The Merchants of Cool
I think This striking 2001 documentary on how conglomerates market coolness to teens should be required viewing for everybody after they reach age 11 or so.
Some of it plays like old people alarmism, sure. You’ve got middle-aged narrators talking about teens imitating what the marketers feed them, blissfully unaware of how carefully the Beatles were marketed to them when they were teens (one guy was kicked out of the band early on because he wouldn’t wear his hair in that distinctive Beatles style they had adopted as their look). My parents named me David after the lead singer of David Starr and the Cockateers, a band I’m sure was marketed just as cleverly as Limp Bizkit was back in 2001.
But still… the sprite.com rap concert and the 13 year-old aspiring models will almost certainly depress you.
Thanks to Sanchez in the forums for bringing that to my attention.
October 24th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
It’s a good documentary…serious but not too alarmist. The narrator does wonder if it hasn’t always been this way, and i think the middle-ground he reaches (it has, but never so quickly and extensively) seems quite sound.
If it was this bad when the Beatles were around, they’d either have been dropped like a turd-wrapped hot col when Lennon did his “We dickslap Jesus!”…or gone into full black-metal mode because hey, it’s edgy! General Satan’s Vivisected Heart Gang Band, anyone?
October 24th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
Great movie. We did watch in school, actually, though unfortunately only because the teacher was an incompetent dumbass who didn’t know how to teach English.
October 24th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
That video didn’t really depress me until I closed the tab and went back to the top of Wong’s blog. It was an ad for a sex-themed show on MTV. Don’t lose your sponsors Dave, you’re doing too well.
October 25th, 2007 at 8:22 am
I wonder if teenage girls still feel the same way about Britney Spears…
October 25th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
This doesn’t have anything to do with this post really, just thought I would say that pointlesswasteoftime was a really happening site with cool features and witty commentaries and so forth, and this new cracked thing, while it may be good for DW and whoever else was involved with PWoT, is just not very cool.
October 25th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
You’re right, that was offtopic. Start a new thread in the forums.
On topic though, I thought that documentary was damn good and damn scary. I’ve heard most of that argument before (the “oh no, our kids are being ad-programmed) but usually it’s been by feminists railing about how ads are objectifying women. PBS brought it much more close to home by pointing out that it isn’t just women and it isn’t just sex that’s being affected.
Also that whole ‘feedback loop’ point is novel too. I’ve heard before that I’m being programmed by the media, but this point is new and much more real. It’s not the media that is lowering the standards, it’s media making teenage rebelliousness the norm which causes us teens to lower our standards even farther to still be rebelliousness.
Now if you excuse me I have to go shave half my head to get ready for the rape-and-binge-drinking party I will be attending tonight.
October 26th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
Dave, you might want to check out a book by Jim Munroe, called “Everyone in Silico”. In addition to just being good fiction, one of the character’s jobs is to figure out whatever the current underground anti-fad is, and market it to kids, so that it becomes mainstream. Then he has to find the new underground fad, to make mainstream, to replace the old mainstream, etc.
Here is a free e-book version:
http://nomediakings.org/everyoneinsilico.htm
I could be wrong, and I could be thinking of his book “Angry Young Spaceman” actually, now I’m sure of it. There is not a free e-book version of that one though.
October 27th, 2007 at 5:37 am
I’m really starting to miss pointlesswasteoftime “all in the same page format”… Cracked’s “x top whatever” and gay jokes rarelly made it to the Mirth Canal for a reasson.
October 27th, 2007 at 11:55 am
And the fact that this is apparently never going to be updated is sad
October 27th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
I remember watching this in sociology class in high school. i think i was the only person who wasn’t shocked to find out that roughly 98% of the music and trends and whatnot were marketed towards us by some big giant omnidynaconglomo corporation, or mtv. Either way it left me feeling sad, dead, empty and downright hopeless, it seemed as if it was the death of creativity and true self expressions.
October 28th, 2007 at 5:08 am
Well, that’s a good reason for you to support independent, finnish, three-man ug-bands that are the brink of releasing a new EP. Ahem.