Fabricated Identity: Bands as Brands
In this life-lived-as-replay era—where many photograph their food before they’ve eaten it—we end up in the wake of cultural backlog, with the gap between innovation and impact being ever lengthened, like an aesthetic equivalent of the Doppler Effect. Documentation should help memorialize, not trivialize. In the recent past, we only photographed major life events like weddings and newborns, now we photograph every thing. Many today can hardly take two steps without stopping to snap yet another picture, and then often immediately review, delete, and redo it.
By the time a form is acknowledged and reaps rewards commercially, it has long since been reduced to mere nostalgia for the more attentive. And, thus, in the marketplace, the status quo remains the same and revolutions-deferred get submerged, appearing only tardily when they are sold down the line as a concept and brand-name (frighteningly far more Ramones T-shirts have been printed since their demise than their records ever were in their entire career).
Though hundreds of thousands of “alternative” bands have tried, not one has yet outstripped the template set forth by the inauspiciously received bands, the Velvet Underground and Big Star. The rub is that the successors are working from a schematic, and that can hardly be construed as “independent.”
It is embalmed. And all that is left is ritual, like a spiritual movement whose charismatic leader has died, and is then followed by competing charlatans quarreling to fill the void for their own nefarious reasons. The primary result of reliance on consumption and source materials for creative action is neutered vision.
It is but a faint memory now what an uproar was stirred when Lou Reed appeared in and allowed “Walk on the Wild Side” to be used for a scooter advertisement (circa 1984). Sadly, he acted as a pioneer regarding selling out, too. Since that first hallowed ground was ruptured, there has come a flood, where now musical bands not only endorse products but have even become their own brands—via clothing lines, cologne, etc.
In his most outlandish musings, it is almost guaranteed that obscure British balladeer Nick Drake never dreamed that decades after his suicide, one of his songs would go on to help sell automobiles and make millions, if not billions, for complete strangers. But this is the delayed assimilation that we are caught within.
Music doesn’t have commercial breaks like traditional television, so corporations have found a way to use them for commercials. And with films, they insert themselves via the cameo intrusions of product placements (a trend which all too many supposedly “street” rappers have introduced a tad too lustily by name-dropping within their rhymes). Now entire films act as chamber of commerce tourist brochures for famous cities that are used as “characters”—which ironically have often been filmed mostly in other less famous but similar cities that offer far cheaper permits.