Pop [minus] Advertising
Last week’s nightlife intelligencer from New York Magazine featured a review of the now one year old Fresa Salvaje, a multimedia celebration that combines “projections of kitschy Mexican movies and fashion ads played on the walls, (with) New York City’s Latin expatriate hipster elite pogo-bopped to Spanish-language, nouveau-eighties electropop and vintage rock.”
This event can be interpreted as another manifestation of Lawrence Lessig’s Remix Culture, with an interesting combination of old and new. Its curator was qualified as having “a highly discerning taste for retro-kitsch,” which essentially means an ability to bring back to life decades-old pop artists in a way that sounds relevant today.
At the end of the note there is a quote from an MTV employee condescendingly dismissing the trend as “nostalgic,” which caught my attention because it’s coming from someone representing the modern world of pop, the one that might eventually become trendy in 30 years. The question is then why 70’s pop can perfectly fit a Williamsburg party while modern Latin pop is bluntly rejected? I doubt is just nostalgia.
An article published in the October 15th issue of American Way brought me back to this question on a recent plane trip back from South America. Gregory Katz wrote a note about Ferrari titled “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” in which a Ferrari executive justified their lack of investment in Advertising due to the fact that it is too ordinary for the brand, which solely relies on its sponsorship of Scuderia Ferrari to communicate key brand messages.
The structure of modern pop music relies on a hefty marketing machine that churns out advertising in all sizes and formats. It works to some extent because it turns these artists into celebrities with plenty of dollars attached to the status. However, on the other hand it creates rejection that might not necessarily be linked to the actual music but to what it represents. Advertising is then working as an invisible signifier for ordinary in the same way viewed by Ferrari’s brand folks. This might be a good reason why tons of indie bands fail at launch whenever picked up by a big record label: they get on the advertising train way too soon and it interferes with the development of a clear, relevant identity.
It is likely that we bump into some vintage Paulina Rubio in 2036, already stripped from all the baggage of advertising, within the virtual pages of the trendy nightlife guide of the future.
