over the counter-culture
The following is an excerpt (and slight
expansion) from a section of a talk I gave earlier this week at the Google
'Firestarters' event in Melbourne.
The theme was 'Adaptive Strategy for an
Adaptive Age'.
In this particular section of the talk I
speculated around some of the external cultural factors that have implications
for strategy (rather than discussing specifics of strategy or process and the
like).
To illustrate I called upon two important texts
in particular, a snippet of a recent interview in the Observer with Don Letts -
legendary DJ, film-maker, Rasta punk and musician with Big Audio Dynamite - and
the significance of the performance given by KLF at the Brits in 1992.
The first text was 'Subculture' by sociologist Dick Hebdige, a study of UK youth subcultures from the 50's to
late 70's (a fantastic academic book, fairly unique among academic writing in
that it is actually readable for mere mortals).
Hebdige describes the two principle methods
by which every counter-culture idea of any significance is later incorporated
or co-opted by the establishment.
He calls these the commodity form and the
ideological form.
In the commodity form the establishment attempts to transform the 'other' into meaningless 'exotica'.
This is done by taking the style, trends,
dress, music etc of the subcultures and popularising them so that the
subcultures lose their exclusivity and gradually become mass-produced
commodities made available to all.
Or, secondly the ‘other’ is trivialised. What was 'otherness' is reduced to 'sameness'.
This incorporation minimises the
‘otherness’ and then ultimately defines the subculture in exactly the terms
that it originally sought to resist in the first place. So, as soon as
the innovations that signified a subculture are translated into commodities and
become everyday they lose meaning, i.e. what were subcultural 'signs' become mass-produced
stuff.
What begins as symbolic challenges end up
becoming the new conventions.
For instance, the music of the Sex Pistols
was played to the Queen, as an enduring symbol of Britishness, at the opening
ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012.
For a long time, as I fancied myself as a
sort of left-wing pseudo sociology professor and agitator type, this point of
view made perfect sense.
So if a subculture could somehow resist
incorporation and not 'sell-out' it could prevail, values intact.
However approaching the problem from
another angle reveals a somewhat different possibility.
What if there is/was no subculture?
What if mainstream culture and
counter-culture were simply two sides of the same coin?
What if consumer capitalism was not about
conformity at all, but actually depended upon rebellion and counter-culture
absolutely in order to generate the next wave of rebel product for integration
into the mainstream?
This is the argument put forward by Heath
and Potter in our second text 'The Rebel Sell - Why The Culture Can't BeJammed'.
That much of consumption is not about
conformity- but distinction.
(From an evolutionary bases standpoint these
would be the types of buying behaviour related to signaling - status and
reproductive fitness - versus consumption broadly driven by survival instincts)
Cultural products that are purchased
to display that we are smarter, cooler, more 'authentic' than others, generate competitive
consumption.
Heath and Potter further argue that the
cycle perpetuates itself because one the early adopters see too many people
jumping on the latest counter-cultural bandwagon, they get off and move onto
something else.
The irony being that
"anti-consumerist" consumers are actually the most brand conscious.
As Debord would have observed ‘Opposition
to the spectacle can produce only the spectacle of opposition’.
Don Letts makes a point in his Observer
article.
(Ideologically he appears to be coming from
the Hebdige point of view – lamenting the decline and slow death of the
counter-culture from the rebel standpoint.
However what he also describes is the adaptation
facing consumer capitalism. When there is no longer any significant counter
culture from which to draw the next wave of cultural consumer products, then
they begin to emerge from somewhere else altogether.)
'These days, people get into music to
be part of the establishment.
The most fuck-you guy around is Justin
Bieber. What does that mean?
There’s no counter culture – only
over-the-counter culture.'
Selling out is now no longer something that
needs to be post-rationalised to stave off cognitive dissonance in rebellious
youth.
Selling-out is the objective, right from
the get-go!
For Gen Xers this is a hard one to swallow.
Not so for millennials, rebellion has never
been part of their culture – their only culture has been a marketing culture.
Later I argued that the real genius of Uber
is nothing to do with technology or even (dubious) business practices.
The genius of Uber is in turning a commodity
(consumption) product – the Taxi – into a display (status) product and spinning
it’s anti-unionisation, anti-regulation winner-takes-all form of
ultra-capitalism as some sort of signal of non-conformity and rebellion.
Now we know what’s going on, is it possible
to map the disruption over time?
Possibly. This is purely a thought
experiment - an ‘acausal connecting principle’ – e.g. a sequence of events that
cannot be fully explained by simple cause and effect but something may be behind
these events, even if we don’t know what.
I’ve joked in the past that the millennials
are unique in post-war youth culture in one respect at least.
They are the first generation that was
unable to come up with any kind of counter-culture idea that their parents would
be afraid of. Sorry hipsters.
1980 was the year that millennials started
being born, and therefore started to enter their teens around 1993 – the year
that the internet began to be adopted and began it’s ten year march towards
critical mass.
The previous year the KLF appeared on the televised
Brit awards show, to perform and collect the award for ‘Best Act’.
In a final futile act of defiance Drummond and Cauty appeared on stage backed by Extreme Noise Terror (thrash metallists)
and performed a barely recognizable thrash noise rendition of their biggest hit
‘3am Eternal’ before Drummond sprayed the audience (the music business itself)
with (blank) bullets from a
machine gun and announcing ‘The KLF have left the music business’.
In The KLF:Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds by John Higgs
the author offers this:
‘In a strange way, something about the
music industry did die around that point. Music in the twentieth century had
shown an incredible ability for invention. New musical genres were constantly
created and explored – so much so, in fact, that this was considered normal.
The first half of the century had given us such distinctive new genres as blues
or jazz. The Fifties gave us rock ’n’ roll, and the Sixties gave us psychedelia
and soul. The Seventies gave us reggae, heavy metal, disco and punk, and the
Eighties had delivered hip-hop, techno, acid house and indie. The assumption
was that this level of creativity was normal and would continue indefinitely…. It
would never have occurred to anyone in those seats, as Drummond fired blanks
into the ranks of their peers, that this period of invention had come to an end’.
The final nail in the coffin for the
counter-culture – given that pop music of some shape or form has always been
central to these movements - can then probably (and not without some significant
irony), be traced to sometime around the turn of the century with the advent of
the iPod, file sharing and streaming music services such as Spotify.
Is it that the emergence of devices and
services that at first look appeared to democratise the music industry,
shifting the power structure and giving us access to all music, all for free
was an incorporation or co-optation too far?
Music began to lose it's signalling and galvanising power because it became an individualised 'pleasure' commodity product consumed (for free) by individuals in private within their earbuds.
That's if the individuals could even make it through the 3 minutes without pressing skip.
Music began to lose it's signalling and galvanising power because it became an individualised 'pleasure' commodity product consumed (for free) by individuals in private within their earbuds.
That's if the individuals could even make it through the 3 minutes without pressing skip.
The well was now dry.
Our relationship with music had now changed
forever – seemingly overnight, though it had been incrementally creeping up on
us for 10 years and we hadn’t noticed.
Therefore consumer capitalism’s (profitable) relationship with the counter-culture has changed forever.
Therefore consumer capitalism’s (profitable) relationship with the counter-culture has changed forever.
What happens now?
I’ve no idea, but the adaptive challenge
for strategy needs to take this on board.
Or since the millennials dropped the ball,
maybe Gen Z can come up with something.
