Rage against the (PR) machine, Roka-style
For all of us "new" art/design show and music junkies, will we ever detox from the drug of sensation?
ADP magazine 2(1): In between / ADP magazine 1(4) | Published 26 October 2009.
This text was partly inspired by Calm like a bomb by Rage Against the Machine.
They wuz all punked. A year ago, at least ten million people buzzed about sharing a grainy-appearing YouTube video showing people apparently making popcorn with their cellphones.
That shit ain’t real. The techno mag Wired debunked the hoax within 10 days with a physicist’s help and, subsequently, the viral campaign was claimed by the maker of Bluetooth handsets.
Yo, whoz da fool? The brain behind the spontaneously successful campaign, Frédéric Chast runs LastFools, an independent—and, as he proclaims, a “most likely dangerous”—ad agency in Paris. The client only had $50,000 to spend for a campaign and Chast knew that once the videos went viral, he would need to coordinate an online mission of intrusion and persuasion. The mission, as he recalled in an interview, was “to intervene on forums, blogs, in order to silence those who might expose the hoax by convincing them by false arguments that the video is true. When the experiment is reproducible, it is a plus.”
Bitchin’! Yo, whoadie! Who wuz da real fool? Copycat videos popped up, even one with an iPhone surrounded by freshly popped corn. Officially embarrassed, the humbled mainstreamers ran for ivory tower and professional cover. One British marketing academic, calling for agency responsibility and “light regulation,” sniffed, “No campaign like this has ever abused fear. With the mobile/popcorn advert—that’s fear! It’s playing on the fear of health, and that’s something we’ve never seen before.” In the United States, a well-known Internet marketer, while acknowledging such “stunts” are a time-honed tradition, called the tactic “scuzzy,” adding her own skepticism about the campaign’s message relevancy and its long-term impact.
Tha blockheads! Fuck the mainstream! If there’s a problem, it’s not with Chast and his antics. Chast, reminding everybody not to drink from the well of the media simulacrum, says he was only temporarily making a fool of people: “They’ll fear what they want to fear. You just have to think ‘my brain’s not corn” and “it’s scientifically impossible. You can check out if it’s true or not in five minutes anyway—with a mobile phone and some popcorn.”
Whoadie, I’m alwayz real, wild and raw. Really? What about the gas station jacket, Prada bowling shoes, and the Favela Chic’s barrios of Rio you’re sportin’? And the music you think is so ostensibly rebellious and authentic …
Dude, I ain’t no stunner. Unfortunately, you’re an oblivious victim. The ‘circus of worthless pawns’ with their pseudo-macho bleating are empty emperors. You might as well be listening to Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy.”
I know what’s soapy and hundoe . Hardly. Whose Kool-Aid are you drinking? Rather than focus on the real problems—hey, what about the class-driven segregation in educational quality and the insurmountable chasm in income equality—you’re a prisoner of—sociologist Karen Bettez Halnon puts it well—“a corporate-sponsored ‘fight club’, an enticing and enchanting world of pseudo-rebellion, where alienated consumer youth temporarily escape the nothingness of everyday life, release their unarticulated everyday rage and feel the exhilaration of being alive.” You’re doing nothing but perpetuating the status quo.
I ain’t fugazy. My shit is cool. You remind me of today’s rock critics today: slickly styled, young, urban hipsters arrogant with the delusions of their university education and desirous of being risky but yet ever so accommodating to tell the edgiest, most political musicians to tone it down. “Anger is a gift,” says Zack de la Rocha, the frontman of the Rage Against The Machine who never separates his activism from his music. You have to keep the distance from the hype and, occasionally, as de la Rocha says, “dip that bandana into vinegar.” Why do you think critics parse their reviews with halting, apologetic, and painfully begrudging syntax and diction? They are the agenda sentries for a music culture that transforms self-deprecating, self-reflexive artists into artistic zombies proselytizing the fatalistic culture of commercialism. Your favorite “fuck the mainstream” musicians end up on radio, iTunes, MTV, and dance clubs around the globe as well as movies, mobile phone commercials, clothing lines, and the talk show dance card list.
I know it’s all just a sick joke! Like the critics, you risk becoming uninspired and jaded. The problem lies with us. Fear is the bitch slap we need, just like Rage Against The Machine’s “Guerrilla Radio” which slams the same medium that brought the song to the ears of its restless, rebellion-starved listeners. You have to listen for the bang as Richard Goldstein wrote more than 40 years ago. “Good rock is a collision of surfaces, producing immediate energy the way an explosion does. What you listen for is the bang, and when that impact vanishes, so does the experience. That could be why ‘flash’ is such an important criterion in Pop. Flash is what happens when an artist imposes himself upon a moment. Flash is spontaneous combustion; it’s magic but it’s also fun. . . . Pop doesn’t age gracefully because it’s meant to disappear.” The punk rock grit rubs hard against the PR-marketing-journalism carnivalesque rave that is saturated and processed to a sense-numbing level. Rock’s energy springs from the contemporary environment of tumultuous, continuous change. Sure, the media professional might have certain proper literary and academic credentials but the critic’s stance, as Goldstein wrote so passionately, should be a “heroic one—strident and suspicious.” As he adds, “to be subjective, a critic only has to be ignorant.”
True dat. Don’t wanna be no spin artist! Yes, now you’re feeling it. Take a cue from de la Rocha: “And that’s the current that I’m trying to tap into, because I think that for a lot of people—for the real participants who live in the shadows and work at car washes and are forced to cross the border and are struggling and facing the real economic consequences—they’re often left out off the debate because of the language they speak or even the terminology that they use.”
And now you have the jewels for keeping the distance from the hype.
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