MISCmedia for 5/23/00
It's (Still) Square to be Hip

AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it's 21 and over.

HIPNESS, REBELLION, the counterculture--whatever you call it, it's been so thoroughly colonized by advertisers for so long, even the normally out-of-it LA Times has caught onto it.

But not everybody's caught on.

Just last night, I was talking to a couple of longtime skateboard doodz. One of them was discussing his attempt to start his own brand of T-shirts and backpacks. He was hoping to attract skaters to his logo, away from some other brand that's apparently gone too far beyond the boarders' in-crowd toward amainstream markets.

(These aren't the exact words he used. I won't embarrass myself by trying and failing to replicate his jargon; which, like that of many hip white kids, is that of white kids trying to talk like black hip-hop kids, gettng it subtly wrong, and inventing something new as a result.)

Anyhoo, I could have gone on my usual rant about that being the way marketing works these days--to start out gaining hip street-cred, then using it to sell mass quantities in the malls. But it was getting late at night and would have been futile anyway.

Guys like him have grown up immersed in brands, and naturally seek self-identification via new brands, brands they can call their very own.

Even the anti-branding movement expresed in publications like Adbusters and No Logo just takes branding-as-identity to its mirror image. Instead of identifying yourself by what you buy, you're identifying yourself by what you don't buy, or by the corporate logos you sneer at on your own anti-corporate jacket patches.

Is this inevitable? After all, iconography has long been part of human social existence, from ancient Egypt to the totem poles. And turning oneself into a walking icon is as old as body modification (something skaters and other hipsters love these days, except for those modifications judged by present-day westerners to be misogynistic.)

Perhaps a new tactic's needed. Perhaps, instead of promoting logos intended ultimately to advertise their own ventures, the entrepreneurs of street-level, small-scale hipster fashion could instead start coming up with words, phrases, designs, colors, patterns, fabrics, and styles intended to subvert the notion of corporate demographic marketing.

I don't know what that would be--maybe something so utterly square, so non-class-specific, so anti-exclusionary, it couldn't possibly be turned into something Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger could take over.

Oops--sorry. That was already tried.

Some people called it "grunge."

TOMORROW: Making it truly hip to be square.

ELSEWHERE:

• All four Golden Girls are still alive (found by Mister Pants)....
• This guy doesn't have many yet, but he wants to amass a great collection of weird fortune-cookie sayings....

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• Modern art as capitalist tool.
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• Parts one and two of Matthew Stadler's look at urban dreamers in the distant and more-recent past.
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• 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
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