THE REVOLUTION WILL BE . . . CARBONATED?

We’ve been talking in class about the relationship between countercultures and consumer culture, but what is “counterculture”? What does counterculture “counter”? And before defining “counterculture,” it seems that we need to first define “culture.” Some people get very upset when they hear the music of Iggy Pop or The Flaming Lips used to sell cruises and cars in TV commercials. According to some people, these artists have "sold out." But is counterculture necessarily counter to the culture of consumption? If culture involves consuming, and if counterculture is a kind of culture, then isn’t counterculture also a kind of consumer culture? Is there even such a thing as a culture--counter or otherwise--that exists outside the economics of buying and selling? Is it simply nostalgia masquerading as concern for a genuinely "counter" culture that no longer seems to counter anything? At the very least, there's something ironic in the proprietary rhetoric of the counterculture consumer who states that artist such-and-such has "sold out."


As an example of countercultural signs used in consumer advertising, here’s a Pepsi commercial that aired during the inauguration. The commercial is part of Pepsi’s “Refresh Everything” campaign, which seems to be an extension of the older “Pepsi Generation” (viz "My Generation") campaign.




Notice how iconic images of youth culture/counterculture/rebellion are used to sell the product, the narrative cleverly moving from one historical era to another. So for example the man with Pepsi in hand who steps through space (from Berlin to some grunge stage, maybe Seattle?) AND time (from fall of Berlin Wall, 1989, to 1990s grunge scene). What connects the flapper to the hippie to the grunge audience isn’t a countercultural ideology but a consumer product: Pepsi. On a denotative level, Pepsi has but a small part, a cameo in each historical moment. On a connotative level, it’s the one thing connecting all people, all places, all times; and it's what "refreshes everything," from one generation to the next. Of course, there’s an acoustic corollary in the Who song, “My Generation,” which ties together the images into a single narrative, albeit changing musical genres to fit the “sound” of each generation (Big Band, Disco, Grunge, Rap, and so on). It’s Heraclitus the Ad Man: Pepsi is change, change is constant.

To help prepare everyone for secondary research, please submit a comment to this post that includes a hyperlink to one website that focuses on analysis of counterculture or the use of countercultural signs in advertising. Below the hyperlink, type a sentence or two in your comment that summarizes the website (name of website, what is found there, useful resources, and so on). Suggestion: try to post a link to an edu (“education”) or org (“organization) site versus com (“commercial”) site.