First, I looked up my citation instructions for MLA style. Here’s what Purdue OWL tells me: source: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/08/ Basic Book Format The author’s name or a book with a single author’s name appears in last name, first name format. The basic form for a book citation is: Last Name, First Name. Title of Book. City of Publication, Publisher, Publication Date. *Note: the City of Publication should only be used if the book was published before 1900, if the publisher has offices in more than one country, or if the publisher is unknown outside North America.

 

Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 1–33.

Keywords

advertising, co-opting, counterculture, commodity, hipster, bohemian

 

Summary

In this first chapter of his book, author Thomas Frank outlines our complicated relationship to what happened in the American sixties and how conservatives and liberals think back upon that decade today. Frank argues that though we have moved beyond the cultural wars of that era, including the hippie movement, some of the ideas of “revolution” and “rebellion” remain with us today, and remain complex. Those attitudes frame the way we think about culture, style, and fashion, but “hippie” has also become a common pejorative term, particularly among the affluent middle class.

A key component of Frank’s argument is that it is not enough to merely say that businesses “co-opted” the authenticity of counterculture. Frank wants to add nuance to this idea, in part by suggesting that “counterculture” itself was shaped by popular culture and mass media.

 

Reflection

Frank provides some thorough commentary about how the advertising industry picked up and continues to use the language of the sixties—language of rebellion, expression, liberation, and freedom that are affiliated with the hippie and progressive movements of the sixties. He discusses how companies have borrowed sixties imagery and culture to sell products for half a century now. This makes for a complicated situation, in which the sixties have been commodified. Individuals who actually participated in the cultural moment of the sixties and people who have since been inspired by it might feel negatively about the ways companies and advertising have used those messages to create brands and market products, considering that a primary message of the sixties is that corporations and consumerism controlled too much of our everyday lives.

This seems to be a major problem worth considering from the inside. If one were to create a television show set in the sixties, from the point of view of advertising employees, one could open up a conversation about what happens when ideas that begin in the creative arts and social justice movements are co-opted and turned into marketable, profitable slogans. This process—cycling of messages into pop-culture commodities—continues to happen today.

A person in advertising who participates in this process might have a complicated life. They might feel a combination of guilt and drive—as they know that they are earning money, but it might come at the expensive of exploiting groups of people or pieces of American culture.

Personally, I find myself resisting Frank’s take of the sixties. He’s very apologetic of corporate culture, and seems to want to right some wrongs he thinks that scholars have brought to corporations. I’m skeptical of how far he seems to want to go in this direction, as it feels to might like it then oversimplifies the other side—including the relationship of the counterculture movement to social justice and civil rights.

 

Quotables

“While acknowledging the success of the civil rights and antiwar movements, scholarly accounts of the decade…generally depict the sixties as a ten-year fall from grace, the loss of a golden age of consensus, the end of an edenic epoch of shared values and safe centrism.” (1)

“Regardless of the tastes of Republican leaders, rebel youth culture remains the cultural mode of the corporate moment, used to promote not only specific products but the general idea of life in the cyber-revolution.” (4)

“Other than the occasional purveyor of stereotype and conspiracy theory, virtually nobody has shown much interest in telling the story of the executives or suburbanites who awoke one day to find their authority challenged and paradigms problematized.” (6)

“This book is a study of co-optation rather than counterculture, an analysis of the forces and logic that made rebel youth cultures so attractive to corporate decision-makers rather than a study of those cultures themselves.” (7)

“This is a study of business thought, but in its consequences it is necessarily a study of cultural dissent as well: its promise, its meaning, its possibilities, and, most important, its limitations. And it is, above all, the story of the bohemian cultural style’s trajectory from adversarial to hegemonic; the story of hip’s mutation from native language of the alienated to that of advertising.” (8)

“If we really want to understand American culture in the sixties, we must acknowledge at least the possibility that the co-opters had it right, that Madison Avenue’s vision of the counterculture was in some ways correct.” (9)

“It was this sudden mass defection of Americans from square to hip that distinguished the culture of the 1960s—everything from its rock music to its movies to its generational fantasies to its intoxicants—and contemporary historical myths have trouble taking into account.” (13)

“Contemporary academic readings of youth culture are considerably more sophisticated than those of the 1960s and 1970s, but they continue to echo a recognizable version of the Mailer thesis—that hip constitutes some kind of fundamental adversary to a joyless, conformist consumer capitalism.” (17)

 

Borrowed Sources

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987)

Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1995)

Norman Mailer, “The White Negro” (essay, 1959)

Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1969)