Entry 8:

Goodness Jim, we're not going to settle this one. Can't you just let me have the last word and be done with it?

You continue to distort my argument to make it easy for you to slap on the trite neo-liberal response (e.g., how come companies fail if they're so powerful?). My argument is certainly not that individual companies control our tastes. Rather I'm making a macro argument here: You and I consume differently because of the way that large companies (collectively) make use of culture to add value to their brands. Companies today largely control the pipelines through which culture flows. And their authorship makes a difference. Consider how a great novelist once was able to recast the thinking of an entire generation. Today branding plays this role. This is not a high-low debate, as much as you want to frame it as such.

The question on the table is whether the way in which marketers do business helps to shape culture rather than just mirroring it. Not only would your critical studies friends down the hall disagree with you, but so, too, would the leading branders at major consumer goods firms and ad agencies. Marketing the historical jazz experience through the tightly produced and Disneyfied Lou Rawls Cultural Center recently opened in Bronzeville instead of through the musty and disorderly confines of the Palm shapes the experience! No different than Ken Burns' recent docu-spectacle Jazz, in which his choices of whom to marginalize in the jazz pantheon--notably the work of Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago--shapes the experiences of "what is jazz" for millions. Branding today, collectively, has these same cultural effects.

Haven't you seen any ads today? Don't you think it's about time for Absolut to kill the bottle?

Drink up,
Doug