SLSL Intro: "rock 'n' roll will never die" meets "the meta-Elvis"

[Dave Monroe]

>From Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business
Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip
Consumerism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997), Ch. 1, "A
Cultural Perpetual Motion Machine: Management Theory
and Consumer Revolution in the 1960s," pp. 1-33 ...

   "The counterculture has long since outlived the
enthusiasm of its original participants and become a
more or less permanent part of the American scene, a
symbolic and musical language for the endless cycles
of rebellion and transgression that make up so much of
our mass culture. With leisure-time activities of
consuming redefined as 'rebellion,' two of late
capitalism's great problems could easily be met:
obsolescence found a new and more convincing language,
and citizens could symbolically resolve the
contradiction between their role as consumers and
their role as producers. The countercultural style has
become a permanent fixture on the American scene,
impervious to the angriest assaults of cultural and
political conservatives, because it so conveniently
and efficiently transforms the myriad petty tyrannies
of economic life—all the complaints about conformity,
oppression, bureaucracy, meaninglessness, and the
disappearance of individualism that became virtually a
national obsession during the 1950s—into rationales
for consuming. No longer would Americans buy to fit in
or impress the Joneses, but to demonstrate that they
were wise to the game, to express their revulsion with
the artifice and conformity of consumerism. The
enthusiastic discovery of the counterculture by the
branches of American business studied here marked the
consolidation of a new species of hip consumerism, a
cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust
with the falseness, shoddiness, and everyday
oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to
drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption."

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/259919.html

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13364.ctl

--- pynchonoid <pynchonoid at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/24/opinion/24DOWD.html
> 
> [...] 'the meta-Elvis.' [...] Rock 'n' roll and
> hip-hop used to be about protest; now they're the
> soundtrack of commodity capitalism, pushing cars,
> clothes, computers, vodka and running shoes. [...]

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