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Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler ( W. W. Norton & Company )
Release Date: 1997-10-01
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List Price: $19.95
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Product Description
Culture has been colonized by enterprise. Mass entertainment has become the economic dynamo that brings the public to the consuming fold and consolidates the power of business over the mind. Telecommunications and entertainment giants have erected a powerful "Culture Trust" and business has taken over the popular imagination. For the last decade "The Baffler" magazine has been hailed as the most perceptive critic of these developments. This work features "The Baffler"'s best essays on the business of culture and culture business.
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Amazon.com Review
In this thought-provoking collection of essays, editor Thomas Frank and other contributors to the contrarian journal the Baffler examine the unprecedented ascendancy of business as the dominating force in American life. If the closest historical parallel is with the Gilded Age and its all-powerful robber barons, Frank and his ilk clearly see themselves as the muckrakers out to expose the absurdities and abuses of big business. Today, however, advertising has come to permeate every aspect of our society, and corporations are in the business of manufacturing culture--what Frank calls the "Culture Trust." These essays analyze the ways in which this Culture Trust has co-opted the power of dissent by appropriating the language and symbolism of nonconformist youth culture, from hippie slang to grunge fashion; in other words, when the media markets rebellion, it becomes just another consumer choice. As evidence, the essayists explore the image of consumer as rebel pioneered by publications such as Details and Wired, as well as the preeminence of "revolutionary" business gurus such as Tom Peters. The result is a highly original book, a satirical and savage indictment of '90s consumerist culture.
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 The Day Cultural Studies Changed
I'm not sure if The Baffler is still being published regularly and, if not, too bad because it was a small magazine that regularly published thoughtful and provocative essays of the old school (and I mean this in the best possible sense): they focused on the people and conditions of cultural production rather than consumption. Anyone who went to college in the 1990s knows the story of innovative consumers of pop music/soap operas/action thrillers and how they "negotiated" and "reappropriated" these products, but Fank and Co. turn there lenses elsewhere, to the producers mostly, and that what makes the Baffler so refreshing.
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 A bunch of white guys sitting around talking ( billow2 )
I actually agree with most of the analysis of culture, media, and business that Frank and his frat boys turn out but it doesn't change a thing as long as they are replicating the power structures they rail against by creating an in-club of overwhelmingly male hepcats.
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Some interesting insights ( jimmieb )
A collection of some of the best writing from the magazine known for its scathing critiques of modern business and media practices. A good read, although at times I felt like they just hated everything. Still, some interesting looks into how rebellion and "alternative", among other things, have been co-opted by the mainstream and thus stripped of meaning.
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enough already.. ( dan@dantrachtman.com )
Here we go again. The media giants are evil. They have consolidated to the point where a handful now own all the major information venues. They hijack culture in order to sell more schlock. They have turned rebellion into a marketable commodity.
A&R men are sleazy and just out to make a buck.
Corporate America is sick and sucking the life out of us. Publishers do this or that just to sell more books. Etc.
It goes on and on. The essays are really all over the place. A few are interesting and informative, but most are just more of the same negativity we are now accustumed to. Perhaps the essays werent so trite in the mid 90s when they were written, but Ive personally had enough. Not sure if there was one positive, remotely uplifting thing in any of the essays. Understandably, that isnt what the book is about, but I just found it often slanted and overkill. For ex, one full essay is devoted to how Wired magazine is dedicated only to selling its sponsors goods and fueling desire for constant consumption. The author seems to have overlooked that the magazine also discusses exciting scientific breakthroughs and offers articles from some of todays most well respected thinkers.
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Insiteful and funny ( ccolt-com )
This collection of essays provides a gutsy, incisive, and energetic critique of American consumer culture that surpasses and even ridicules the limp, flaccid, self-referential verbiage that academics try to pass off as a "radical", and "critical" examination of culture and power. "Commodify Your Dissent" is a series of critical essays, or "salvos" as the authors prefer to call them, that were printed in The Baffler during the 90's largely in response to the hypocrisy, and gluttony of the America's expanding techno-consumer culture. Using lucid, forthright language, direct examples, and actual critical thinking (not the mental self-gratification generated by tenured radicals) the authors demonstrate how corporate America has commercialized the concept of revolution and employed it along marketing and production guidelines that are-guess what-conformist and conservative. In the 90's culture, as these essays so aptly demonstrate, "free thinking, revolution" and "breaking the rules" really amounted to a double-speak ideology centered around buying more gadgets and helping companies to make more money, a process that was reinforced in words and letters by such "radical" cultural critics as Camille Paglia.This book is bound to anger a lot of readers because, it's gutsy, direct, and ruthless in its battering of the misused tropes and recycled clichés that enable legions of consumers, workers, and managers to feel like they're breaking the rules when in fact they are merely conforming to and reinforcing them. I know it's a hard fact to face, but buying a recycled pair of bell-bottoms is not an act of rebellion.
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