip" bohemian elite have spread
to the masses, or to argue that the results of this cultural migration are
deleterious. Both the observation and the complaint are virtually as old as
20 th -century cultural criticism itself. Click to read Leslie Fiedler
on the subject in 1960, and to read Theodor Adorno discussing it in 1947.)
Wherever the image of nonconformity appears, Frank spies the ascendant force of
rebel consumerism. Is there really a common sensibility that unites the
inspirational homiletics of Nike's "Just Do It" and the remorseless irony of
ABC's "You can talk to your wife anytime" campaign? When Delta Air Lines
promises to be "ready when you are," is that an instance of untrammeled
individualism, catering to the whims of the impulsive jet-set rebel? Or is
Delta merely trying to soothe the nerves of the anxious business traveler who
hopes to arrive at the next meeting with his clothes unwrinkled? Frank's
categories are too crude to answer these questions. All these advertisements
may be insulting to one's intelligence or taste; but they don't add up to a
single coherent message--much less to a dissent-dissolving "magic cultural
formula" that can explain capitalism's survival and success.
