“MERCHANTS OF COOL”
“THEY WANT to be cool. They are impressionable, and they have the cash. They are corporate America’s $150 billion dream.”
That’s the opening statement in PBS’s stunning 2001 Frontline documentary “The Merchants of Cool,” narrated by author and media critic Douglas Rushkof. What emerges in the following sixty minutes is a scandalous portrait of how major corporations—Viacom, Disney, AOL/Time Warner, and others—study America’s children like laboratory rats in order to sell them billions of dollars in merchandise by tempting, degrading, and corrupting them.
Think that’s a bit of an overstatement?
It’s an understatement.
“When you’ve got a few gigantic transnational corporations, each one loaded down with debt, competing madly for as much shelf space and brain space as they can take,” says NYU communications professor Mark Crispin-Miller, “they’re going to do whatever they think works the fastest and with the most people, which means that they will drag standards down.”
Let’s see how far down.
“It’s a blizzard of brands, all competing for the same kids,” explains Rushkoff. “To win teens’ loyalty, marketers believe, they have to speak their language the best. So they study them carefully, as an anthropologist would an exotic native culture.”
“Today,” Rushkoff discloses, “five enormous companies are responsible for selling nearly all of youth culture. These are the true merchants of cool: Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp, Disney, Viacom, Universal Vivendi, and AOL/Time Warner.” The documentary demonstrates how big corporations literally send spies to infiltrate young people’s social settings to gather intelligence on what they can induce these children to buy next.
“The entertainment companies, which are a handful of massive conglomerates that own four of the five music companies that sell 90 percent of the music in the United States—those same companies also own all the film studios, all the major TV networks, all the TV stations pretty much in the 10 largest markets,” University of Illinois communications professor Robert McChesney reveals in the documentary. “They own all or part of every single commercial cable channel.
“They look at the teen market as part of this massive empire that they’re colonizing. You should look at it like the British Empire or the French Empire in the 19th century. Teens are like Africa. You know, that’s this range that they’re going to take over, and their weaponry are films, music, books, CDs, Internet access, clothing, amusement parks, sports teams. That’s all this weaponry they have to make money off of this market.”
MTV
WHAT ABOUT the cable channel that positions itself as champion of today’s teens and preteens—champions of their music, their rebellious free spirit, and their genuine, if ever-changing, notions of what is “cool”? Whatever else MTV might be, at least it’s interested in kids, right? Sure, just like the lion is interested in the gazelle.
“Everything on MTV is a commercial,” explains McChesney.” That’s all that MTV is. Sometimes it’s an explicit advertisement paid for by a company to sell a product. Sometimes it’s going to be a video for a music company there to sell music. Sometimes it’s going to be the set that’s filled with trendy clothes and stuff there to sell a look that will include products on that set. Sometimes it will be a show about an upcoming movie paid for by the studio, though you don’t know it, to hype a movie that’s coming out from Hollywood. But everything’s an infomercial. There is no non-commercial part of MTV.”
Rushkoff illustrates how the machine works by using the example of Sprite. What was once a struggling, second-string soft-drink company pulled off a brilliant marketing coup by underwriting major hip-hop music events and positioning itself as the cool soft drink for the vast MTV-generation market. Connecting the dots between Sprite, MTV, rap musicians, and other cross-promotion participants, Rushkoff lays out the behind-the-scenes game plan: “Sprite rents out the Roseland Ballroom and pays kids 50 bucks a pop to fill it up and look cool. The rap artists who perform for this paid audience get a plug on MTV’s show, `Direct Effects,’ for which Sprite is a sponsor. MTV gobbles up the cheap programming, promoting the music of the record companies who advertise on their channel. Everybody’s happy.”‘
“So what,” you say? “What’s wrong with that? Aren’t MTV and rappers and clothing companies and others just giving kids what they want?”
That’s what they say. But it’s not what they do.
In reality, the companies are creating new and lower and more shocking—that’s the key-word, shocking marketing campaigns, disguised as genuine, authentic expressions of youthful searching for identity and belonging, for the sole purpose of profiting financially from America’s children.
They hold focus groups. They send out culture spies (which they call “correspondents”) to pretend to befriend and care about teens so they can study them—what they like, don’t like, what’s in, what’s out, what’s cool, and what’s no longer cool. They engage in “buzz marketing” (where undercover agents talk up a new product). They hire shills to interact with young people in Internet chat rooms, and they engage “street snitches” to loudly talk up a band or other product to raise interest. They bring the entire machinery of modern market research and consumer psychology to bear on studying this gold mine of a market—to anticipate the next, and always weirder and more shocking, incarnation of “cool.”
This would be bad enough—if corporate America were just following and marketing the basest instincts of confused, unsupervised teenagers. But they are not following, they are leading—downward. Exhibits A and B: the “mook” and the “midriff,” two creations of this corporate youth-marketing consortium.
The mook is a marketing caricature of the wild, uninhibited, outrageous and amoral male sex maniac. “Take Howard Stern,” says Rushkoff, “perhaps the original and still king of all mooks. Look how Viacom leverages him across their properties. He is syndicated on 50 of Viacom’s Infinity radio stations. His weekly TV show is broadcast on Viacom’s CBS. His number one best-selling autobiography was published by Viacom’s Simon and Schuster, then released as a major motion picture by Viacom’s Paramount Pictures, grossing $40 million domestically and millions more on videos sold at Viacom’s Blockbuster video.” Rushkoff adds: “There is no mook in nature. He is a creation designed to capitalize on the testosterone-driven madness of adolescence. He grabs them below the belt and then reaches for their wallets.”
A great deal of MTV’s programming features and markets to the mook in America’s boys. For instance, a major venue of the mook is professional wrestling—one of the most-watched types of television among adolescent boys in America today.
Okay, what about the midriff?
Girls, says Rushkoff, “get dragged down there right along with boys. The media machine has spit out a second caricature…. The midriff is no more true to life than the mook. If he is arrested in adolescence, she is prematurely adult. If he doesn’t care what people think of him, she is consumed by appearances. If his thing is crudeness, hers is sex. The midriff is really just a collection of the same old sexual cliches, but repackaged as a new kind of female empowerment. ‘I am midriff, hear me roar. I am a sexual object, but I’m proud of it.'”
And what is the purpose of these debauched role models for America’s future, fashioned out of market research compiled by culture spies hired by corporations to predict what the likely next step down—the next shock wave disguised as authentic “cool”—will be for the MTV generation? Why, to sell kids more stuff, of course.
“When corporate revenues depend on being ahead of the curve, you have to listen, you have to know exactly what they want and exactly what they’re thinking so that you can give them what you want them to have,” explains NYU’s Crispin-Miller. However, he adds, “the MTV machine doesn’t listen to the young so it can make the young happier…
The MTV machine tunes in so it can figure out how to pitch what Viacom has to sell.”
And how do they manage to bond kids—imprint them—with the next round of musical, clothing, and lifestyle choices they should be buying into?
“Kids are invited to participate in sexual contests on stage or are followed by MTV cameras through their week of debauchery,” says Rushkoff. “Sure, some kids have always acted wild, but never have these antics been so celebrated on TV. So of course kids take it as a cue, like here on the strip in Panama Beach, Florida, where high schoolers carry on in public as if they were on some MTV sound stage. Who is mirroring whom? Real life and TV life have begun to blur. Is the media really reflecting the world of kids, or is it the other way around? The answer is increasingly hard to make out.”
Then the really devilish part of the marketers’ modus operandi comes into view, as host Rushkoff relives his own epiphany:
I’ll never forget the moment that 13-year-old Barbara and her friends spotted our crew during a party between their auditions. They appeared to be dancing for us, for our camera, as if to sell back to us, the media, what we had sold to them.
And that’s when it hit me: It’s a giant feedback loop. The media watches kids and then sells them an image of themselves. Then kids watch those images and aspire to be that mook or midriff in the TV set. And the media is there watching them do that in order to craft new images for them, and so on.”
“Is there any way to escape the feedback loop?” Rushkoff asks. Only in the kids’ minds, he reveals, noting that “cool”-seeking youths continually reach downward to a new, raunchier, more outrageous expression—something, anything, as long as it hasn’t been exploited and ripped off by the corporate world.
That said, Rushkoff rolls tape of a large, demonic-looking group of teens, faces painted, chanting and screaming obscenities in downtown Detroit on Halloween night. He explains:
A few thousand mostly white young men have gathered to hear a concert by their favorite hometown band, Insane Clown Posse. ICP helped found a musical genre called rap metal or rage rock, which has created a stir across the country for its shock lyrics and ridicule of women and gays…. Rock music has always channeled rebellion, but where it used to be directed against parents, teachers or the government, today it is directed against slick commercialism itself, against MTV. These fans feel loyalty to this band and this music because they experience it as their own. It hasn’t been processed by corporations, digested into popular culture and sold back to them at the mall.”
A member of Insane Clown Posse explains the group’s attraction: “Everybody that likes our music feels a super connection. That’s why all those juggaloes here, they feel so connected to it because it’s—it’s exclusively theirs. See, when something’s on the radio, it’s for everybody, you know what I mean? It’s everybody’s song. `Oh, this is my song.’ That ain’t your song. It’s on the radio. It’s everybody’s song. But to listen to ICP, you feel like you’re the only one that knows about it.”
“These are the extremes,” intones Rushkoff, “to which teens are willing to go to ensure the authenticity of their own scene. It’s the front line of teen cultural resistance: Become so crude, so intolerable, and break so many rules that you become indigestible.” To complete the mood, in the background Insane Clown Posse is rapping “Bitch, you’s a ho. And ho, you’s a bitch. Come on!” and other uplifting lyrics.
Then comes the betrayal. “The Merchants of Cool” shows how Insane Clown Posse and other “authentic” groups—untouched by commercialism—are ultimately bought off by the marketing machine, packaged, and sold back to the youth market. Of course, when the shock value wears off, and the mantle of cool—untouched and uncorrupted by corporate America—moves downward to the next, even more outrageous level of depravity—MTV, Viacom, and the other corporate giants will be there to package it and sell it, once again, to our children.
Oh, but don’t bother trying to tell your kids about this fiendish game. You see, says Crispin-Miller, “It’s part of the official rock video world view, it’s part of the official advertising world view, that your parents are creeps, teachers are nerds and idiots, authority figures are laughable, nobody can really understand kids except the corporate sponsor.”
Okay, so is that it? America’s teens are in the grip of a malignant marketing campaign by big, greedy, uncaring corporations? And hopefully the kids will grow out of it and become normal sometime? End of story?
Not quite. To be sure, millions of youths are in the grip of something destructive, but the corporate aspect is just the visible part. Behind both the corporate manipulators and the youths caught in their selfish and shameful influence lurks another, much more formidable and all-pervasive marketing campaign—a malevolent dimension that has no one’s best interests at heart and which is programmed to devour all in its path, from the highest to the lowest.
David Kupelian, The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell us Corruption Disguised as Freedom, Nashville, 2005. pp. 64-70.