BOOKS
Don’t Believe the Hippies! Title: La conquista de lo cool [The Conquest of Cool] Author: Thomas Frank Translation: Mónica Sumoy and Juan Carlos Castillón Publishers: Alpha Decay City: Barcelona Year: 2011 440 pages. 25 euros
ELENA MEDEL Interior, day: an advertising agency receives a commission for one of its main accounts, a luxury car brand, whose clients belong –because of their purchasing power and customs– to an older age range. The company seeks to become fresh. It does not want to dirty its design, or become cheaper; it demands a new air, and needs a campaign which will convey rebelliousness and youthfulness in addition to its long-standing reputation. So, let’s imagine a brainstorming session, and, suddenly, the idea of a seasoned advertising executive, or a new hire who knows his stuff. The new audience they seek gets excited by freedom, by the struggle against established values, by counterculture. Why not use one of their heroes? We should hire an actor or a musician who represents those values; however, it is hard to find anyone who will protect and maintain the dignity of the brand image. So we try the source, the seed of the opposite. We will risk pretentiousness and even being seen as outside the mainstream context. The above paragraph is based on real events. The ad was shown on TV in 2008, and survives on YouTube, uploaded by a user who found it funny. In it, several bearded actors wearing sunglasses and hats –the hipster attire par excellence– declaim a fragment from On the Road, the referential novel of the Beat movement, immersed in their own road movie. About thirty comments are still there, furiously: “publicists use the symbol of money on anything as long as it sells”, claims a Utopian viewer; “Kerouac is turning in his grave”, says another. Those who miss the wild decades they lived scream their indignation, but, for many others, the businessmen and
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advertising executives achieved their objectives: to lend BMW a modern and well-travelled image. This example reflects the theory of this fascinating, lucid and risqué essay by Thomas Frank. The subtitle –The Business of Culture and Counter-Culture and the Birth of Modern Consumerism– moves away from symbolism, to encapsulate an acid, polemic and brilliantly argued thesis: that the US cultural movement which fought in the years of peace and love did not emerge as a way of opposing capitalism, but as its fruits. We should leave behind the alternative thinking from the last fifty years, and Thomas Frank, an expert on the link between politics and culture, tells us that our entire discourse against money and on ethics was not planned at Woodstock, but was invented by a cigar-smoking guy on Madison Avenue. Why? Because it sounded cool. And like a moneymaker, of course. A powerful narrator –The Conquest of Cool can be interpreted as the antithesis of “another world is possible”–, Thomas Frank analyses not so much the way in “which a culture is produced”, but “how it is received”, looking at the main advertising agencies from the time, portraying its founders and naming this particular American dream. In this way, he connects this new view of advertising mechanisms with the emergence of a new generation of creatives, experts on the interests of young people, on their aspirations, on what moves them, and how to use it. They were part of the group. Whether or not we agree with Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool gives rise to a juicy debate: what if the bête noire of capitalism took on the tenderness of mummy and daddy?