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Chevy: An American Revolution
There’s an old Time Magazine that somebody left in my bathroom. Kanye West is on the front cover, advertised as “More GQ Than Gangster” and on the back is a full page ad for the Chevrolet SS. Every time I look at it, all I see is their slogan: “An American Revolution.”
There’s a great passage in yippie leader Jerry Rubin’s book “Do It!” where he is talking about how a dying culture destroys the potency of language:
A dying culture destroys everything it touches.
Language is one of the first things to go.
Nobody really communicates with words anymore. Words have lost their emotional impact, intimacy, ability to shock and make love.
Language prevents communication.
CARS LOVE SHELL
How can I say
“I love you”
after hearing:
“CARS LOVE SHELL.”
He of course then goes on to extol the glories of the word “Fuck,” but I think his point is well made either way. And I think we see exactly this same thing happening in the Chevy slogan (and countless others) “An American Revolution.” We see a culturally and historically important happening - the American Revolution - conflated with a product that has nothing whatsoever to do with it. If you hear this association made often enough, there’s a good chance your mind is going to start projecting Chevrolet products backwards anachronistically into the historical American Revolution. That is, if you even remember it at all.
In either case though, the cultural potency and historic importance of the actual original event is diluted each time the ad slogan is repeated, and the original meaning of it is twisted. It’s a technique that Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard made heavy use of, and which he said was adopted from the Nazis by PR practitioners: redefining the meaning of words.
And just in case you think ad people aren’t consciously making use of these techniques, check this out:
Chevrolet is using “An American Revolution” as its tag line for a major new ad campaign that began Friday, Dec. 19. Chevrolet is trying a new tone with the ads: “acceptable rebellion,” said Kim Kosak, Chevrolet’s general director for advertising and sales promotion, at a press event here last week. She described the campaign’s message as “confident without being arrogant and fun at the same time.”
And thus, by association in the public mind, the actual real American Revolutionary War is re-defined as being an “acceptable rebellion”. With this kind of patterning going on culturally, it’s no wonder protests against those in power have become so utterly toothless. Our feelings of rebellion are all channeled into the acquisition of products and entraining us to be “acceptable” and “confident without being arrogant.” Where’s the real American Revolution when we need one?
- Revolutions & Rebellions
- Make sure the revolution is profitable
- We’re Not Trespassing!
- Masons and the Revolutionary War
- Thomas Jefferson Quotes
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May 30th, 2006 at 5:30 pm
More people are going to have to watch American Beauty, American Pyscho, Fight Club, and other such movies which protest mindless consumerism. You know there is definately a thread out in pop culture which says all this commercialism, consumerism is kind of sicko.
I just realized something right now which is kind of funny. I just finished drinking my delicious coca-cola near my super hip Dell computer. But now I have to go drive the great winding highways with my Ford and buy an American flag at Wal-mart (seriously I have to).
May 30th, 2006 at 5:42 pm
I have been mourning the loss of precision, meaning, and depth in the English language. I’m not sure what to do about it, except maybe get lost in Canterbury Tales and reconnect with how words feel when they are not slathered in new meaning like the twentieth layer of wallpaper in an abandoned funhouse.
Also, it’s bit of a chestnut, but have you read George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language?
(emphasis mine)
May 30th, 2006 at 5:45 pm
Well that’s just the problem though - they see that some of us have a dissatisfaction with this stuff and then create products and media to encourage us to feel that way, thereby channeling our anger into acceptable forms of rebellion…
May 30th, 2006 at 6:34 pm
[…] Maybe I’ve just been reading too much Jerry Rubin and Philip K. Dick lately, but I had a really vivid dream a couple of nights ago which related to a near-futuristic USA and a rebellion (and no, not the Chevrolet kind). […]
May 30th, 2006 at 8:19 pm
[…] While we’re on the topics of deviance and stripping language of meaning, there’s another quote from Jerry Rubin’s “Do It!” that I think is really great. I don’t know if this is supposed to be a real or fictionalized conversation, but it works either way: Cops enter an occupied university building to arrest students: […]
May 31st, 2006 at 8:15 am
I don’t know about American Beauty, but American Psycho and Fight Club were both originally books.
The most subversive revolutionary ideas come from books. Movies, TV, top 40 radio: all that stuff is instantly digestible. They are easily tampered with and completely capable of being co-opted by mass culture.
Books take a while, and contain more explosive ideas than an entire album of protest tunes. Yes, there is crap lit out there, but smart people can tell the difference between John Grisham and Dave Eggers.
The true subversives have always been writers. Even Rubin and Abbie Hoffman conceded this point when they wrote their respective books.
Books demand that the reader actively pursue another realm of thought, which includes language. The best books reinvent language for the reader. It uses the tricks of the fascist propagandist against itself: redefining language is what good writers get paid to do.
That’s why the old guard always decries the seeming lack of literacy among the youth. They are afraid that there will one day be a generation where none of its progeny have ever read a book.
Fortunately, there are youngsters out there who seek out the old ways. I was one of those kids, and as I get older I hope to meet more in the future.
May 31st, 2006 at 10:54 am
“The most subversive revolutionary ideas come from books. Movies, TV, top 40 radio: all that stuff is instantly digestible. They are easily tampered with and completely capable of being co-opted by mass culture.”
Hang on there…”movies” don’t have to be instantly digestible. I see this a lot lately…this idea that film is somehow unapproachable and not worthy of analysis simply because in it’s mainstream form, it’s easily digestible.
The medium of film itself is not flawed…what is flawed is the way we’ve all been brainwashed into certain expectations and assumptions. You’re right in that it’s easier to co-opt moving pictures to tweak for a specific agenda, but that doesn’t render the medium pointless when it comes to communicating subversive ideas. You can make a movie about anything you please. All you need is access to a digital video camera and a computer. DV “tapes” are around $10. The web is a perfect theater that plenty of people can gain admission to.
If people in this world of conspiracy and subversive activities and ideas would embrace the medium (now that it’s dirt cheap and just about anyone in the first world can get access to it), we might see some truly interesting ideas come from the world of film. And I don’t mean that in a literal way, like “Now everyone should go out and film their own conspiracy theory movie!!”…I mean that now that the medium of film is cheap and do-able, maybe folks that have a better grasp on nuance and myth than the usual Hollywood asswipe can have a shot at making some truly amazing art.
You can watch a good film 20 times over and still discover new bits and pieces of information, plot and nuance you didn’t catch the first time around.
Film is just two dimensional artwork that moves and has a soundtrack.
May 31st, 2006 at 11:07 am
OTOH an odd Clarion call came at the end of a Mr Clean car wash commercial I heard last night. After this guy uses the product on his boss ’stang, and marvels at the shiny sheeting action, at the very end of the ad a female vioce comes from off camera and declares ala Pistis Sophia:
“Now you’ll have more time with your mind!”
what a strange thing to say…
May 31st, 2006 at 12:44 pm
What the heck? That’s totally freakin weird!
June 1st, 2006 at 2:11 pm
It makes kmee think of Ubik. In that novel, Ubik first appears as these really stupid ads for some ambiguous product–a deodorant, a beverage (eye forget exactly)…only slowly does the lead character begin to realize that it’s a message and a consciousness concealed inside the ads…like in his other books, the true god has to sneak in under the radar and evade notice by the archons. The divine first appears in the dustbin…
There’s a potential to really treat ads this way…divorce the true messages from the bullshit that it’s covered in…Like when Nike had “Just do it” as a slogan, that is an admonition, that yes, lots of folks could really use some heading in their lives (Just do it–Live); even if Nike was aiming to do what the admen love to do, steal the soul of a true sentiment and sell us slave-made shoes. (Tangent: The Heaven’s Gaters, as demonstrated by the identical Nikes peaking out from under their shrouds certainly took another meaning from “Just do it” along with the program to buy footwear–but that ain’t the only meaning to be found.)
This is a dangerous way–treating all ads and propoganda as omens and bits of QBL; the “paranoid” and the “conspiracy theorists” are doing this, with varying degrees of ludidity and consciousness and it can be positive in more individually liberating ways; or it could just be another way to rationalize behavior that is really following a different program (e.g. “Oh, I’m reading Kaballah now because of Kaballah energy drink and I know the beverage is whoring mysticism, but, well, I bought this can in my hand because, um, I like the taste/it’s ironic/fill in rationalization here).
It’s a tricky thing. The Situationists saw this quandery and yet, in the end, their method of “detourning” advertising has been reabsorbed by marketing itself and even Adbusters has not been above allowing Nike to buy ads that “detourne” Nike in their own magazine…(pardon the lack of a link on this one, don’t have the google search record handy).
“Now you’ll have more time with your mind!”–what could this mean? and if it’s just a mind divorced of body/ dissociated, isn’t that part of the trance repeatedly induced by the PTB (whoever “they” are)? Yet, what real “Sophianic” messages might we glean from this seeming non sequiter?
June 1st, 2006 at 7:25 pm
Red, I lumped movies in there because it is a more passive medium than sitting down reading a book, like watching TV. But you make a point that it doesn’t have to be instantly digestible, and that’s true… of ALL mediums.
For every “Finnegans Wake” there’s a ghost-written book or a romance novel or a Grisham ‘thriller’ that puts people’s brains to sleep. Likewise, for every movie like “Un Chien Andalou” that challenges the status quo, there’s a “Pearl Harbor” or “Dude Where’s My Car” just waiting to sedate the masses. For every Captain Beefheart making music that snaps you out of a trance, there’s plenty of music out there that puts you into the trance.
However, reading takes more activity than just sitting down and looking at something. Like a painting in a museum, a good book asks not only to be looked at and pored over but contemplated. Good movies do the same thing but are also more likely to remain ‘uncontemplated’ because you’re just sitting there, watching things happen.
You can’t just read a book while you fold laundry, but I can watch countless hours of movies and complete a number of different chores as I watch. Same with music.