How interesting, really, are other people’s mixtapes? Am I just too self-centered? They seem specifically personal, often the product of a particular transaction between people at a particular moment in their relationship. So what is the appeal of Cassette from my ex, a site that recreates other people’s romantically swapped mixtapes for our vicarious consumption? (PSFK linked to the site recently.) At least with muxtape, the mixes are ostensibly prepared for general consumption. But what is the point of these music mixes that are more about a particular moment in someone else’s life and how music signified it to them? What good is that to us, someone else’s nostalgia? My own nostalgia is bad enough. I spent an hour one recent evening listening to an item from my high-school tape collection, King’s Steps in Time album. Life is too short to be revisiting that excrescence. (What is especially hilarious about that Rolling Stone review of King that I linked to is the fact that it is as about as uniformly negative as a review could be, but the album still warranted three and half stars. What do you have to do to get fewer than three? Record yourself murdering babies?)

Mixtapes, as I have understood and experienced them, are mainly attempts to impose the peculiarity of one’s own tastes on others and force them to recognize how special that taste is. In short, mixtapes are an ego trip; maybe only people with no ego about their musical taste can appreciate them. (I’m not one of those people, but I’m trying to be. I really am.) The benevolent motive of sharing cool finds is balanced against the less benevolent motive of competitive discovery—of scoring points by having a more eclectic taste, having a wider listening scope. When you have a lot of your identity invested in musical taste, distributing mixtapes is a way of manifesting that identity—a more significant gesture than actually talking to people, which doesn’t ordinarily afford as many opportunities to demonstrate musical taste. When you force someone to listen to your tape, it’s like you are forcing them to listen to your monologue of self. That this is sometimes cast as a romantic gesture tells you something about love among teenagers. To put this point in mixtape terms—cue Jim Croce’s “It’s Hard to Say I Love You in a Song” and follow it by Dobie Grey’s “Drift Away” (the song that features the immortal chorus: “Give me the beat boys that frees my soul, I wanna get lost in your rock and roll,” which prompted a friend of mine to propose that I get so lost in his rock and roll that I would need a map or possibly a trail of breadcrumbs to find my way out.)

I suppose apologists could say that mixtapes serve as a new multimedia form of storytelling that incorporates and transforms other pop-culture works to make them something other that merely popular and generic—it transforms empty pop songs into the soundtrack to a quirky short story.  These intimate mixes, however, make us into voyeurs, and maybe that is the point—they are just another iteration of reality TV, of our impulse to sell out our memories for notoriety.

—Rob Horning

Tom Slee, the author of No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart (highly recommended), complains about The Long Tail in this post, noting all the effort wasted in debunking an idea that was, in his opinion, never much more than a hypothesis.

Face it. Chris Anderson now has people at Harvard Business School of all places spending their valuable time following up his idle speculations. He comes up with a half-baked idea, has basically no data to support it, and yet here are academics - smart people, with tenure, real jobs and things to do - actually spending their time following up these idle daydreams; acting as his research assistants. What a waste.

Slee links to this Harvard Business Review essay by Anita Elberse that examines Anderson’s notions and finds that serving the long tail won’t make much money for any businesses, and that the economics of superstars still reigns supreme. No one is going to start a winning business selling obscure goods to the handful of people who are interested in them. More likely, I would think, those interested people will find a way get the obscure goods free from one another, if they are digitally distributable—especially since difficulties in securing rights clearances can inhibit many of these goods’ distribution for sale.

But despite the data, it’s hard for me to give up on the long-tail idea. It has a certain romantic appeal, as Elberse notes:

How much enjoyment is derived from obscure versus blockbuster products? We can all easily imagine the extreme delight that comes from discovering a rare gem, perfectly tailored to our interests and ours to bestow on likeminded friends. This is perhaps the most romanticized aspect of long-tail thinking. Many of us have experienced just such moments; they are what give Chris Anderson’s claims such resonance. The problem is that for every industrial designer who blissfully stumbles across the films of Charles and Ray Eames, untold numbers of families are subjecting themselves to the likes of Sherlock: Undercover Dog. Ratings posted by Quickflix customers show that obscure titles, on average, are appreciated less than popular titles.

It may be that we’re allured by the notion that deeply individual tastes will be nurtured by the entertainment economy of the future, that the dream of having perfectly idiosyncratic taste will be fulfilled for everyone. And there will be a perfect marketing plan individually tailored for us all that will be so suited to us that it won’t even seem like advertising. It will just seem like our wants being anticipated, the desired goods brought to us right on time. Such is the fantasy of individualism for its own sake, in the field of consumerism. With our identity riding on what we consume, we come to believe that there’s something valuable about having unique tastes, but we don’t actually pursue such a course in practice. When it comes to pop culture, for better or worse, its popularity alone is part of what makes it enjoyable, consumable. When the obscure good is consumed, it is usually an equally shallow effort to enjoy obscurity for its own sake, to use it as a badge, rather than because there is something compelling about the obscure thing itself. (This explains probably 75 percent of my record collection. That Terry Knight and the Pack record is not something I enjoy for the music.) Most of the time, what we want to consume in pop culture is the potentiality of participation in a public sphere that consists to a large degree in recognizing the same set of entertainment touchstones.

The niche products that retailers can stock (but rarely sell) may have nothing but an alibi function—they make us feel bnetter about consuming mainstream junk because we also know that we could buy something weird and idiosyncratic. As Elberse notes, “the tail is likely to be extremely flat and populated by titles that are mostly a diversion for consumers whose appetite for true blockbusters continues to grow.” Consuming niche goods every once and a while serves as a palate cleanser for the popular stuff we have truly integrated into our social lives. A Godard of Fassbinder film now and then licenses a lot of Indiana Jones and Lost episodes.

—Rob Horning

I’ve been on a kick where I’m reading works by outdated Frankfurt School thinkers—first, Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse, then Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm. (Maybe I’ll move on The Authoritarian Personality next.) Marcuse argues that economic productivity has moved us beyond scarcity as a motive, and therefore civilization should be capable of transcending Freud’s reality principle, which asserts (as Marcuse interprets it) that we need to repress libidinal urges and channel them into alienated labor, into work conceived as a necessary evil. This transcendence, Marcuse argues, would be a matter of ceasing to repressive erotic impulses, a position that is easy to lampoon as a call to free love and orgies and pansexual abandon. (Because he is working in the hypersexualized Freudian context, he practically invites this interpretation.) But if one puts aside the polymorphous perversity, one can see a more useful ideal that Marcuse is sketching out, basically a utopian version of the grail of meaningful work for all: “The free development of transformed libido within transformed institutions, while eroticizing previously tabooed zones, time, and relations, would minimize the manifestations of mere sexuality by integrating them into a far larger order, including the order of work.” If I’m understanding this correctly (the 1960s context of this book tempts me to use the word grok), he’s saying that non-repressed society—a culture that moved beyond capitalism’s repressive reason and no longer mandated the “performance principle”—would not be fixated on genital sex, but would instead suffuse social relations with the positive vibes of love. “The organism in its entirety becomes the substratum of sexuality, while at the same time the instinct’s objective is no longer absorbed by a specialized function—namely, that of bringing ‘one’s own genitals into contact with those of someone of the opposite sex.’ “ That fixation, he suggests, is the product of the repressive culture; in the utopian culture the joy limited to sexual intimacy would be accessible in basically any social activity (and bourgeois fictions like the nuclear family and “falling in love” would fall away). Then we would finally be free, without institutions working to make us repress our libidinous instincts and sacrifice the primal pleasures of sensuousness and free play.

Now, it would be easier to buy into this if it conjured up in me the vision of idealized Fourierist phlanastèries instead of the Manson family. But I get stuck on the dirty-hippie attempt to realize these ideals, shed their hang-ups and unleash free love, an effort doomed by the way it was embedded in a hostile culture and easily coopted and enticed by that culture. The lesson to seems to have been that one can’t will oneself into the post-repressed state, the institutions that shape us—the society in which who we are has meaning—need to be changed before we can change. Efforts to set up alternative, independent societies are useful to the degree that their ideas are absorbed and shift the nature of the hegemonic culture, but in and of themselves, they are doomed to eventual failure.

Why? As Marcuse points out,

Civilization has to defend itself against the specter of a world which could be free. If society cannot use its growing productivity for reducing repression (because such usage would upset the status quo), productivity must be turned against the individuals; it becomes itself an instrument of universal control. Totalitarianism spreads over late industrial civilization wherever the interests of domination prevail upon productivity, arresting and diverting its potentialities.

The methods for doing this? Marcuse lays them out in a passage that seems to draw heavily from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment:  The “coordination of the private and public existence of spontaneous and required reactions. The promotion of thoughtless leisure activities, the triumph of anti-intellectual ideologies, exemplify the trend.... The individuals who relax in this uniformly controlled reality recall not the dream but the day, not the fairy tale but its denunciation. In their erotic relations, they ‘keep their appointments’—with charm, with romance, with their favorite commercials.” Technology is not helping. In a passage that would please Nicholas Carr, he writes, “With the control of information, with the absorption of individual into mass communication, knowledge is administered and confined. The individual does not really know what is going on; the overpowering machine of education and entertainment unites him with all the others in a state of anesthesia from which all detrimental ideas tend to be excluded.” Think of the internet in this light, and there might be reason to fear Google, which is nothing if not an administrator of knowledge, perhaps the most efficient the world has ever seen.

Marcuse says that the non-repressive utopia will be based on “purposiveness without purpose” and “lawfulness without law”—an ethos of aestheticism. Fromm, too, dreams of human liberation into “an active and spontaneous realization of the individual self.” But in Escape From Freedom he argues that we often see individuality as a burden, as a state of insecurity and purposelessness that is not pleasurable but intolerable.

Capitalism not only freed man from traditional bonds, but it also contributed tremendously to the increasing of positive freedom, to the growth of an active, critical, responsible self. However, while this was one effect capitalism had on the process of growing freedom, at the same time it made the individual more alone and isolated and imbued him with a feeling of insignificance and powerlessness.

Capitalism destroys the traditional ways our identity would be anchored, in the class or religion to which we were born, in the duties assigned to us, in our our overall lack of social or geographical mobility. The powerlessness and unrootedness is exacerbated by the rationalization of life in a capitalist society, with all relations between people reified, instrumentalized and marked with alienation and mutual manipulation. People have no value in and of themselves, but only in what they can contribute and sell. So in isolation, they learn that they are worthless, with no innate qualities.

Fromm figured this left them vulnerable to totalitarian movements like Nazism, that promised to supply individuals a purpose in supplication to an authority figure who alleviates one’s feelings of inferiority and insignificance but taking away the burden of individuality. It’s obvious he has Hitler and Mussolini in mind, but Fromm also points to anonymous authority, which reigns while leaving its subjects seemingly free.

It is disguised as common sense, science, psychic health, normality, public opinion. It does not demand anything except the self-evident. It seems to use no pressure but only mild persuasion.... In anonymous authority, both command and commander have become invisible. It is like being fired at by an invisible enemy. There is nobody and nothing to fight back against.

This analysis presages Althusser’s definition of ideology, in which such dispersed, institutional authority is actually constituitive of the individual rather than a response to developing individualism. In Decoding Advertisements Judith Williamson looks at how that authority manifests specifically in advertisements, which present themselves as common sense and help us call into a being a sharpened sense of identity that we then become reliant on—as though it were the source of our integrity. Ads seem always to be reminding us of what we already know; that is the velvet way they exercise their insidious authority.

Fromm characterizes the seductiveness of ads, as anonymous authority, in a similar way.

It does not appeal to reason but to emotion.... by attracting the customer and at the same time weakening his critical abilities by the sex appeal of a pretty girl; by terrorizing him with the threat of b.o. or halitosis, or yet again by stimulating daydreams about a sudden change in one’s whole course of life brought about by buying a certain shirt or soap. All these methods are essentially irrational; they have nothing to do with the qualities of the merchandise, and they smother and kill the critical capacities of the customer like an opiate or outright hypnosis. They give him a certain satisfaction by their daydreaming qualities just as movies do, but at the same time they increase his feeling of smallness and powerlessness.

That passage touches on a few of my favorite themes—(a) ads and entertainment are indistinguishable, (b) ads turn our insecurity into a feeling of certainty and a possibility for productive action—a purchase, (c) ads work by stimulating fantasies not about the product but about ourselves; they encourage us to consume our sense of ourselves vicariously; to enjoy ourselves through the product the way we would enjoy the details of the lives of any other celebrity—it puts us on their level, particularly when ads feature celebrity endorsements, and most significant, I think, (d) the point of ads collectively is to reduce our objections to non-logic and experience it as liberation.

Of course, Marcuse sees the undermining of reason—of constricting, repressing rationality—as liberation. But ad discourse evokes a fantasia that merely teases us with the kind of non-repression Marcuse sees as being just around the corner in his dialectic of civilization. We “keep our appiontments” with commercials, just like Marcuse noted, but what we experience there is enough of the utopian promise to defuse the possibility of our ever fighting to bring that utopia into being. Ads de-repress us as they exert their authority; they solve our problems with individuality while seeming to reinforce our freedom (our freedom from hang-ups). It seems that capitalism’s systems for entertaining/controlling us can absorb even the rationality-smashing protocol and make it too serve the status quo. 

—Rob Horning

Where I work, someone has thoughtfully put a $6 bottle of Kiss My Face Organic Grapefruit and Bergamot self-foaming hand soap beside the bathroom sinks, and every time I use it, I think, “Wow, this is far classier than using the industrial fluid installed in the basin-mounted pumps.” (I also think, “Weird. My hands now smell like Froot Loops.") Today, because I had just been reading Megan McArdle’s post about morality as a luxury good, I also thought that it’s probably true that more people will be motivated to enivronmentally friendly behavior by its aspirational aspects, by the luxury it connotes, than by any sense of moral rectitude. In consumer society, morality is more of a product than a line of reasoning, and an identity signified through props as opposed to an ethos sustained through a series of actions.

McArdle is mainly interested in the positive freedom our general prosperity allows for: “Morality lies in doing the best you can with what you have. Given that I do have the luxury of finding delicious vegan food and non-leather shoes, I believe I have an obligation to do so. If that should change, I will go back to eating and wearing animal products without moral regret--though with a fair amount of digestive distress.” I think the framework that orients our notions of what prosperity means (more stuff) means that the calculus that goes into our moral decisionmaking may have been recalibrated for most of us, away from a focus on pursuing voluntary obligations and toward the idea of accumulating moral stances as so many prized possessions, reified into various tokens that symbolize our green concerns.

Hence, the Method soap strategy, which Rob Walker wrote about a few years ago. he talked to Eric Ryan, one of Method’s founders.

‘’Design is a fast way to make these products more high interest,’’ Ryan says, to the target audience of ‘’progressive domestics.’’ Environmental safety was ‘’a goal,’’ one that he still sounds almost surprised to have achieved. But form is what really sells some $10 million of the stuff annually. Much of the feedback from enthusiastic customers boils down to: ‘’I kind of thought it wouldn’t work, but at least I’ll have this cool container left over. Then I got it home and used it, and I’m shocked at how well it actually works.’’

For most consumers, the sleek design and the product’s environmental perks are of the same ilk—distinctive qualities that mark the consumer who uses such a product as being of a better class. Environmentalism is not a ethos but a design quirk. This may be the only way to corral individuals into acting on a problem that is far too large for any one person’s actions to affect—to ignore outcomes and sell it on style. 

—Rob Horning

My expectations may have been all wrong for the Takashi Murakami show, (originally I mistakenly wrote Haruki) which is currently at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Murakami is perhaps most notorious for designing bags for Louis Vuitton and making a retail location for their sale an installation in his show, so I expected some investigation of consumer culture and branding as contemporary forms of art—a problematization (to use a good Foucauldian word) of the preeminence of branding in our culture. But instead it was “superflat” to use Murikami’s own term for his style—lifeless and at every turn unprovocative, blankly cheerful when embracing motifs derived from toys, unconvincing when aspiring to creepiness, with the lone exception of a video piece about a E.T. like robot-boy character who wants to be able to love like a real-life junior high school boy, presented as a series of fake commercials for a nonexistent TV series. That piece succeeded in messing with where we placed our empathy as viewers and made us reconsider what nostalgic fantasies of adolescence and sci-fi-themed escapes are about. Teen alienation is literalized, refigured in a way that makes that pain palpable and truly ridiculous at once—a far cry from the way teen angst is an empty, stylized trope in our culture at large, and definitely in a different league of artistic inquiry than the Super Mario World juvenilia, the McDonald’s Playland-like installations, the self-satisfied gestures toward commerciality in the rest of Murakami’s show.

Presumably we are supposed to be at a point where we are not expected to be outraged at the commercialization of art, and are instead being asked to appreciate the artistry in the creation of a brand campaign. But if that is so, the joke is still on us for going to see an inferior execution at a museum when much better campaigns are taking place all around us. We’d be better served going to the long awaited grand opening of the Ikea store in Brooklyn. That is branding, democratization of design, identity crafting through purchases meant to shape the field of everyday life on perhaps the largest scale in the world. At the Murakami show, I felt like the artist was trying to cajole me into granting him leeway for the shallowness of his creations, as though they weren’t exactly his fault and merely expressed the democratic spirit inherent in niche marketing: Everybody gets their products—Louis Vuitton bags for the rich, stuffed animals and sticker sets for the less rich. But that’s not an excuse for creating works with no frisson, with nothing that seems ingenious or provocative. Instead, there were hollow gestures—a statue of anime characters with big breasts squirting a milk lasso; a mushroom cloud landscape; a room wallpapered with cutesy eyeballs. Was it a comment on how surveillance infiltrates our lives under the guise of welcomed entertainment? How we mistake Big Brother for something cute and cuddly? It just didn’t seem like there was enough evidence to attribute such ideas to Murakami; I felt like I was going to my own bag of argumentative tropes to try to engage with what I was seeing, that I was reading it all against the grain rather than reveling in what was supposed to be, I think, a dazzling tour de force of sensual overload, of fun, flashy surfaces.

In the end I wasn’t convinced that pop art is anything other than a dual-edged mockery of actual pop culture and the kind of art consumers who’d rather engage with his work than other sorts of fine art that requires more cultural capital—more knowledge of artistic tradition, etc. The wall cards suggested that Murakami was modifying various Japanese aesthetic traditions, and maybe you need to be Japanese to appreciate the subtlety of his approach. But that ended up making me think Americans looking for an analogous experience should skip Murakami and instead go to DisneyWorld. Murakami seems to want to bring the spirit of childlike wonder and unreflective excitement typical of theme-park goers to the museum, but instead he made me feel like I now had to take the solemn spirit of museumgoing to the amusement parks. That’s the problem with trying to collapse that particular dichotomy—the dominant term (in this case high culture) wins out and corrupts the populist and potentially subversive pleasures to be found in the subordinate sphere. The inversion of values doesn’t stick; pop culture isn’t afforded new respect while remaining truly popular—the popular audience just ends up being alienated from what once seemed like simple pleasures made for all of us by the new audience ironizing and problematizing it all by force of habit.

—Rob Horning

This was a predictable development: People (music snobs, mainly, I’m guessing) are starting to buy vinyl albums again, despite the ubiquity of low- to no-cost MP3s. Some of these folks may have the kind of hi-fi setups necessary to take advantage of the higher audio fidelity of vinyl, but I think a fixation on sound quality is secondary. The appeal is likely in the thrill of physical ownership, of having a cultural object that gets personalized, acquires a patina, through one’s personal pattern of usage. It becomes something that can’t be duplicated, and digitization has made all such unduplicatables rarer and therefore more valuable to us.

There is also a totemistic appeal to albums. I can remember sitting in people’s dorm rooms listening to records, staring at the covers, held in thrall by the object itself. And the ritual of picking a record to play from a shelf of by flipping through records in a box simply conjures an entirely different feeling than selecting it from what’s essentially a spreadsheet. The article notes “Whether it’s inspecting a needle for dust or flipping the record over at the end of a side, LPs demand attention. And for a small but growing group, those demands aren’t a nuisance.” These may be the sort of voluntary limits we impose on our cultural consumption to make it more managable, to keep the avalanche of digital culture from burying us.

(Via PSFK)

—Rob Horning