Despite it still actually being 2014 (I checked) two days ago, the Garagista Beer Co., a new South African brewery, decided that the best way to promote their product was to run a campaign that attempted to satirize hipsters. The problem is that the ads feel dated even while referencing something that still exists in 2014, but the campaign’s true flaw is that it attempts to co-opt other people’s criticism of hipsters to shill a product, which means it’s criticizing people for doing the exact thing that it’s criticizing. It’s like an oroboros of bad marketing. Let me explain.
Over the years, we’ve all either read about, or in some cases seen (hi mom), a number of subcultures emerge, blow up, go too far and then die out quietly to be reinterpreted endlessly till our deaths. It’s a process that begins with Grandmaster Flash and ends three decades later with Macklemore winning a Grammy, and it hurts every time.
Culture, by its broadest definition, usually comes about as a critical response to dominant culture. If this ‘counter-culture’ is sustained by enough people with a shared or similar philosophy, it can become subculture, or what is referred to by some as co-culture. A co-culture is essentially a response to the mainstream which forges ahead and develops rapidly, largely because no one from the marketing industry has yet interfered with its trajectory by co-opting its key messages to suit the desires of brands who are trying to sell sunglasses we’d probably buy anyway if they just made them good.
Once that happens subculture quickly becomes popular culture, and then equitably slips into the mainstream corn thrasher of our largely capitalist society. Most people who actually share the philosophical inclinations that created the initial response to dominant culture will probably not be too pleased about this, but at the same time everybody’s gotta eat and wear sunglasses, so hey, why bother inventing the wheel?
The problem, you see, is that “dominant” culture adopts subculture’s key messaging and much of its visual appeal without carrying over any of the core message at the heart of the original social movement. This is why concert companies refer to their post-event YouTube videos as “After Movies” now. It makes the video feel like it exists in the actual creative arena that inspired its existence, rather than the poor imitations (or, you know, the actual industries) used to mostly just sell stuff to an increasingly more debt-ridden society at large.
Basically, originally this guy bought a banjo because it didn’t retail at R4999.
This brings us perfectly around to the next part of the cultural cycle, which takes the form of a blowback against the subculture. This is what we’re seeing with hipsters now. The only problem is, even this minor criticism of the subculture is just a co-opting of the actual critical analysis being done by real researchers who are trying to make actual statements about society and how it develops. Only without any of their intentions.
The criticism being labelled against “hipsters” is that they are people who aren’t really authentically interested in anything they claim to be into. They like “bands you haven’t heard of” because they want to be into something outside the mainstream, rather than because they actively care about the quality of the music. They are merely upper middle class, hetero-normative consumers who have adopted the appearance of people who actually cultivated real affection for strange or outmoded things like, say, fixie bikes or weird hats. By extension, these ads are really a criticism being labelled against the mainstream adoption of everything that “hipsters” supposedly stand for. Except mainstream culture has distilled the counter-cultural idea that most of this crap stood for down into a series of meaningless signifiers that, when made fun of, make the one pointing and laughing come across like a mean kid on the playground trying to pick on a littler kid just because they are wearing glasses.
And that’s pretty much all this ad campaign is.
Being able to point out that how someone looks, dresses or acts is “stupid” is not actually funny. It’s not funny because good humor comes from an ability to critically analyse people and situations, and then provide a witty rejoinder that also draws interesting comparison between that and something seemingly unrelated. Mainstream culture is, by its very nature, a meaningless display of affectation – like when a straight actor plays a gay person as a melodramatically effeminate version of themselves, rather than as themselves but ready to fuck people with the same sex organs they have. Unfortunately, we give out awards for this stuff.
On top of the flawed argument that this entire campaign rests on, and the lame co-option of commentary written half a decade ago by funnier people than these, there is one glaringly obvious reason that they should have thought twice before running this campaign, and that is that it’s not funny.
Of course, it doesn’t matter that it isn’t funny or even a meaningful argument, because the target audience of this is probably meant to be people who would automatically find this and the latter three Scary Movie films in the franchise funny. Because the joke is not actively witty, but because it references other things they like. It’s like that time Jesus showed up at your house with a sixpack and I can’t even complete this joke how does Seth MacFarlane write this way?!
And the reason for THAT is because this is what makes money. And mainstream culture, however blissfully unaware of it they are, will always sustain this beleaguered model so that it can keep selling sunglasses. I know that even my negative post about their beer company will be read as part of the “any press is good press” philosophy which taints the value of actual criticism these days.
But whatever, man, I wasn’t doing anything except counting the stacks of money my family received through benefiting off the backs of slavery and oppression for almost a century and running my blog anyway.
Nas Hoosen