Rating: 
Summary: Boring Smug and Stale
Review: John Seabrook's book sounds promising. A thoughtful essay on how marketing and culture have become virtually the same thing. However, it becomes clear early on that Seabrook is quite proud of his associations in the literary world, name dropping relentlessly while prattling on about his priveleged upbringing in a home filled with his fathers beautiful suits.It's a shame that I didn't consider his thesis of Nobrow more carefully before I bought the book. Basically, Seabrook claims that there used to be a disntinction between Hi-Brow (elite cultre) and Lo-Brow (consumer culture) but that the distinction no longer exists and all culture is consumer culture. However, this is not a "new" culture of No-Brow (where there is neither high nor low). The reason there is neither high nor low is that low won, so there is no reason for the distinction. No-brow is a conceit that doesn't hold up to serious scrutiny. This idea of no-brow is an excuse to write about all the assignments Tina Brown sent him on. It's also sort of stale. The way Seabrook refers to a Chemical Brothers concert as transcedent is a little embarrassing and in fact doesn't make a persuasive case as to why that is any more or less valid than finding transcendence at the opera house. It's a smug and vapid generalization that he tries to hide behind his own experience as an older man enjoying the music just as much as the kids he is around. I'm halfway through and I don't think I'll finish. This book isn't working as analysis or fiction or biogrpahy so I recommend you pass.
Rating: 
Summary: Nobrow - No Thesis, No Analysis, No Coherence
Review: Mr. Seabrook's book Nobrow: the Culture of Marketing and the Marketing of Culture, much like Mr. Vidal's Live from Golgotha, begins with a wonderful idea whose author is unable to bring to fruition. Such a title is pregnant with possibilities. One would expect a furtherance of the thesis of Culture, Inc., Mr. Herbert Schiller's excellent but relatively unknown book from the 1980s. Sadly, Nobrow is no such furtherance. It does not even further its own thesis. Furthermore, it does not even seem to have a thesis. The book itself is infuriating. So intriguing is the title and its implied thesis that one continues reading hoping it will improve, that all the meaningless forays into whom Mr. Seabrook knows and what type of music he finds appealing will end and be replaced by trenchant analysis of a very serious problem, the decay of our culture into a heap of compost through the neglect and cynicism of American marketing firms. It never does. It simply rambles on aimlessly. The few pithy observations and histories of decline are spread too thinly to be of comfort. Even more disturbing is Mr. Seabrook's seeming disinterest in this decline. He seemingly accepts without regret that he himself is a Nobrow, neither terribly interested in traditional high culture nor regretful of its displacement by decadence and triviality. If the book was said to have any argument at all to put forward, it would be that to be it is very "cool" to be "in the know" or "buzz" (Mr. Seabrook's word) of the world of popular culture. There is no history of the development of Nobrow culture, nor is there any analysis of its effects. There are only disconnected recollections, observations, and a few histories, but nothing ties them together into any coherent thesis. The decline of the New Yorker from a magazine of quality to something less serious than Vanity Fair is a potential cornerstone for a devastating indictment of Nobrow culture, but the indictment is never handed down. The entire reaction to the rise of Nobrow culture seems to be taken in stride with the penultimate dictum of our times, "well, whatever...never mind." The sting of being enticed to purchase the book by the glorious promise of a well wrought argument concerning the decline of our culture and to discover it to be nothing more than tedious, gossipy trivia is very aggravating. Furthermore, the disconnectedness of the entire book brings to mind Neil Postman's observations that the students he has met in his classes over the past ten years seem not to understand the idea of cause and effect in their writing. Mr. Seabrook suffers from this problem. If one chapter connects to another to further the thesis (if one could be found) of the book, it is seemingly unintentional. Give this book a pass. Go and obtain a copy of Culture, Inc. by Herbert Schiller or One Nation, Two Cultures by Gertrude Himmelfarb. What you sought in Nobrow will be found in these books.
Rating: 
Summary: a few interesting insights
Review: Nobrow has one very interesting moment: Seabrook declares that the highbrow/lowbrow dichotomy has collapsed and in its place has risen "nobrow" where one's knowledge about culture, about all things mainstream (and "alternative" things which are also mainstream) determines one's coolness. in place of "highbrow"-ness is a "heirarchy of hotness." i think this is a pretty insightful piece of cultural analysis. however, the rest of the book lacks an analytical approach and most of the book details seabrook's experiences at the new yorker magazine. at its worst, this book reads like a long boring gossip column about the new yorker. at its best, the book can offer small snippets of insight about our cultural moment.
Rating: 
Summary: A smart book for people with small attention spans.
Review: Nobrow is a fun ride - a smart book for people with small attention spans. His quick visits with popculture 'tastemakers' are insightful and interesting if not terrably deep. His arguements for his Nobrow theory are many but by the end I felt that for every arguement FOR Nobrow I could think of one AGAINST Nobrow. The book itself is a work of Nobrow - I suppose that's the idea. It's little more than repackaged best bits, or directors cut, from Seabrooks recent New Yorker pieces, tied together with banal reporting on walking through Times Square and Sunday shopping on Prince St. Knopf publishing a book by a posh New Yorker writer who takes such pleasure in how many times he can mention Bananna Republic and Helmut Laing in a book is the crux of Nobrow.
Rating:
Summary: "no-brow" writing but good information
Review: Seabrook has an excellent story to tell-- that of how our marketing mind has changed; how America now creates product with intrinsic marketing. He makes the transition to a marketing culture understandable in an "oh-yes, I knew that!" sort of way. However, at times to book feels like a first draft as his writing style sinks to casual information rather than knowledgeable reporting. A worthy read if you have anything to do with marketing/selling/creating/envisioning...it gives you an better understanding of today's aged 15-35 buying psychology!
Rating:
Summary: Buzz is just the same old hype.
Review: Seabrook offers a series of fresh observations of "buzz" culture in this book, including MTV from the inside, alternative band concerts (he describes his own drug use during one of them), profiles of George Lucas, David Geffen, and a fourteen-year-old rock musician hyped as the next Cobain (his CD and video failed). Seabrook contends that there is no difference between this culture and what was once considered "high" culture, mainly because he likes the "low" stuff and Tina Brown (then his editor at The New Yorker magazine) preferred it to more "serious" subjects. I enjoy pop culture too, but do not buy the idea that cultural distinctions have collapsed. Seabrook also equates marketing with culture (it's the closing line of the book), which suggests that advertising and the product it advertises are one and the same. That's true of MTV, where the video exists to promote the album and the cable network. But "Puff Daddy" is not going to displace Verdi's Otello, or the novels of Ralph Ellison, any time soon. In short, as good as Seabrook's observations are, I question his analysis. The best parts of this book are the shrewd descriptions of the immiscible cultures that coexist in the same locale, such as a music superstore, or even Times Square. He had only to look more carefully at their failure to mix to understand why Brown couldn't survive at The New Yorker, as well as why that magazine changed from trendsetter to trend-follower under her editorship.
Rating:
Summary: hypnotized by the Void, we soldier on through the crudscape.
Review: Sorta. Hard to imagine taking all that MTV pseudo-culture even half seriously. Snoop Dogg is sooooo cute ! O Wow. Mmmmmm. chapter six. Sunday in Soho. Lets take a walk with John Seabrook and be fascinated with all the groovy stuff he finds fascinating. Saith he: "These cultural equites rise and fall in the stock market of popualar opinion, and therefore one has to manage one's portfolio of investments with care. No value endures; everything shifts through the marketplace of opinion". Cripes. Reads like the essay of a precocious high school senior. Earnest, intellectually uncoordinated, insightful in spite of itself, rather like a companion volume to Glamorama. Then you realize that Andy Warhol said it all so much better.
Rating:
Summary: Aimless, self absorbed, useless book
Review: The book cover makes it sound like this book is about the culture and sociological changes. In fact, it's basically a description of the author meeting a few people and talking about a few things, all loosely based on the fact that high culture and low brow have merged into one. What I expected was the convergence of such two different types of cultures to be explained in a thought provoking, interesting manner. A smart sociological conscience book. Instead, I basically got John Seabrook's random and pointless observations. He describes the change not by numbers, graphs, professional opinions, numerous sources, but instead just merely points a few random examples, like his closet, the movement of his office from one building to another, how he met a kid guitarist. Absolutely nothing eye opening, noteworthy, interesting, or concrete. This is the equivalent of me talking about the culture and history of Hawaii by showing slides of my vacation. It really is that useless.
Rating:
Summary: Aimless, self absorbed, useless book
Review: The book cover makes it sound like this book is about the culture and sociological changes. In fact, it's basically a description of the author meeting a few people and talking about a few things, all loosely based on the fact that high culture and low brow have merged into one. What I expected was the convergence of such two different types of cultures to be explained in a thought provoking, interesting manner. A smart sociological conscience book. Instead, I basically got John Seabrook's random and pointless observations. He describes the change not by numbers, graphs, professional opinions, numerous sources, but instead just merely points a few random examples, like his closet, the movement of his office from one building to another, how he met a kid guitarist. Absolutely nothing eye opening, noteworthy, interesting, or concrete. This is the equivalent of me talking about the culture and history of Hawaii by showing slides of my vacation. It really is that useless.
Rating:
Summary: Seabrook is self-aware enough to admit his own bias
Review: The book has some poignant insights that made me think and sometimes laugh - like when he's in a museum in NY and sees an attractive area of space, only to find out he's looking out the window onto the street - really a great metaphor for the whole book. Another reviewer gave a great synopsis of what I consider one of the most valuable ideas in the book: the etymology of culture. The very influences of the original words still mingle and impact what we know as "culture." As far as John Seabrook, I must defend that he is aware of his affluent upbringing and fully admits it, and fully admits that he probably can't completely know just how that has influenced his ideas of culture - most notably, while at a lecture in his youth he revealed a moment when he was speaking out about "taste" and figured out he was too affluent to understand what he was talking about. Too few non-fiction authors I read these days include moments of realizations of their shortcomings. All we can ask of authors are to pay their respects to what they currently know as their shortcomings or shortsightedness, and try to gain knowledge and understanding of their flaws with time. I think John is a good example of someone who works with and learns his subject while still remaining humble enough about his perspective on it. Actually, I considered this one of the most positive aspects of the book. His references to his father, to me, were just an attempt at being honest in helping the reader understand where he was coming from in discussing culture. If you like broad socio-cultural analysis and wonder why some people pay two hundred dollars for t-shirts, this book is worth reading.
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