The Conquest of Cool : Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism

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Summary: Great Book
Review: An excellent examination of consumer culture and the way that corporate America has tried to deal with, understand, and co-opt youth culture (or did youth culture co-opt advertising?) Frank gets to the bottom of it all in an always entertaining look at advertising from the Madison Avenue years through the sixties. His examinations of various ad campaigns - such as Volvo who insisted in their ads that their cars were ugly and at least not as filled with defects as the cars they used to make - are insightful and well researched. In fact, this book is a necessary primer for anyone doing research on youth culture. It helped to change the way that I think about these issues and has become a text that I refer to often.

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Summary: ...
Review: Did Madison Avenue really "invent" the counterculture? Did it? Really?

According to Thomas Frank, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and presently the editor of The Baffler, Madison Avenue not only invented the counterculture, Madison Avenue shares many of the same values. That might be a lot to swallow at one time, but Frank does have all sorts of groovy statistics for us to consume. Going into summary detail about the completely rad history of marketing and advertising during the 1950s and 1960s, Frank gives us a panoramic view of boss advertisers discovering their funkadelic science while quaffing martinis and getting-down with Sammy Davis Jr and Norman Mailer--who, as we all know, was everywhere and originated everything. He shows how the 23 Skidoo sophistication of advertising mirrored the mores of the general culture, and that as the general culture began to show signs of latent sophistication without any help from its oh-so-cosmic commodifiers, the focus groups and marketeers were right there with them like barnicles on a ghost ship, learning how to rack-up the most impressionable groups like billiards on a table, learning where the trends and fashions were being generated and learning how to harness fashion slaves and trendoids for the parasitic purposes of profit and, of course, propaganda.

Frank also illustrates how the Sixties generation was the first generation in history to have been raised with advertising as an ambient force in their lives. Any wonder why they ended up rioting in the streets? Any wonder why marketers, even to this day, are having trouble getting the counterculture to feed at their horse-trough? Wanna figure for us why nearly everyone in America is hell-bent for self-satisfaction? What's next? Advertisers turning their commercials into snuff movies in order to cater to the Marilyn Manson crowd when it "comes of age"?

Frank completely ignores the existence of today's counterculture, nor does he seem to recognize that it is the same counterculture. What's even worse, Frank never once calls into question a loaded buzzword: counterculture. Counterculture? What's that? Another mass media stereotype? A shorthand way of describing a complex phenomenon? A way to get your copy down to where the goats can get it without missing the afternoon deadline?

What Frank does not show--perhaps because he doesn't quite understand it--is that the counterculture of the 1960s had (and has!) far more facets than most commentators allow. As a fashion trend, the counterculture indeed is more of a market fabrication than a genuine social movement. As a social movement, however, the counterculture is literally at odds with Madison Avenue--a threat in nearly every way--despite the fact that Madison Avenue was (and is!) in control of the mass media machinery upon which it depended. In light of this latter fact, it should be easy to comprehend that the counterculture is forced, through little fault of its own, into a sort of symbiotic relationship with the regime it countered. Madison Avenue, after all, is being used--at least as much as it uses cultural trends for its own self-aggrandizement.

Frank, like many present-day omsbudsmen of the era, confuses two definite forces: the counterculture and, of course, popular culture. Like the marketer-driven displacement of the punk movement--which never got much radio airplay because its music and its mores were considered unpalatable to the tastes and needs of advertisers--and its widely-perpetrated market-oriented replacement, New Wave, the counterculture/pop art mirror game is, consequently, getting smoked in The Conquest of Cool. Given that almost no one in America can come up with something original without Madison Avenue right there at his or her heels, it's really too bad anti-stalking laws don't apply to advertising agencies.

And, yes, it's obvious that we need commodities to survive. It's still not so obvious why we have to be commodified in the process.

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Summary: Advertising co-opted the counterculture and...?
Review: Frank's work with the Baffler and the Reader has always been enlightening and entertaining. As essays for the casual reader, his writing can do a lot of eye-opening. However, I don't think he can sustain his brand of cultural criticism for a book-length work. The problem, after Frank's thesis is repeated for the umpteenth time, is you finally say "So?" I personally always wind up picturing Frank in clothes he has spun himself, living off beans he is cultivating in a backyard seed plot, entertaining himself by sneering from his garret's window at the shallow "lifestyles" of every human being on the planet (except his own). I've always disliked the hypocritical, distant stance people like Frank (whose views I happen to mostly share)adopt when they tackle these issues. The great problem is how to relate these kinds of ideas without pretensions of immunity to the dominant cultural malaise, without relentlessly stereotyping the middle class, and without the hopelessly easy targeting of lame ducks, ducks that Frank seems to consider strong and insidious. Tom Frank, what are the alternatives? Where are the solutions?

Rating:
Summary: ...
Review: in fact, Frank's point is that advertising did NOT necessarily co-opt counterculture. if he labors over anything, it's his assertion that the Creative Revolution in business practically preceded the existence of a widespread counter-culture movement. as far as his scorn, it was rather obviously directed only at the baby-boomers and historians with bad memories...the ones who insist that 60s youth culture was completely non-commercial, the ones who need to believe in The Man (especially the man in the gray suit).

i thought that the book was extremely engaging. frank is very insightful, and his writing is entertaining. i laughed a lot, and said, "Right, exactly!" so many times. i did not get any sense that frank had any real trouble with the conquest of cool or even consumer culture. he develops his thesis so precisely that there was no room for censure. as far as offering a solution--the book doesn't present any Problem to be solved. it's an examination of the relationship between commercial and counter culture. Most importantly, it's a rethinking of that relationship through the lens of the late 50s and 60s.

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Summary: Great history of advertising...
Review: This was Tom Frank (founding editor of the Baffler, for those in the know) University of Chicago dissertation on advertising, and is absolutely fascinating. Frank's main focus is a Frankfurt School/classical Marxist critique of how the early 60s anti-advertising of people like Bill Bernbach (the guy responsible for the classic early VW beetle ads) worked to help create our ideas of 60s counterculture. As such, it's of interest to anybody fascinated by cultural theory, 20th c. American history, or corporate cultures and advertising. However, it's also useful to anybody involved in marketing, planning or advertising (even if your political views aren't of the college Marxist with capitalist parents school), simply because it's just a great history of advertising in the 20th century, and shifting attitudes towards advertising as a profession, from the idea that advertising was a hard science (propounded by David Ogilvy and others) to the idea that advertising was "an art." Most importantly, it's a fantastic read-Tom Frank is a great writer with a fantastic turn-of-phrase, and is better thinker than 90% of academics in the humanities today.

Rating:
Summary: The Essence Of Awful
Review: Thomas Frank has been endowed with a talent for writing tortured prose which is uniquely inelegant, the Washington Post should really recruit him, he could be much more effective at crippling the language there. Instead he makes do with whatever scraps of intellect he possess to write articles in obscure magazines one stumbles over occasionally in second hand bookstores, and this wretchedness. Thomas Frank is no more equipped to comment on the Sixties then Michael Crichton would be on Bertrand Russel.

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Summary: Required Reading in Today's Corporate World
Review: Thomas Frank has written one of the most important, and yet baffling, works on understanding the Megamachine and like others of his type (Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul), it will strike so close to home as to be actually uncomfortable to read and digest and still view the world as before. The thesis that Madison Ave. invented the counter-culture by co-opting the hip underground culture of the time is both brilliant and obvious; so obvious, in fact, that its very simplicity caused it to go unnoticed for years. That is the very essence of the Megamachine, the ability to absorb humanist and revolutionary trends, only to revise them in the very image of the machine and counter to their intended purposes. Only when up against another machine (fascism, Soviet Marxism, Chinese Marxism) does the Megamachine have to posit counter values. (i.e., Hollywood propaganda: "Why We Fight," Red Scare films, why Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as Dresden, were necessary for freedom, etc.)

I remember an interview with a rock star of the 60s who boasted that by publishing his music the Establishment was laying the very seeds for its own destruction. Nonsense. Nothing truly subversive would ever be allowed to pass through those hallowed commercial halls. Frank's book shows just how insidious the Megamachine is in its cultural hegemony.

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Summary: Zach Robbins, honestly...
Review: Thomas Frank's work in this book is extremely in depth, his knowledge of the marketing revolution of the 60's is probably the most exhaustive you will find, and this book is definitely worth reading. There are definitely problems with his writing and his ability to take the reader above the mundane details and obvious deductions of his work. However, the type of person willing to read this book is probably looking for pure information and not counting on any sort of entertaining odyssey, and that's good because it isn't very entertaining. The thesis is proved, and proved over again, and over again again. The same things are repeated over and over with different titles and contexts until one starts to wonder whether this book was really worth maxing out at 250 some odd pages. But such is the nature of information.