The
B AI.TERNATIVE AFFLER NumberFtve
TO WHAT?
Rock 'ti RoU is the Health of the State, page 5
TOWARD A RETRO APOCAI.YPSE The Nostalgia Gap, page 152
CONSOI..DATED DEV'ANCE, 'NC. Youth Culture Fabrication Specialists, page 159 Plus new writing by Janice Eidus, Robert Nedelkoff, and Steve Albini
66The Journal That Bloots the Cutting EdgeM
is stomach turns a somersault with the drop of the elevator. He steps out into the crowded marble hall. For a moment not knowing which way to go, he stands back against the wall with his hands in his pockets, watching people elbow their way through the perpetually revolving doors; softcheeked girls chewing gum, hatchetfaced girls with bangs, creamfaced boys his own age, young toughs with their hats on one side, sweatyfaced messengers, crisscross glances, sauntering hips, red jowls masticating cigars, sallow concave faces, flat bodies of young men and women, paunched bodies of elderly men, all elbowing, shoving, shuffling, fed in two endless tapes through the revolving doors out into Broadway, in off Broadway. Jimmy fed in a tape in and out the revolving doors, noon and night and morning, the revolving doors grinding out his years like sausage meat. All of a sudden his muscles stiffen. Uncle Jeff and his office can go plumb to hell. The words are so loud inside him he glances to one side and the other to see if anyone heard him say them. They can all go plumb to hell. - John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
The Baftler
Thomas Frank, Keith White U...
7'
editors Andy Beecham-Production Greg Lane-Urim Editor "Diamonds" Dave Mulcahey-Thummim Editor
Special thanks to WHPK, Bill Boisvert and Eric Iversen for extra editing, the Crey City Journal Monocle, "Twist" White, Gill's Cut Rate Liquors, DD&S Barbecue, Buzzmuscle, Galaxy of Mailbox Whores, Sabalon Glitz, and Ashtray Boy. We also want to thank everybody who wrote to us over the last year, even though we rarely had a chance to reply. We produced this Baffler in November, 1993 in the tiny office ofWHPK-FM, crammed in the upper reaches of the ersatz-Gothic spire of the University of Chicago's Reynolds Clubhouse. The large screen of their computer and access to their gigantic record library made the task much easier than before. The nearby roof was perfect for cookouts and drunken stumbling. "The Hippogryph Files," the selections from ANON and S.P.Y., and "Not the Plaster Casters," are printed with permission. Everything else 漏 copyright 1993 The Baffler. All rights reserved. Our ISSN is 1059-9789. The Baffier is distributed by Ubiquity, Speedimpex, Fine Print, Small Changes, and Desert Moon.
The Baffler is published by its editors (and no one else) in the South Side of Chicago. Sometimes an unseemly long period elapses between issues (almost a year this time). But in the interim we are always up to something-parties, media pranks, newsletters, general troublemaking-which you can hear about by subscribing. Subscriptions are $16 for the nexr four issues; single copies cost $5. Somewhat more for libraries. We strongly encourage readers to send us their essays, fiction, art, and poetry. Help us "Blunt the Cutting Edge." But we warn them in advance that, being extremely busy with our scholarly pursuits, we tend to be rather lax correspondents. To many of those who sent us material over the past months, we apologize for having taken so long--{)r having failed-to reply. We were not prepared for such a deluge of submissions, but we promise to do a better job in the future.
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NUtnber Five ALTERNATIVE TO WHAT? Rock n Roll is The Health of the State, Tom Frank, p. 5 Eulogy: Sun Ra, Bob Nastanovich, p. 20 Making the Scene: Brain Dead in Seattle, Eric Iversen, p. 21 The Problem With Music, Steve Albini, p. 31 Rebel Rock in Moscow, Nathan Frank, p. 41 Why I am Very Angry, Seth Sanders, p. 47 A Nest of Ninniea, Selected Scorchings, p. 50 Sweet Portable You, Music Reviews, p. 53 The Name Caller, Steve Healey, p. 81 Sass Sells, Tom Frank, p. 95 World Music and You, Herbert Mattelart, p. 103
TWENTY-NOTHING REVISITED We're Marketed, Therefore We Are!, Stephen Duncombe, p. 131 BeatnikMania-Again!, Maura Mahoney, p. 149 The Retro Apocalypse, Tom Vanderbilt, p. 152
CONSOLIDATED DEVIA.NCE, INC. An Exclusive Baffler Investment Opportunity, p.159
FICTION Not the Plaster Casters, Janice Eidus, p. 43 The District Supervisor, Robert Nedelkoff, p. 59 The Grace of God, Mat Lebowitz, p. 87 A Gray Day in Ann Arbor, Rick Perlstein, p. 112 I am the Light, Dan Libman, p. 115 Gedney Goes Underground, Staff, p. 139
POETRY
ART
Gaston de Beam, p. 93 David Berman, pp. 16,85. Alec Dinwoodie, pp. 80, 110 Joe Fodor, pp. 27, 158 James Tolan, p. 40
Scenes from a Lifestyle, Illustrations by Don MacKeen The Hippogryph Files, Patrick Welch, p. 63 What is Alternative, Chris Holmes, p. 28 Latchkey Larry, Greg Fiering, p. 155
Second printing-,June, 1994 The topic for BalRer #6 is "Business Culture and the Culture Business." Is Schwarrenegger worth a trade war with France? Will the penetration of the rule of business into every aspect ofAmerican life be as wonderful as that annoying child from MCI says it will be? We doubt it. Send us revealing memos, corporate newsletters, cultural anifucts, and whatever else you think appropriate.
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Contributors Steve Albini's band, Shellac, has recently released two singles on Touch and Go records. David Berman was born in Williamsburg, VA. He is a sleeping car porter on Amtrak's Crescent Line and plays in the Silver Jews and the Warcomet.A1ec Dinwoodie works constantly to subvert his own poetry. He slips in and out of the American consciousness: voice of Faustus, shadow of velvet, Bert to his own Ernie. Lucky Stephen Duncombe lives in New York City where he is completing a performance piece based on the third volume of his work, The Economic Influence ofthe Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485. Janice Eidus' new novel is called Urban Bliss. "Not the Plaster Casters" will appear in Fall 1994, in Unbearables, an anthology of short fiction to be published by Autonomedia Press. Joe Fodor worked at Quayle Quarterly until the rude business of last November. Now he's the fashion editor ofHysteria. Steve Healey is in the exquisite Frances Gumm, whose CD Crnelfa was recently released by VHF. Chris Holmes, explicator of the "Guyville paradigm," is one of the country's leading Ufologists and a roadie for Sabalon Glitz. Robert Nedelkoffhas contributed to Forced Exposure and Conflict. He is a student at the Monterey College of Law and lives in Salinas, CA, with his lizard. Seth Sanders' studies have convinced him that magic and religion are based on the common man's wonder at unfair trade practices: hanc animam pro meliore damus, "we give this life for a better one;" call for escape route.James Tolan is a graduate ofJack Benny Junior High in Waukegan, IL but now bides his time in South Louisiana, sharecropping for the Man and penning the occasional vers libre. David "Diamonds" Mulcahey is thoroughly and utterly obsolete. He's waiting in virtual hibernation for the retro sensibility to reach1988, the year he won the Paris-Dakar rally. Keith White has finally torn himself from New York and returned to the birthplace of the Baffier, submerging his literary angst in dry columns of tables, figures, and bad prose; burrowing through the pages in a certain academic haunt deep in the Blue Ridge. Watch out, America. Tom Frank is not a person / you should be listening to. His application to Harvard didn't feaure a recommendation from a Kennedy. No interests back his literary efforts, and his ideas have no influence in the Clinton White House. Nor does he exhibit the appropriate shock when blue-ribbon committees discover that the children of poor people are also poor. He has never had a job, and he has almost never had a good haircut.
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AI. TERNATIVE TO WHAT? Tom Frank It's Not Your Father's Youth Movement There are few spectacles corporate America enjoys more than a good counterculture, complete with hairdos of defiance, dark complaints about the stifling 'mainstream,' and expensive accessories of all kinds. So now that the culture industry has nailed down the twenty-somethings, it comes as little surprise to learn that it has also uncovered a new youth movement abroad in the land, sporting all-new looks, a new crop of rock en' roll bands, and an angry new 'tude harsher than any we've seen before. Best of all, along with the media's Columbus-like discovery of this new "underground" skulking around exotic places like Seattle, have been treated to what has undoubtedly been the swiftest and most profound shift of imagery to come across their screens since the 1960s. New soundtracks, new product design, new stars, new ads. "Alternative," they call it. Out with the old, in with the new. Before this revelation, punk rock and its descendents had long been considered commercially unviable in responsible business circles because of their incorrigible angriness, their implacable hostility to the cultural climate that the major record labels had labored so long to build, as well as because of their difficult sound. Everyone knows pop music is supposed to be simple and massproducible, an easy matter of conforming to simple genres, of acting out the standard and instantly recognizable cultural tropes of mass society: I love love, I'm sad sometimes, I like America, I like cars, I'm my own person, I'm something of a rebel, I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride. And all through the 80s the culture industry knew instinctively that the music that inhabited the margins couldn't fit, didn't even merit consideration. So at the dawn of punk the American media, whose primary role has long been the uncritical promotion of whatever it is that Hollywood, the record labels, or the networks are offering at the time, lashed out at this strange, almost unfathomable movement. "Rock Is Sick," declared the cover of Rolling Stone. The national news magazines proBAFFLER路
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nounced the uprising to be degeneracy of the worst variety, then proceeded to ignore it all through the following decade. Its listeners were invisible people, unmentionable on TV, film, and radio except as quasi-criminals. And in the official channels of music-industry discourse-radio, MTV, music magazinesthis music and the tiny independent labels that supported it simply didn't exist. But now, it seems, the turning of generations and the inexorable logic of the market have forced the industry to reconsider, and it has descended in a ravenous frenzy on what it believes to be the natural habitats of those it once shunned. Now we watch with interest as high-powered executives offer contracts to bands they have seen only once, college radio playlists become the objects of intense corporate scrutiny, and longstanding independent labels are swallowed whole in a colossal belch of dollars and receptions. Now Rolling Stone magazine makes pious reference to the pioneering influence of defunct bands like Big Black and Mission of Burma whose records they ignored when new. Now we enjoy a revitalized MTV that has hastily abandoned its pop origins to push 'alternative' bands round the clock, a 50-million-watt radio station in every city that calls out to us from what is cleverly called "the cutting edge of rock." And now, after lengthy consultation with its 'twenty-something' experts, the mass media rises as one and proclaims itself in solidarity with the rebels, anxious to head out to Lollapalooza on the weekend and 'mosh' with the kids, don flannel, wave their fists in the air, and chant lyrics that challenge parental authority. Time magazine has finally smelled green in the music of what it longingly calls "the hippest venues going," and, in its issue of October 25, 1993, flings itself headlong into the kind of reckless celebrationism usually reserved only for the biggest-budget movies and the most successful TV shows. Salivating over the "anxious rebels" of "a young, vibrant alternative scene," it is all Time can do to avoid falling over itself in a delirious pirouette of steadily escalating praise. The magazine breathlessly details every aspect of the youngsters' deliciously ingenuous insurrection: they're "defiant," they're concerned with "purity and anticommercialism," they sing about "homes breaking," and-tastiest of allthey're upset about "being copied or co-opted by the mainstream." But for all this, Times story on 'alternative' rock never once mentions a band that is not a "co-optation," that still produces records on an actual independent label. As per the usual dictates of American culture, only money counts, and indie labels don't advertise in Time. So Pearl Jam, a major-label band that has made a career out of imitating the indie sounds of the late eighties, wins the magazine's accolades as the "demigod" of the new "underground," leading the struggle for 'authenticity' and against 'selling out.'
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Of course this is poor reporting, but journals like Time have always been more concerned with industry boosterism and the hard, profitable facts of making credible the latest packaging of youth culture than with a vague undefinable like 'news.' Thus while we read almost nothing about the still unmentionable world of independent rock, we are bombarded with insistences that Pearl Jam is the real rebel thing, the maximum leaders of America's new youth counterculture-assertions that are driven home by endless descriptions of the band going through all the varieties of insurgent posturing. They have a "keen sense of angst," and singer Eddie Vedder feels bad about the family problems of his youth. He rose to success from nowhere, too: he was a regular guy with a taste for living on the edge (much like the people in ads for sneakers and cars and jeans), a "gas station attendant and high school dropout," who thought up the band's lyrics while surfing. But Eddie's real sensitive also, a true Dionysian like Mick Jagger, with a "mesmerizing stage presence" that "reminded fans of an animal trying to escape from a leash." In fact, he's so sensitive that certain of the band's lyrics aren't included with the others on the album sleeve because "the subject matter is too painful for Vedder to see in print." The gushing of official voices like Time make necessary a clarification that would ordinarily go without saying: among the indie-rock circles which they mimic and from which they pretend to draw their credibility, bands like Pearl Jam are universally recognized to suck. Almost without exception, the groups and music that are celebrated as 'alternative' are watery, derivative, and strictly secondrate; so uniformly bad, in fact, that one begins to believe that stupid shallowness is a precondition of their marketability. Most of them, like Pearl Jam,
Born Down Ihe Douse of to_oDS in Your Brand New Shoes I wanted to be a Details man. I had recognized my need for bee-stung lips, carefully unkempt hair, the washboard stomach, the baggy Versace suits, the attendant awed babes, the tattoos-you get the picture. I wanted to pal around with other young sophisticates dressed just as rakishly as me, chatting about the latest trends in 'alternative' music and last week's party with Drew, Iggy, Uma, and Keanu. I couldn't get what I needed from stodgy old Esquire or pretty-boy GO. Spin might tell me how to dress and behave like Eddie Vedder, but their narrow focus-musicwould leave me in the dark about important developments in ice-climbing and seventies collectibles. And the trio of British men's fashion mags (The Face, Arena, and Sky) were simply too expensive and too derivative for my tastes. Details, with its two dollar cover price and relentlessly macho attitude, promised to deliver the new me. I think of Details as the Pearl Jam of the magazine
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world, the glittering showplace where rebellion, individualism, and nonconformity are packaged conveniently into lifestyle and paired with a" the correct accessories. Its mission is to chronicle what I should buy, what I should wear, where I should go, what I should see, what mass culture offerings I should choose from. Details is a sort of Sears catalog with 'tude, the fabulous intermediary between the latest offerings of the nation's clothing and entertainment industries and excitement-starved people like me. And with its utilitarian, punk-inspired typeface and its fractured post-modern layout, a reader intent on learning the secrets of youthful rebellion can be assured that Details is serious about delivering. But my quest to become a Details man was hampered by a fear: how on earth was I going to reinvent myself convincingly month after month in order to keep up with the latest cool identities? How was I going to pass myself off as an aficionado of a" these disparate trends when I knew nothing about them at a"? Details had the answer. It doesn't just fill me in about grunge, it gives me the history of the movement, so I
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play pre-digested and predictable versions of formulaic heavy guitar rock, complete with moronic solos and hoarse masculine poutings. There is certainly nothing even remotely' alternative' about this sound, since music like this has long been the favorite of teenage boys everywhere; it's just the usual synthetic product, repackaged in a wardrobe of brand new imagery made up of thousands of fawning anicles and videos depicting them as 'rebels' this or 'twenty-something' that. A band called the Stone Temple Pilots, who grace the cover of other national magazines, have distinguished themselves as the movement's bargain boys, offering renditions of all the various' alternative' poses currently fashionable: all in one package the consumer gets sullen angst, sexual menace, and angry pseudo-protest with imitation punk thrown in for no extra charge. Another group called Paw is exalted by their handlers and a compliant media as the premier product of the ever-so-authentic Kansas 'scene,' complete with album-cover photographs of farms and animals; their lukewarm mimicry of Nirvana hailed as a sort of midwestern 'grunge.' Never mind that the band's founders come from a privileged Chicago background and that they have long since alienated most of Lawrence's really good bands by publicly crowing that one of their number killed himself out of jealousy over Paw's major-label success. The sole remarkable feature of these otherwise stunningly mediocre bands is their singers' astonishing ability to warble the shallowest of platitudes with such earnestness, as though they have actually internalized their maudlin, Hallmark-worthy sentimentality. But we aren't supposed to be concerned with all this: the only thing that matters is that the latest product be praised to the skies; that new rebels triumph happily ever after over old. As ever, the most interesting aspect of the
industry's noisy clamoring and its self-proclaimed naughtiness is not the relative merits of the 'alternative' culture products themselves, but the shift of imagery they connote. Forget the music; what we are seeing is just another overhaul of the rebel ideology that has fueled business culture ever since the 1960s, a new entrant in the long, silly parade of "countercultural" entrepreneurship. Look back at the ads and the records and the artists of the preNirvana period: all the same militant protestations of nonconformity are there, just as they are in the ads and records and artists of the 70s and the 60s. Color Me Badd and Wham! once claimed to be as existentially individualist, as persecuted a group of "anxious rebels" as Rage Against the Machine now does. But by the years immediately preceding 1992, these figures' claims to rebel leadership had evaporated, and American business faced a serious imagery crisis. People had at long last tired of such obvious fakery, grown unconvinced and bored. No one except the most guileless teeny-boppers and the most insecure boomers fell for the defiant posturing of Duran Duran or Vanilla Ice or M.e. Hammer or Bon J ovi; especially when the ghettos began to burn, especially when the genuinely disturbing sounds of music that was produced without benefit of corporate auspices were finding ever wider audiences. By the beginning of the new decade, the patina of daring had begun to wear thin on the eighties' chosen crop of celebrity-rebels. Entire new lines of insolent shoes would have to be designed and marketed; entire new looks and emblems of protest would have to be found somewhere. Consumerism's traditional claim to be the spokesman for our inchoate disgust with consumerism was hemorrhaging credibility, and independent rock, with its Jacobin 'authenticity' obsession, had just the things capital required.
can wow my friends with my firm grasp of alternative arcana (Did you know that Smashing Pumpkins lead singer Billy Corgan had a fling with Courtney Love while Kurt Cobain was still sleeping on the Melvins' guitarist's front porch?) It even had a feature showing me how to alter my clothes so it looks like I've been a punk rocker for years. Like a good social matron, Details never debuts a new youth fashion movement without painstakingly delineating its rebel credibility. Despite the whirlwind of ever-changing trends, Details retains a consistent, unifying philosophical viewpoint: the archetypal new American male is a rebel consumer. A recent issue that featured $300 silk Versace shirts also included a revealing apotheosis of Lollapalooza performers Anthony Kiedis and Henry Rollins as the qUintessential men of the 90s. 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 bound by their own moral codes." The words used to describe this new man were
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exciting and fresh: Explosive, individualist, all for one, selfstyled, rebellious, existential, heroic, and-most appealing of all-nonconformist. Furthermore, Details was offering to show me how to buy the appropriate gear so that I could become as individualistic as they. Other articles further impressed upon me the magazine's guiding vision of 'alternative' as a set of consumer choices. When Details pushes expensive bathing costumes, it paired them not with suntanned frat boys, but with skinhead men dressed in tattoos, Doc Martens boots, and leather jackets emblazoned with the names of hardcore bands from the '80s. A $900 silk shirt was photographed with the instructions, 'Wear it loose with tight jeans and a rock 'n' roll attitude." Another time it let me know which expensive home video games are preferred by the members of Faith No More. It treated me to a photo spread featuring Perry Farrell, Billy Idol, and a member of the Stone Temple Pilots posing in the latest designer offerings. Setting out right away, I got myself a few baggy suits and
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Outwent the call for an 'alternative' from a thousand executive suites, and overnight everyone even remotely associated with independent rock in Seattle-and Minneapolis, Chapel Hill, Champaign, Lawrence, and finally Chicago-found themselves the recipients of unsolicited corporate attention. Only small adjustments were required to bring the whole universe of corporate-sponsored rebellion up to date, to give us Blind Melon instead of Frankie Goes to Hollywood; 10,000 Maniacs instead of Sigue Sigue Sputnik. And suddenly we were propelled into an entirely new hip paradigm, a new universe of cool, with all new stars and all new relationships between the consumer, his celebrities, and his hair. And now Pepsi is no longer content to cast itself as the beverage of Michael Jackson or Ray Charles or even Madonna: these figures' hip has been obsoleted suddenly, convincingly, and irreparably. Instead we watch a new and improved, an even more anti-establishment Pepsi Generation, cavorting about to what sounds like 'grunge' rock; engaged in what appears to be a sort of oceanside slam dance. Vaniry Fair, a magazine devoted strictly to the great American pastime of celebrating celebrity, hires the editors of a noted 'alternative' zine to overhaul its hip ness; Interview, the great, stupid voice of art as fashion, runs a lengthy feature on college radio, the site of the juiciest, most ingenuously 'alternative' lifestyle innovations in the land. Ad agencies and record labels compete with each other in a frenzied scramble to hire leading specimens of the 'alternative' scene they have ignored for fifteen years. Even commercial radio stations have seen the demographic writing on the wall and now every city has one that purports to offer an 'alternative' format, featuring musical hymns to the various rebellious poses available to consumers at
malls everywhere. In the same spirit the Gap has enlisted members of Sonic Youth and the cloying pop band Belly to demonstrate their products' continuing street-cred; Virginia Slims has updated its vision of rebel femininity with images of a woman in flannel sitting astride a motorcycle and having vaguely 60s designs painted on her arm. Ralph Lauren promotes its astoundingly expensive new line of pre-weathered blue jeans and flannel shirts with models done up in 'dreadlocks' and staring insolently at the camera. The United Colors of Benetton hone their subversive image by providing the costume for indie-rock figure "Lois." Another firm offers "Disorder Alternative Clothing" for the rebellious grungy "few are tired of the mainstream." Quite sensibly, the makers of Guess clothing prefer imagety of an idealized 'alternative' band, played by models, to the real thing, since actual rock 'n' rollers rarely sate the company's larger obsession with human beauty. So there they stand, in a pose that just screams 'authentic': four carefully unshaven guys in sunglasses, grimaces, and flannel shirts, each with a bandana or necklace suspended carefully from their neck, holding guitar cases and trying to look as hardened, menacing, and hip as possible, with a lone blonde babe clinging off to one side. In another ad the Guess Clothing fantasy band are picrured 'in concert,' a flannel-clad guitarist spotlit with eyes closed, stretching one hand O\.J,t to the heavens in an anthemic consumer epiphany. But the most revealing manifestation of the new dispensation is something you aren't supposed to see: an ad for MTV that ran in the business sections of a number of newspapers. "Buy this 24-yearold and get all his friends absolutely free," its headline reads. Just above these words is a picture of the 24-year-old referred to, a quintessential' alternative' boy decked out in the rebel garb that the executives
bought a copy of Rollins' poetry to display from the pocket. I got a particularly menacing tattoo on my neck, got the sort of car Kiedis drives, purchased some of Iggy Pop's brand of underwear, wore one of Michael Stipe's characteristic hats. While I was spending my money, I thought I'd better pick up a few packs of Excita condoms, some sex technique videos, and a few muscle-building machines (all helpfully advertised in the back of each issue). Unfortunately, all of this paraphernalia cost me $150,000, and I was still behind the times-the next month's issue had just hit the newsstand. But my greatest disappOintment came in the most recent issue. Tucked away in the back pages of the magazine was an elaborate apologia to all the readers who had been led astray by misfires of Details' cultural divining rod. "Hypes and Sleepers" was a year-end scorecard on how the prognosticators had fared over the previous twelve months. Reading through the list-glam revival, cyberpunk revolution, jazz rap, girl grunge, Tabitha Soren-brought back painful memories of occasions like the
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time I had shown up at a party wearing a tight purple jumpsuit and eyeliner to find myself in a room of Beavis and Butthead manqu9s. But the people for whom I really felt sorry were the folks whose warehouses were full of space boots, minidiscs, and virtual reality machines, trends that had received countless pages of editorial as Details valiantly tried to convince its readership of their viability. Perhaps the real secret to becoming a true Details man lies in the apology of sorts that accompanied the article: "Mass taste IS perverse and unpredictable, that's also why keeping tabs on it is so much fun." This statement of regret seems directed less to readers than to the magazine's true clients, the real Details man-the guy who manufactures these trends. In the end, Details' message is no different from any other lifestyle magazine's: 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. - Keith White
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who read this ad will instantly recognize from their market reports to be the costume of the 'twentysomethings': beads and bracelets, a vest and T-shirt, torn jeans, Doc Martens and a sideways haircut like the Jesus and Mary Chain wore in 1985. His pose: insolent, sprawled insouciantly in an armchair, watching TV of course. His occupation: consumer. "He watches MTV;" continues the ad, "Which means he knows a lot. More than just what CDs to buy and what movies to see. He knows what car to drive and what credit cards to use. And he's no loner. What he eats, his friends eat. What he wears, they wear. What he likes, they like." Thus with the 'alternative' face-lift, "rebellion" continues to perform its traditional function of justifYing the economy's ever-accelerating cycles of obsolescence with admirable efficiency. Since our willingness to load up our closets with purchases depends upon an eternal shifting of the products paraded before us, upon our being endlessly convinced that the new stuff is better than the old, we must be persuaded over and over again that the 'alternatives' are more valuable than the existing or the previous. Ever since the 1960s hip has been the native tongue of advertising, 'anti-establishment' the vocabulary by which we are taught to cast off our old possessions and buy whatever they have decided to offer this year. And over the years the rebel has naturally become the central image of this culture of consumption, symbolizing endless, directionless change, an eternal restlessness with 'the establishment'-or, more correctly, with the stuff 'the establishment' convinced him to buy last year. Not only did the invention of 'alternative' provide capital with a new and more convincing generation of rebels, but in one stroke it has obsoleted all the rebellions of the past ten years, rendered our acid-washed jeans, our Nikes, our DKNYs mean-
ingless. Are you vaguely pissed off at the world? Well, now you get to start proving it allover again, with flannel shirts, a different brand of jeans, and big clunky boots. And in a year or two there will be an 'alternative' to that as well, and you'll get to do it yet again. It's not only the lure of another big Nirvanalike lucre-glut that brings label execs out in droves to places like Seattle, or hopes of uncovering the new slang that prompts admen to buy journals like The Baffler. The culture industry is drawn to 'alternative' by the more general promise of finding the eternal new, of tapping the very source of the fuel that powers the great machine. As Interview affirms, "What still makes the genre so cool is not its cash potential or hype factor but the attendant drive and freedom to create and discover fresh, new music." Fresh new music, fresh new cars, fresh new haircuts, fresh new imagery. Thus do capital's new dancing flunkeys appear not in boater hat and ingratiating smile, but in cartoonish postures of sullen angst or teen frustration: dyed hair, pierced appendages, flannel shirt around the waist. Everyone in advertising remembers how frightening and enigmatic such displays were ten years ago when they encountered them in TV stories about punk rock, and now their time has come to be deployed as the latest signifiers of lifestyle savvy. Now it's executives themselves on their days off, appearing in their weekend roles as kings of the consumer hill, who flaunt such garb, donning motorcycle jackets and lounging around the coffeehouses they imagine to be frequented by the latest generation of angry young men. Of course every other persecuted-looking customer is also an advertising account exec or a junior vice president of something-or-other; of course nobody would ever show up to see a band like, say, the New Bomb
Business Ponks Bole It's Business Punks now. Those words went through my head as I saw a broad-shouldered Armani-suited lifer shove a lesser man aside, striding down the streets of his hardrocking birthright. The city, being white or at least buying it, always buying it, but shopping smart, going hard, going out for the pass until it passes out but JUST GOING. As soon as I saw those punk emblems on his lapels, I knew the time had come for the ultimate melding of anarchy and the invisible hand, individualism to the very hard core. So this season it's spiked hair and Barney's NY Kilgour, French & Stanbury corndogvan leather cap-toes, ripped up and fucked up with ARGYLE in any color you feel like. Sid Lives, and like Mike Milken, he did you his way. - Seth Sanders
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Turks or Prisonshake in a costume like this. As ever, Interview magazine, the proudest exponent of the commercialization of dissent, explains the thinking of the corporate mandarin who has now decided to dude himself up in a Sid Vicious leather jacket and noticeable tattoo. Punk, as the magazine triumphantly announces in a recent issue, has been successfully revived as a look only, happily stripped of any problematic ideological baggage: Maybe '90s punk is just a great high style. Some will slash their own clothes, and others will clamor after the fashions of rule-slashing designers. [are there ever any designers who don't claim to "slash rules?") If your mother doesn't like it, who cares? If your kid is embarrassed, stand proud. If your bosses fire you for it, screw 'em. And if people stare at you in the street, isn't that the point?
So on we plod through the mallways of our lives, lured into an endless progression of shops by an ever-changing chorus of manic shaman-rebels, promising existential freedom-sex! ecstasy! liberation!-from the endless trudge. All we ever get, of course, are some more or less baggy trousers or a hat that we can wear sideways. Nothing works, we are still entwined in vast coils of tawdriness and idiocy, and we resolve not to be tricked again. But lo! Down the way is a new rebel-leader, doing handstands this time, screaming about his untrammelled impertinence in an accent that we know could never be co-opted, and beckoning us into a shoe store. Marx's quip that the capitalist will sell the rope with which he is hanged begins to seem ironically incomplete. In fact, with its endless ranks of beautifully coiffed, fist-waving rebel boys to act as barker, business is amassing great sums by charging admission to the ritual simulation of its own lynching.
Interlude: Come Around to My Way of Thinking Perhaps the only good thing about the commodification of 'alternative' is that it will render obsolete, suddenly, cleanly, and inexorably, that whole flatulent corpus of 'cultural studies' that seeks to appreciate Madonna as some sort of political subversive. Even though the first few anthologies of writings on the subject only appeared in 1993, the rise of a far more threatening generation of rock stars has ensured that this singularly annoying pedagogy will never become a full-fledged 'discipline,' with its own lengthy quarterly issued by some university press, with annual conferences where the 'subaltern articulations' of Truth or Dare are endlessly dissected and debated. Looking back from the sudden vantage point that only this kind of imageContinued on page 119
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