NKNL
Naomi Klein, No Logo – I read somewhere someone describing Naomi Klein’s deconstruction of Roots, the Canadian branded clothing store, and realised only then that her book, No Logo, was written by a thoughtful, academic Canadian who might give me some interesting Chuck Klosterman-like accounts of that weird Canadian branding phenomenon and its perturbed origins and effects. I, like Klein, remember seeing everyone in my grade six class stamped with the same boring Roots sweaters in the cold months, and the same boring Roots t-shirts in the warm months. I could never figure out what Roots was and why people were so fascinated by it. Five letters, a beaver, and you have a youth uniform. Why?
Klein has written a whole book about brands and brand culture. She relates personal histories and interactions with brands, she relates brand anecdotes, she cites statistics and reads trends into them, she discusses awareness and activism, she hypotheses and emits stern warnings about cultural trends that the unthinking masses follow like sheep. Her book is interesting, her ideas often striking, but ultimately she succumbs too often to an urge to ramble; and having read the same or similar points popping up in various parts of the book strengthens my belief that she could have benefitted greatly from a strong editor who could have trimmed the prose, consolidated the points, and chopped out 30% to 40% of the near-400 pages down to a tidy 250 pages or so.
Not all of her ideas are good, though, and while I cannot prove anything, I am suspicious of some of the conclusions she draws from simple statistics – she seldom sounds credible. The book is re-packaged as a 10th year anniversary edition, but branding and culture has marched on without No Logo – the book is in bad need of an update; there is, after all, nary a mention of Google, Yahoo! or Facebook to be seen, and the obsession with Nike (and especially with its then-CEO Phil Knight) is a bit overbearing. On top of that, many of the numbers are 1997 numbers, giving us a statistical snapshot of the pre-Britney Spears era.
The book often hits the mark: there’s an amusing discussion of Space Jam, Michael Jordan’s co-starring venture with Bugs Bunny, and comments like “Nike had some reservations about the implementation of the movie” over concerns that Jordan’s brand-hopping had sullied his status as a brand vehicle for the shoe-makers. Klein also jumps all over the hollowing out of corporate brand-holding America as a place that no longer actually made stuff but simply owns rights and copyrights, while farming out production so that it could focus on branding and marketing; naturally, this is simplistic, but brands like Nike are easier targets are easier targets than Kelloggs, which really makes Frosted Flakes. Nice. The book is littered with surreal quotes, like David Hill, CEO of Fox Broadcasting, saying that “we are hoping to take the attitude and lifestyle of Fox Sports off the TV and onto men’s backs, creating nation of walking billboards.” Well, I guess Hill is in heaven because his vision has become a reality, for that’s what we’ve become indeed (although it’s not for me, personally…).
Interesting statistics: “1992 was the first year since 1975 when the number of teenagers in America increased.” Forget about marketing Tide and Snuggle, focus on MTV and Nike (and maybe Wal-mart). Sell to status-conscious kids who run in packs. “If you sell to one, you sell to everyone in their class and everyone in the school.” And when Tony Blair re-branded Labour as New Labour, Klein notes that “his is not the Labour Party, but a labor-scented party.” Nice. Of course, not all marketing is to kids, but they’re a big and important demographic. Klein lists weird hip-targetting branding antics, like when Coke and Old Navy launched pirate radio stations (?!?!). Ruminations on Eddie Vedder’s obligation (and failure) to use his cred to make a difference.
When the world’s cameras were turned on Seattle, all we got were a few anti-establishment fork-yous, a handful of overdoses and Kurt Cobain’s suicide. We also got this decade’s most specacular “sellout” – Courtney Love’s awe-inspiring sail from junkie punk queen to high-fashion cover girl in a span of two years. It seemed Courtney had been playing dress-up all along. What was revealing was how little it mattered. Did Love betray some karmic debt she owed to smudged eyeliner? To not caring about anything and shooting up? To being surly to the press? Don’t you need to buy in to something earnestly before you can sell it out cynically?”
There’s a funny anecdote about Spice Girl Posh Spice saying that the Spice Girls “wanted to be a ‘household name’. Like Ajax.” In another freaky anecdote, a school that was engaged in a huge corporate project with Coke – designing Coke’s new marketing campaign – actually suspended some troublemaker who dared to show up to the exercise wearing a Pepsi t-shirt. But Klein sometimes takes it too far, noting that Serbian youths would wear Chicago Bulls caps as they burned American flags (what – all of the kids wore Chicago Bulls caps?). “If we agree on nothing else, virtually everyone knows that Michael Jordan is the best basketball player that ever lived.”
Weird statistics like “The mammoth international temp agency Manpower Temporary Services rivals Wal-Mart as the largest private employer in the US.” But is that internationally, or in the US only?
From time to time her prose gets shrill, bloated and quite ugly:
Corporate censorship has everything to do with the themes of the last two chapters: media and retail companies have inflated to such bloated proportions that simple decisions about what items to stock in a store or what kind of cultural product to commission – decisions quite properly left to the discretion of business owners and culture makers – now have enormous consequences: those who make these choices have the peer to reengineer the cultural landscape.
I get it – controversial artists care enough about Wal-Mart to change his album just for the Wal-Mart buyers, but do we care if shocking album covers are less shocking in some stores? Big deal.
She also lets her thoughts get a bit carried away: “Book superstores, with their plush chairs, faux fireplaces, book clubs and coffee bars, have slowly come to replace libraries and university lecture halls as locales of choice for author readings on the book-tour circuit.” She recounts an absurd story when Michael Moore, at a reading for one of his books, insisted that striking workers get time at his mic. He was shocked when his reading got cancelled. Why? She rages at some companies’ decisions to hire temp workforces. “[Bill] Gates has already converted one-third of [Microsoft's] generalworkforce into temps, and in the Interactive Media Division, where CD-ROMs and Internet products are developed, about half the workers are officially employed by outside ‘payroll agencies,’ who deliver tax-free workers like printer cartridges.” Hmmm… it does suck for people to work temp when they’d rather be full employees, but she discredits herself with the “deliver workers like printer cartridges” bit.
The book is divided into four sections: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, No Logo (apparently, there was no room in Klein’s heavily over-written tome to add No Future). No Space covers the growth of the brand, No Choice covers the über-permanence of brands through pervasive brand creep, and the creation of mega-brands through mergers and acquisitions. No Jobs gets into the trimming of workforces by mega corporations solely concerned with the health of their brands, and No Logo gets into the resistance against brands and brand culture.
The book is so wordy and repetitive that I really lost steam during No Jobs, and didn’t have the patience for No Logo, so for now this is an incomplete review, given that No Logo is probably the thrust of the book (which she finally gets to after 279 pages of introduction!!), but I didn’t have the patience for nearly 200 pages of that, as she goes through topics like “culture jamming”, reclaiming the streets, the new anti-corproate activism, brand-based campaigns, case studies on Nike and Shell and McDonald’s, the role of students and communities, brand-based politics and consumerism and globalisation.
No sweat! No joke!! No nukes!!! No hope!!!! It’s easy to say no, it’s hard to say yes, Yeah!!