“I believe, in fact, that attempts to bring political protest together with ‘popular music’ - that is, entertainment music - are fot the following reason doomed from the start.
The entire sphere of popular music, even there where it dresses itself up in modernist guise is to such a degree inseparable from ‘Warencharakter’, from consumption, from the croos-eyed transfixion with amusement, that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial.
And I have to say that when somebody sets himself up, and for whatever reason accompanies maudlin music by singing something or other about Vietnam being unbearable… I find, in fact, this song unbearable, in that by taking horrendous and making it somehow consumable, it ends up wringing something like consumption-qualities out of it.”
Contradictions between consumer culture and the branding paradigm propel institutional shifts in both.
1. Firms compete to add value to their brands, guided by the principles of the extant branding paradigm. Aggressive firms continually push the envelope, innovating new techniques that push the principles to their logical extreme. These techniques create contradictions in consumer culture.
2. As consumers pursue the various statuses and desires that are valued within the extant consumer culture, they become collectively more knowledgeable and skilled
in enacting the culture, producing an inflation in what is valued. This inflation, combined with increasing literacy in how branding operates, produces reflexivity that challenges the accepted status of marketer’s actions.
Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding
DOUGLAS B. HOLT
