assignment
twinkle22
ICS392tastestatusandcoolness.pptxICS 392: Consumer Culture
Taste, status and coolness
Created: July 2, 2019
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Taste, status and coolness
Three things happened
Social class evolved: Inconspicuous consumption; NoBrow; One downmanship; Selective extravagance; Trading up/trading down.
We see the emergence of alternate status systems: Coolness (Rebel Cool, DotCool), Authenticity, Normcore, etc.
Status systems are in flux
Social class, coolness and the markers of each are dynamic, ephemeral and intertwined
Since they are positional goods, their value is in their rarity
Distinction is the goal
Once a status good is mainstream, it looses its status appeal. It becomes too common
Once a cool thing hits mainstream, it looses its coolness
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Taste, status and coolness
Formerly, tripartite ranking for cultural goods
High brow
Middle brow
Low brow
Now, seeing more goods/brands that draw from both ends
Nobrow
$200 T-shirt
Designer jeans
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Taste, status and coolness
Hard to define
A conceptual issue
Changes rapidly
What people/ideas/things are considered cool at any particular moment changes frequently
Market responses can be unpredictable
Cool began as a protest to the rigidity of social class as a status system but ended up creating a new status system.
Authenticity followed a similar path.
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Taste, status and coolness
Hard to define/quantify
Coolness is a many varied thing
Cool is a knowledge, a way of life.
Lewis Macadams, Birth of The Cool
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Taste, status and coolness
Cool is an age-specific phenomenon, defined as the central behavioral trait of teenagerhood.
Coolness entails a set of specific behavioral characteristics that vary in detail from generation to generation, from clique to clique, but which retain a common essence.
Marcel Danesi, Cool: the Signs and Meanings of Adolescence
An oppositional attitude adopted to express defiance to authority. Kids want to be acceptable to their peers and scandalous to their parents
Alex Wipperfurth, Brand Hijack
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Taste, status and coolness
In complete control of one’s emotions; hip, but having a quiet, objective, aloof attitude; indifferent to those things considered non-essential to one’s beliefs, likes and desires”
Dictionary of American Slang
Taste, status and coolness
Coolness is an aesthetic of the streets, a style of deportment specifically designed to alert potential predators that one is impregnable to assault, to prevent skirmishes with lurking thugs, ready to waylay nervous cowards who let down their guard and betray their faint-heartedness while scurrying through bombed-out barrios.
Suburban coolness... has become part of the imposture of privileged youth desperate to rid themselves of what they perceive as the taint of inauthenticity
Daniel Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic
Origins of the term
An aloof indifference
Looks kind of silly to some when taken out of its original context and enacted in the local chain-store food court
One analyst: where the ghetto goes, so go the suburbs
Note the concept of inauthenticity
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Taste, status and coolness
These definitions are largely abstract essentialist in nature
Simple, undefinable, non-natural property
Some common themes
Indifference/nonchalance
Devoid of emotional expression
Uniqueness
Rebellion
See also WASP Lessons
Can’t be taught
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Taste, status and coolness
The central status hierarchy in contemporary urban society. Just as not everyone can be upper class and not everyone can have good taste, so not everyone can be cool. This isn't because some people are essentially cooler than others, it's because cool is, ultimately, a form of distinction
Heath and Potter, Nation of Rebels
Only a small fraction of the population lives in full commitment to hip; for most of us, work, school, family, rehab or the alarm clock gets in the way. Yet we all participate in its romance. …hip permeates mainstream daily life at the level of language, music, literature, sex, fashion, ego and commerce.
John Leland, Hip: The History
Coolness is predicated on rebellion.
You can see this by looking at a allied/adjacent concept: hip
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Taste, status and coolness
Distinction via coolness; distinction via of rebellion
Employ the Critique of Mass Society
Distinction via rebellion against the mainstream
Distinction – taste is distaste
H&P 191A, 193A
Politicize consumption via coolness is to invoke the Critique of Mass Society
Critique of Mass Society
That in order for captilalism to function, we must have four things happen:
1) Conformity in workers,
2) in education
3) in consumption
4) sexual repression
Since the 1950s, it has figured into a lot of cultural goods (movies, books, songs)
Rebellion against mainstream
mainstream = conformity
Critique of Mass Society
American Beauty
points 1 and 3 and totally makes point 4
Weeds
makes points 1 through 3.
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Taste, status and coolness
Marketing of anti-consumption/anti-mainstream
Alternative music
The “alterna” prefix
Independent movies; Mainstream movies
American Beauty
Fight Club
Anti-ads
Anti-ads play against conformity in consumption by violating the rules of advertising and/or implying that consumers of other brands are mindless sheep.
The zombie consumer
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Taste, status and coolness
Anti-ads
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Taste, status and coolness
Anti-ads
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Taste, status and coolness
Anti-ads
Famous example – “1984” Apple Macintosh
Consumers as hypnotized sheep
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Taste, status and coolness
Anti-ads
Taste, status and coolness
Anti-ads
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Taste, status and coolness
How do you make something cool?
Answer: You make it rebellious.
You evoke the critique of mass society and you commoditize rebellion
Thus is consumption politicized
Essentially: consumption of anti-consumption
Coolness drives consumer society
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Taste, status and coolness
Cool is based on distinction
Cool/Not Cool
Rocks/Sucks
Hot/Not
Wired/Tired
Hip/Square
Bohemian/Bourgeois
Bourgeois values
Hard work
Society
Restraint
Their pecking order = social class
Bohemian values
Hedonistic
Individual
Sensual
It is a cultural battle between values
Bohemians – Hippies, Beatniks, Punks
Non-traditional
Marginalized
Countercultural
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Taste, status and coolness
Bohemian values triumphant
Yet capitalism as strong as ever
The two sides merged
Lots of names for the merged phenomenon
Bobos (Bourgeois Bohemians)
David Brooks
The Creative Class
Richard Florida
X-class
Paul Fussell
Grups
Sternbergh
Sterbnergh – Grups
Grown ups that don't grow up - rebelling against mainstream adulthood
1) The effect on the generation gap
Cultural differences between generations
Values, norms, etc.
tastes - music, film, literature
If everyone acts like adolescents, the generation gap goes away (pro) the current generation has nothing of their own (con)
2) How they treat their kids
As mini-me; Vicarious consumption of coolness
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Taste, status and coolness
How did capitalism survive?
Answer: the restless, individualistic, free-spirited ways of the Bohemians are more in tune with the spirit of capitalism
Bourgeois values
Materialism
Order
Regularity
Rational thinking
Self-discipline
Bohemian values
Creativity
Rebellion
Novelty
Self-expression
Vivid experience
The creative class is capitalist in orientation
202A
204 A, B, C
205A
Which list of values better describes Steve Jobs?
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Taste, status and coolness
Coolness also requires validation by others
So, that which is seen as cool tends to spread
But there is much that is unpredictable about how this process plays out
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Taste, status and coolness
VW’s (new) Bug & Chrysler's P.T. Cruiser
Chrysler wanted something similar to the New VW Bug
Didn’t work out that way
Pabst Blue Ribbon
From nearly dead brand
To sudden, unplanned resurgence in popularity
All with minimal marketer effort
Brand sold several times
1990s: declining sales; fading user base: cheap, lonely, old men
Mid 2002: Fastest growing domestic brand of beer
How?
Lurking cultural icon
Little too no advertising
Eclectic distribution & availability
underground and retro cachet
Attractive to certain cynical subcultures in late 1990s
Portland bike messengers
Powerful (cool) brand advocates
Northwest U.S.: double-digit growth rates
Anti-status as status
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Taste, status and coolness
Cool began as a protest to the rigidity of social class as a status system but ended up creating a new status system.
Rather than abolishing class, cool essentially replaced class as the central determinant of social prestige
But, it too faces challenges
Cool has a short shelf life
The paradox, of couse, is that the better coolhunters become at bringing mainstream to the cutting edge, the more elusive the cutting edge becomes
The key phrase here is information friction
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Taste, status and coolness
Two bold assertions:
The middle class is the most class insecure
You are doomed to your class of origins.
Does this logic also hold in coolness?
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Taste, status and coolness
Critique of mass society
In order for capitalism to function, we must have:
1) Conformity in workers,
2) in education
3) in consumption
4) sexual repression
Critique of civilization
1) authority is oppressive
2) status seeking is humiliating,
3) work is alienating,
4) conformity a form of death.
These two meta-critiques are part of the quest for cool and the pursuit of authenticity
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