Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing-The Marketing of Culture - Rilegato

Seabrook, John

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0375405046 ISBN 13: 9780375405044

Casa editrice: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2000

Riassunto

Prepare to enter the outrageous new world of Nobrow, where the old cultural distinctions -- highbrow (Wagner's Ring), middlebrow (Masterpiece Theater), and lowbrow (the latest MTV video) -- cease to exist. John Seabrook raises the curtain on an onrushing cultural phenomenon: the melding of culture with the marketing of culture and the culture of marketing.

He shows us how Nobrow increasingly defines the great American audience that now follows the Three Tenors on tour, cheers rock groups like Radish (whose fifteen-year-old lead singer wins a multi-million-dollar recording contract and fifteen minutes of celebrity), obsesses on the prequel to Star Wars, and is as hip to promotion as to performance. He reveals how the Buzz came to Tina Brown's New Yorker; how art and business mingle in the work of moguls like George Lucas and David Geffen; how it's all stirred together in one super-soup of art, money, spin, and hype; and how even aesthetic worth is measured by units shipped in the frenetic culture he calls (as we all will from now on) Nobrow.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

John Seabrook's articles appear regularly in The New Yorker. He has also written for Vanity Fair, Harper's, and The Nation and is the author of Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace. He lives in New York City.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Right inside the door of the Virgin Megastore was a vast section of popular music labeled Rock/Soul, which ran the gamut from the Eagles to Al Green to Pere Ubu, with vast stretches of irony, allusiveness, camp, and boring stuff in between. This giant culture deposit was thick with association. Here were bands that were the pop cultural equivalent of the pencil marks parents put inside the closet door to show how much Junior has grown since last year. Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Neil Young, and the early '70s folk rockers, many of them on the Asylum label started by the young David Geffen, oozing that peaceful, easy feeling that was my first pop love, and that I listened to in my bedroom, a sullen and mopey twelve-year-old with the lights out. Punk rock rescued me from the Dan Fogelbergian miasma of folk rock: Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, then the Talking Heads, who made punk mainstream. Although I did not understand it at the time, the shift from California folk rock to British punk rock -- from the "fake" mainstream California sound to the "real" British underground punk sound -- was the decisive antithesis that would in one way or another determine all my subsequent pop musical experience. After Talking Heads came the bands like Duran Duran, the Cure, and the Cars, who marketed the "authentic" sound of punk into the "fake" New Wave and turned me off pop music in my early twenties. Then the big-hair bands of the '80s like Van Halen, Guns n' Roses, and the second coming of Aerosmith, which had kept me away from pop. And then Nirvana, the band that changed everything.

Before Nirvana my cultural experience had followed a more-or-less stately progress up-hierarchy from commercial culture to elite culture. But after I heard Nirvana, at the age of thirty-one, the stream of culture as it flowed through me slowed, stopped, and started moving in the other direction. After Nirvana, I began to pursue pop music with an energy I had never devoted to it as a teenager, when I was too worried about how my adult life was going to turn out to pay that much attention to pop. Pop became a way of hanging on to my teenage self, which had become a kind of touchstone for me as an adult. I got into hip-hop, and then the subgenres of hip-hop, like gangsta, and then techno, and now I was into the rich ground between techno and hip-hop -- acid, trance, jungle, big beat, ambient -- which seemed to be where the future of pop music lay.

As a kid I thought that becoming an adult would mean putting away pop music and moving on to classical, or at least intelligent jazz. Cultural hierarchy was the ladder climbed toward a grown-up identity. The day you found yourself putting on black tie and going to enjoy the opening night of Aida as a subscriber to the Metropolitan Opera was the day you crossed an invisible threshold into adulthood. But for the last five years, pop music had provided me with peaks of lyrical and musical transcendence that I long ago stopped feeling at the opera and the symphony, those moments when the music, the meaning, and the moment all flowed together and filled you with the "oceanic feeling" that Freud said characterizes powerful aesthetic experience.

A month earlier I had had an oceanic experience at a Chemical Brothers' show that my friend had taken me to hear at the Roxy. The Chemical Brothers were two young musician/programmers from the dance/Ecstasy subculture of Manchester, England, who had begun by deejaying in the clubs that flourished in the dark satanic mills left over from the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, and that were now dark satanic malls of late-twentieth-century street style.

We waited in a long line outside the Roxy for an hour, freezing, while scalpers in big down parkas cruised by murmuring "whosellingticketswhosellingticketswhosellingtickets." As usual when we went gigging, we were just about the oldest people there. Going out to hear hot new pop acts was one of the greatest cultural pleasures of our grown-up lives. These intense moments of ectastic communion with youth stood out from our otherwise predictable diet of respectable culture -- interesting plays, the Rothko show, the opera, and, sometimes, downtown happenings at the Kitchen or the Knitting Factory. Afterward, we would go home to our wives and kids and our tasteful diet of highbrow and middlebrow culture, but here in the oceanic present of pop music, we felt alive in a way we never felt when experiencing elite culture.

Finally we got inside and worked our way down into the crush of kids on the dance floor. Most were trying to figure out the optimum time to drop the drugs they had brought along, so that they peaked when the music peaked. After a long time somebody walked out onto the darkened stage and a buzz rippled through the crowd. An evil-sounding pulse started to beat, pumping a black squishy liquid out of a computer and swirling it around the room. Then came a sampled sentence from a Blake Baxter song, repeated four times: dabrothersgonnaworkitout. With each set of four beats a new computer-modulated drum sound entered the mix, and on the last set a distorted-sounding guitar made an appearance. Because the music was made on synthesizers it had the geometric regularity of code, and this made it possible to feel intuitively where the lines of sound were headed and when they would converge. It was like reading a sonnet: you anticipated the shape of the form before the content arrived. Such a sonic convergence was coming up. All the rhythmic variations and distortions that had previously been at counterpoint with one another were about to come together into what promised to be an amazing blast of unified sound.
My friend turned to me and yelped, "It's about to get REALLY loud . . . !"

Then -- THHHHRRRRUUUNKKK -- enlightenment struck in the form of a solid cleaver chop of sound to my breastbone -- from their hooooooouuuussse to our house -- that knocked us backward like bowling pins. The flashing lights illuminated the flailing hair of the blond Chemical Brother as he worked his instrument board, catching him at the perfect moment -- streaking upward from his subculture of clubs and drugs and computers, rushed into the mainstream by the music industry and MTV, which was hoping to consolidate the different small grids of techno and house music into a single big-grid category, "Electronica," in order to supplement the sagging sales of the "Alternative" marketing category that Nirvana's success had spawned. Within a month, the Brothers would be all over MTV. At one point in the frenzy of that night, I remember looking behind me and seeing Judy McGrath, the president of MTV, rocking out in the VIP area.

Then another flash -- POP! -- revealing a new kind of icon: the information artist at his console, reeling with sounds, styles, light and insight, the jittery agonized struggle of the cortex trying to absorb the digital information pouring into it. The heat in the hooouusse, the frenzy of the crowd, the potency of the joint my friend and I were now passing, all produced an intense cultural experience, a Nobrow moment, that was still fresh in my mind as I rode the megastore escalator down to Level B1, gently sinking into the bath of Buzz, heading for the Imports section, where I hoped to find a compilation CD of the legendary Chemical Brothers shows at the Heavenly Social in London.

The megastore's Classical Music section was also down here, to the right of the escalator. Encased inside thick glass walls to keep out the raucous sounds of the World Music section, just outside, where salsa, Afro-Gallic drumming, reggae, and Portuguese fado mingled in a One World jambalaya, the Classical Music section was an underground bunker of the old elite culture, its last refuge here in Times Square. There were a few discreet videos, usually showing James Levine conducting or Vladimir Horowitz at the piano. Inside these thick glass walls of silence you could feel the sterility of the academy to which the modernists had condemned classical music, by coming to believe that popularity and commercial success meant compromise. All the most original innovations of the modernists, the electronics and the atonal variations and the abrupt yaws in pitch had long ago been spirited away from this room and found popular expression in the Jazz and Techno sections in other parts of the store. Meanwhile, by continuing to put out, year after year, recordings of the world's great orchestras performing the standards -- in spite of the fact that the difference in performances was only interesting or even discernible to a very few people -- the classical music industry had all but destroyed itself, imprisoning what might be a vibrant genre in the forbidding confines of a room like this. The classical music room in the megastore was almost always empty: a good place, I'd discovered, to ring up purchases of pop music when there was a line upstairs.

I didn't find what I was looking for in Imports, but I did find some other CDs I wanted -- one by the "junglist" L. T. J. Bukem, as well as a compilation of rock/techno hybrid tracks called Big Beat Manifesto. (That was the trade-off in the megastore experience, refinement for breadth and unexpected synchronicity.) Also, back upstairs, I found a CD by an Essex-based group, Underworld, Dubnobasswithmyheadman, which I'd heard was good. Twenty minutes later I was back in Times Square with $59.49 worth of music in a red plastic Virgin bag. At Forty-fifth I stopped, unwrapped the Underworld CD, cracked open the jewel box, extracted the precious polyurethane wafer, and popped it into my Discman.
Clinton had finished addressing the citizenry, and the people in Times Square were turning their attention to other distractions. I stood there for a moment longer in the yellow tornado light while the techno music in my ears reorganized my consciousness into cleaner lines than the gangsta vibe, and the vocals -- "Mmmmskyscraper I...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375405046
• ISBN 13: 9780375405044
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 215