Rebel Society Selling the counterculture
Riding waves sells. Period. And it doesn’t take a marketing degree to understand why. The faces of surf, skate and snow littering our billboard landscape offer a one-way ticket to cool, free with every purchase. Women buy L’Oreal because Kelly Slater says he’s “worth it”. Tony Hawk has ‘hawked’ everything from junk food to videogames. And Shaun White, who graced the cover of Huck a few months back, has the stature to sell HP computers through the magic of TV.
But for those who believe ‘real’ subcultures must be exclusive, mass-produced access to the in-crowd packs a fatal blow. It’s the age-old tale of every countercultural wave. Word spreads. The line between alternative and mainstream becomes blurred. And, eventually, fallen heroes stand trial for having sold their souls.
Today, the market for rebellion is big business. And it’s our cultural icons – men and women who deserve their legendary status – that are lumbered with the ‘sell out’ tag. But before hanging our greatest talents, should we not first ask: can you not make a living and still be a rebel? Or does our cash-crazed generation mark the end of the countercultural bloodline?
From the moment the hippies decided to stick it to ‘The Man’ (read: corporations, capitalist pricks, the system), the alternative-mainstream divide has been the barometer of one’s place in the zeitgeist. Being unpopular is cool, following the crowd most certainly isn’t, and capitalism – with its toxic consumerism and lust for mass marketing – is the enemy.
The rebel faction of surf, skate and snow has earned its place in the history of the counterculture. Since early California surfers caught their first waves, surfing has stood diametrically opposite capitalist values. Being free to surf a perfect set meant opting out of a nine-to-five reality. When the Z-Boys stormed Dogtown in the seventies, their heady mix of punk rock and surfing style made skateboarding the ultimate rebel culture. Then came the youngest maverick – snowboarding, a fine way for antisocial adolescents to disrupt civilised ski resorts. Surfers were slackers, skaters were delinquents, and snowboarders were aggressive liabilities.
“Skateboarding was the gateway drug to being rebellious,” says Shepard Fairey, creator of the Obey Giant street art campaign. “It was never accepted as a sport, there’s nothing compulsory about it, and it’s totally individualistic.”
But the wave of youthful rebellion has hit a cultural impasse. The professional surfing circuit has turned a niche lifestyle into a lucrative competitive sport. Pro-skaters compete in the X Games for over a million dollars - another notch in a portfolio of product endorsements and sponsorship deals. And in 1998 snowboarding became a bona fide Olympic event, complete with rulebook and scoreboard.
Rebel culture’s commercial makeover has evoked a mixed bag of emotions. Whether it’s embraced by Generation X or condemned by sixties leftovers, one enigma evades all: did the rebels sell out or were they co-opted by ‘The Man’?
“Subcultures are the holy grail of branding,” says Sean Pillot de Chenecey, an alternative trends analyst who helps brands capture ‘cool’. With ten years of experience in advertising, our man on the inside knows why corporate suits want a piece of the freestyle action: “You should always link the brand to some authentic movement.”
Corporate co-optation is often accused of being the bad guy in this process. In other words, ‘The Man’ decided to mimic the rebellion, drain out the political threat, and sell back a diluted fake - all the while cashing in on the masses dying to be cool. For the anarchist, punk clothing lost its edge the moment it strolled down the catwalk.
For others, this sorry tale of abduction just doesn’t hold. “Co-optation is a myth,” says Andrew Potter, co-author of The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture and cultural pundit for Canadian alternative journal of politics This Magazine. “It mistakes the cultural effects of non-conformist behaviour as a political threat,” he explains. “Subcultures are simply underground scenes, and when they get popular, that’s all that’s happening - getting popular.”
But according to the great anti-hero gospel, becoming popular is as good as writing off your authenticity. And selling out is the cardinal sin.
“When I was seventeen, the great thing about punk was this real notion of selling out. It was something you just didn’t do,” says Sean. “Now, the whole point of creative culture is to make a living. There is no shame in selling out as there is no longer any notion of selling out.”
Andrew offers a different take. “Selling out never existed, because that would require some form of dissidence,” he says. “People need to stop pretending that they’re up to something more subversive than they really are.”
This revelation - despite dampening teenage rebel spirit - offers a get-out clause for any pro skater who’s ever been drawn and quartered for ‘cashing in’. If our so-called anti-heroes weren’t rebelling in the first place, appearing in a Doritos ad could be nothing more than good business sense.
In fact, according to Andrew, it is our very damn-the-man countercultural habits that fuel the demonised ‘c’ word: “Stylised rebellion creates goods that people compete over as a way of standing out from the crowd. So non-conformist behaviour actually makes consumption worse.”
Controversial words to any self-styled rebel. But when it comes to consumer society, boardsports fanatics are up there with the best of them. Between boots and boards, shoes and T-shirts, and whatever else you can slap a logo on, the whole industry is worth more than $10 billion in the United States alone.
“You need to decide whether you want to ride the cultural wave while it’s hot or not,” says Shepard, who has never lost sleep over producing graphics for brands like Sprite. “But if a graffiti artist or skater refuses to do an ad because they don’t want to sell out, I just hope it’s not sour grapes when they’re no longer in demand.”
But what impact do brands have on the subcultures they lust after? “Companies try to harvest and exploit culture from the people that make it,” says Shepard, fully aware that earning a buck has its downsides. “No matter how rebellious you try and stay, once something becomes absorbed by the dominant paradigm, people become numb to it. You have to keep evolving and not let things get stale.”
Few feel more disillusioned than Kalle Lasn, founder of anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters. “Young people today enter countercultural movements as passing fashions, and there’s very little else behind it,” he says. “They’ve grown up in a polluted mental environment of commercial messages, they’ve been lied to and propagandised since they were little babies crawling around a TV set and by the time they become teenagers they are no longer authentic human beings.”
For those plagued with a visceral fear of blending in with the crowd, today’s off-the-rack rebel style is a sure sign of cultural stagnation. According to these ‘founding’ members, a subculture is only as credible as the people who make it. “Newcomers to a subculture tend to act out the crap version they’ve been fed through advertising,” says Sean with the cynicism only a former Ad Executive can muster. “Take your London surfer who rocks up on some beach at the weekend in the most expensive gear straight out the box. They’ll look idiotic, but back in Shoreditch they look the business.”
Clearly, the alternative-mainstream defining line hinges on a question of authenticity. But what exactly is that elusive quality that makes a person or culture truly ‘authentic’? For Sean, it’s about staying commercial-free: “Subcultures that remain away from the public eye and don’t want to look like walking target markets covered in brands are by definition more authentic. They’re being themselves not being the brand.”
While defining who is and who isn’t keeping it real is somewhat elitist, it’s hard to ignore that countercultures of today are looking more and more like ‘the norm’. “Local scenes are percolating out to the periphery much more quickly thanks to MTV and the Internet,” says Andrew. “And because ‘cool’ always relied on the distinction between a scene and the mainstream, there is really no such thing as ‘cool’ anymore.”
For Kalle, the constant deluge of branding messages is a threat to individualism. Ever the activist, he believes defiant rebels must prepare for battle: “When authentic bottom-up cool has to compete with top-down corporate cool, you have to launch a counterattack, take back your subculture and make it authentic once again.”
Despite reports that we may be witnessing the death of cool, there is reason to be optimistic. “As long as there is a dominant culture, there will be a counterculture,” says Kalle. “The two have an organic symbiotic relationship and come and go like seasons.” Even Andrew agrees that a true alternative will always exist: “Subcultures have a self-radicalising tendency, an internal ratchet that makes each counterculture so extreme it will never become mainstream.”
The jury may still be out on who bought and sold the counterculture, but at least for now, one thing seems clear: as long as the culture of riding evolves as quickly as the act itself, ‘The Man’ will always trail the genuine rebel.
The eternal optimist, Shepard Fairey knows the secret to why the board-borne cultural hub will never be watered down: “It requires too much insanity to be a real stiff and do it.”
The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter is published in the UK by Capstone, £16.99, and in Canada and the United States by HarperCollins, $14.95.
www.rebelsell.com
www.captaincrikey.com
www.obeygiant.com
www.adbusters.org
This story originally appeared in Huck #003.
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