Article Review

       Karen Bettez Halnon’s “Inside Shock Music Carnival: Spectacle as Contest Terrain” was an interesting read.  Throughout the course of the article, Halnon argues that shock music carnival bands exhibit a dis-alienating effect on their fans.  That is, hardcore metal and punk bands don’t alienate youth, as scholars like Jeffrey Arnett (and most of the general public) claim.  Rather, they create a place where the “otherness” of youth is protected and celebrated.  Through the use of Mikhail Bakhtin’s “grotesque” imagery, Halnon explores how the concerts and songs of carnivalesque bands like Insane Clown Posse, Marilyn Manson, or GWAR serve as sites of resistance. Ultimately, these bands reject cultural forms of dominance, celebrate the authentic, and allow youth to feel as if they’re a part of something.

       Halnon does a thorough job of providing an overview of the carnival and the grotesque. She starts with good ol’ Debord’s description of the “the society of the Spectacle,” claiming that we live in a world of nothingness.  The Spectacle has limited the ability of consumers to think critically, and even dissatisfaction and dissent are commodities to be sold.  (744) Halnon moves to an understanding of Bakhtin’s “carnival-grotesque”(747), which in its simplest form is understood as an “exaggeration of the improper.”  Through disgusting or obscene acts, Bakhtin argued, the grotesque becomes a confusing place where traditional understandings about the world are challenged.

       Halnon then provides many, many examples of rhetorical acts deemed “grotesque,” acts which originate from band members and from fans.  She seems to take special delight in describing the (staged) decapitations of GWAR (771), the self-mutilation of Marilyn Manson (762), the violence of mosh pits (775), or the never-ending spray of spit, sweat, blood, and urine concert participants are subjected to (762-765).  In sum, these transgressions of polite protocol celebrate “otherness” and serve as challenges to traditional American social structures.

                They also represent a sort of grotesque realism.  Everybody emits bodily fluids, everybody has violent fantasies.  By emphasizing those primitive acts everyone has in common, shock carnival bands allow their fans a change to escape social hierarchies. They suggests a sort of authenticity not found and daily life, and offer spectators a place in their world.  For a group of youth often characterized as black sheep or outsiders, this effect can be particularly therapeutic.

Looking at how carnival bands reject the signs of mainstream culture does help explain the appeal of shock-value bands. When situated within the context of counter cultures, the growing numbers of fans seems to make sense.  Halnon has a firm grasp of a socio-cultural lens which gives value to a movement many others have dismissed.

However, the article can read like a work in progress, exhibiting issues of scope. Several times Halnon indirectly mentions her intention to write a book, and her two primary and interconnected arguments here – that bands have dis-alienating effects, and carnival bands serve as sites of cultural resistance – are large enough to each serve as an individual chapter.  (Indeed, they are marked off as separate headings.)  Toward the end of her argument, Holnan reaches outside the body of her evidence to discuss how the movie “Fight Club” contributes to her claims about the therapeutic effects of rage (776).  Again, this inclusion is better suited as a separate book chapter, rather than firm support for her current debate.

Additionally, though she makes all-encompassing statements about sites of cultural resistance, it’s worth noting that metal fans are characteristically white, and they’re usually male.  Halnon inserts an “intermission” into her text to briefly discuss the role of women in shock music carnival (772), but this serves more as a stylistic narrative than any attempt to consider the homogeneity of shock carnival music fans.  The perspective changes as Halnon describes a first-hand experience observing a woman baring her chest to surrounding fans, and it appears Holnan is more interested in a personal aside than her argument at hand.  It would have been more beneficial to flesh out how “commodification of dissent” (751) contributes to Ritzer’s notion of an “island of consumption”(745).   Or how the grotesque acts in a space between conventional and chaotic worlds (she uses the phrase “liminal” a total of fourteen times).  Halnon frames her article as a dialogue between the domination of the Spectacle and the resistant nature of the Spectacle, a sort of “contested terrain.”  She provides much support for the later but only glosses over the former.

Cyberculture = Counterculture

The internet has become the primary domain for culture jamming.  Master Chief's video provides a general survey of how people have used cheap software and internet traffic to provide their own sophisticated media critiques:



According to Fred Turner, associate professor in the Communication Department at Stanford University, technology is more than a domain where cultural resistance can occur.  Cyberculture is a form of counterculture (Rothstein, 2006).  And no, I don't mean cyberculture is a counterculture in the sense that computer geeks lack basic social skills and tend to reject mainstream hygiene habits.  I mean that cyberculture represents a movement against preexisting social orders.

When looking at the role of technology, compared to the aims of countercultural groups, Turner's argument makes more sense.  Computer and internet users are freed from hierarchial structures of traditional forms of media.  They rely on horizontal networks, rather than top-down structures, to transmit information.   As a result, the individual user becomes empowered by how skillfully he can navigate that network. A lone technician can topple the biggest and most powerful companies; The New York Times, the LA public transit system, CitiBank and NASA have all been hacked into. 

Recognizing the power technology offers through it's ability to "foster[. . .] dissent and question[ . . ] authority" (Roszak, qtd. in Rothstein), a new degree of social activism has emerged: hactivism.  Cited as a form of "electronic civil disobedience," hactivists take advantage of their technical skill to make soial commentary.  The Yes Men create parody websites to highlight the hypocrisies of the big businesses, and offer software that allows others to create their own parody "mirror-sites." The Trojan Cow Project has widely posted illegal code for DVD gaming technology.  Hactivist groups use the unique nature of interet technology, namely, that

Of course, you need not know a great deal about computer programming to use media technology to make a statement.  Even a simple blog post can get your message across:

What's So Evil About Brands?

Before delving into more anti-consumer, anti-corporation rhetoric, I think I may have skipped over an important premise of the counterculture: why, exactly, consumerism is bad. While my previous posts touched on how countercultures criticize the passive acceptance of ubiquitous corporate messages, another important argument of anticonsumerism is that big businesses aren't really selling anything.

It was in the eighties that companies starting shifting focus from producing goods to producing images, according to Naomi Klein, author of No Logo.   It was expensive to take care of factories and people to work inside of the factories, and a lot cheaper to market an image.  Just spend lots of money on an ad team to associate your "products" with a certain lifestyle, wrangle up a licensing agreement to slap your brand on some other company's products, and you're set.  Tommy Hilfiger, for example, is structured entirely through licensing agreements, and manufactures absolutely nothing at all.

Credit: http://www.goodlogo.com/

Granted, some companies do, in fact, produce their own goods.  It's hard to deny that the barista at Starbucks isn't handing you a real, physical latte to drink.  But that's not to say branding isn't the lifeblood of such companies, either.  Places like Starbucks have "integrated the idea of branding into the very fabric of their companies" (Klein).  The coffee powerhouse has strict guidelines dictating company lexicon, how leisurely employees should be working, and won't allow franchising lest some amateur mar the company image. 

It's all about maintaining brand image, and actual product quality is neglected as a result.  In fact, it doesn't really matter what the product is.  It can be clothes, political policy, or a government program.  A successful marketer can brand anything (see "How to Brand Sand" as an example).  The whole point, anticonsumerists acknowledge, is that unaware consumers aren't buying things, they're buying deliberately produced images.  They're buying carefully constructed associations and idealized ways of life.  Our public lives are encroached upon by ever-present business advertisements, and our public lives start to become defined through the particular brands we buy.



Credit: Adbusters



Now, you'll run into those consumers who swear, up and down, that they disregard brands, and happen to popular items (i.e. trendy and expensive items) because they truly are better. One teen, in response to Frontline's Merchants of Cool, explained

I wear Nike shoes. Yes, it is a big huge name brand and there's tons of advertising on it. And I've gone out and I've worn Reeboks or whatever. And honestly, the one pair of Reeboks I ever had fell apart in a month. So to me, I found something that I like, that's comfortable, and that stays in one piece, and so that's why I buy Nike" (What Teens Think).

 

Nevermind that Reebok is considered the alternative to the "huge name brand."  Or that "staying in one piece" appears to be the primary justification for buying Nike shoes.  Obvious flaws aside, this teen is developing a brand loyalty Nike is counting on.  He is not just buying a shoe, but he is buying into the Nike way of life, which is considerable more expensive.

Appropriation: Large Scale Antics of Ron English and Banksy

As highlighted in the previous post, cultural sabotage via parody is not always the most effective strategy.  To start, consumers are smart, and they're turned off when directly bombarded with didactic messages. (Inductive marketing structure, anyone?)  So, to be effective, messages should leave a little wiggle room for interpretation.  Be clever, but try to be a bit vague, too.

(Photo credit: KTRX: Houston)

Secondly, it helps if the message is big.  Like, really big.  Ron English, the billboard liberator, makes use of preexisting public spaces to subvert corporate advertising.  He "vandalizes" billboards with surrealist art and subvertisements.  He's posted Jesus drinking Budweiser, and Hitler as an exemplar of "Thinking Differently" (mocking a recent Apple marketing tag). Like the Adbusters magazine, English makes use of culture jamming to get people to critically evaluate the messages they consume.  With advertsing a ubiquitous force surrounding us, we're not used to studying the billboards or posters we regularly pass.  By contradicting usual messages, English interrupts, or "jams" our usual processing mechanisms. "We're not used to seeing ads that aren't trying to sell anything," English explains in POPaganda.

If you don't know English (pun unintended), you may be more familiar with Banksy.  The Bristol native (yes, he actually is English) is similarly known for his large-scale, guerilla artwork.  He's scrawled graffiti art over the West Bank wall in Israel, marked up the penguin enclosure at the London Zoo, and somehow snuck an inflatable doll, dressed as a Guantanomo prisoner, into Disneyland's Big Thunder Mountain ride.  Like English, Banksy uses large, vivid, and decidedly illegal art pieces to get people to stop and do a double-take.

(Graffiti art, in which a man removes graffiti.  Photo credit: Ethur, A Polite Rebellion Against Mass Thought)

Both English and Banksy make use of cultural appropriation, or the borrowing of familiar images and symbols .  The point is to place popular, easily recognizable icons in different settings to create new meaning. Specifically, these artists reclaim public spaces from media groups and large corporations.  They enable people to, using a shared knowledge of popular characters or images, reevaluate how most people interact with media. And in this way, guerrilla artists set the stage for cultural resistance.

Does Adbusters really get anyone to think?

 Though I'm new to Adbusters, the Vancouver-based, anti-consumerist magazine, I'm familiar with its strategies. Its spoof ads, such as Chemo Joe or the Calvin Klein Obsession series, have become almost common place among media and pop culture circles. Adbuster images take the same slick fonts and graphics corporate advertisers use and manipulate the images to create new, contradictory meanings.

The whole point, argues Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters, is to "stop the flow of spectacle long enough to adjust your set" ("Culture Jamming," 1999, p. 418). That is, by altering familiar images, Adbusters interrupts the expected, usual way we receive mediated messages and allows consumers the opportunity to reevaluate what they're seeing. This tactic, known as "culture jamming" is founded on the work of French Situationalists, those beatnik revolutionaries who decried the over-consumption of public living and revived Dadaist tactics in the 1950s and 60s. The idea of culture jamming is that, like a saboteur might throw a wrench in the cogs of a mill to stop its output, parodying familiar media texts sabotages the consumerist rhetoric. Indeed, describing themselves as neo-situationlists, adbusters details in its Culture Jamming Manifesto its attempts to bring "image factories" of pop-culture marketeers to a "sudden, shuddering halt" (evolutionzone.com).

More specifically, Adbusters employs the Situationalist strategy of détournement in its parodies. Détournement, as defined by Internationale Situationniste, is a way to "detour," or divert, popular images and messages. Détournement sabotages those images offered up by the Spectacle and challenges publics to think for themselves.

Of course, détournement is only an meaningful strategy when used appropriately. Situationalists Guy Debord and Gil Wolman explain that "[d]étournement by simple reversal is always the most direct and least effective" (See: A User's Guide to Détournement, 1956, available online through Situationalist International Anthology at bopsecrets.org). That is, the culture jammer should leave the audience to fill in some of the blanks. Rather than telling a public "The messages you're receiving are wrong," proper détournement should intentionally be surprising, confusing, or vague to encourage active reflection.

Adbusters, however, seems to offer only negative critique. The "Adbuster spoofs oversimplify the dynamic relationship we have with media images" (40), explains Christine Harold in Ourspace. Rather than providing its audience with a chance to think critically and rationally about the media images it consumes, Adbusters seems to smugly point out the mistakes big media producers make. It "self-righteous outsider stance" (Harold, p. 53) even goes so far as to alientate its audience as it offers what appears to be little more than a glorified public service announcement. Today's media consumer, having grown up with a deluge of advertisements from a variety of sources, can see the one-sidedness of Adbuster spoofs. The "subvertisements" don't offer a chance for critical evaluation. They don't suggest revolution, and they don't really say anything.

Sure, it's unusual to see Joe Camel stricken with cancer and lying in the ICU. But is there anyone who didn't already know smoking is harmful to your health?