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NO LOGO:
TAKING AIM AT THE BRAND BULLIES
BY NAOMI KLEIN
NONFICTION, PICADOR, 446 PAGES

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By Austin Bunn

Feb. 15, 2000 | Consider this passage from John Seabrook's new book, "Nobrow":

By the 1990s, the end of the High-Low hierarchy of distinctions was at hand ... It could be felt in the change of manners: in the old days if you said to your dinner partner, "How are you?" he or she would say, "Fine thank you. How are you?" But in the present, when you said, "How are you?" you heard "Fabulous. I've just published my memoir about my incestuous affair with my alcoholic father, and the film rights have been optioned by Oliver Stone, and he's talking to Kate Winslet for the role of the heroine, and Entertainment Weekly has an item about me this week."

My response to this, and it was quite visceral, was to put the book down and promptly take a shower. I wanted these ideas off me. We're supposed to be laughing along with Seabrook here, shaking our heads at the rise of the ridiculously self-involved. But the delusion that sticks with me is Seabrook's: a smugness masquerading as thoughtful indignation, a lazy conviction that the study of a dinner greeting constitutes cultural analysis and that annoyingly inclusive "you" that assumes your friends sound like Seabrook's friends, which is to say, like press agents. Just who is John Seabrook speaking to? In the airless world of "Nobrow," he's talking to those both old enough to sincerely believe that Tina Brown ruined the New Yorker and young enough to think that the Chemical Brothers lost something when they landed on MTV. In other words, no one.

Nobrow Buy this book at B&N.com No Logo Buy this book at B&N.com

"Nobrow" is billed as a meditation on an ascendant muddle in American culture: a creeping everglade of hype, populism and fame between "highbrow" (intellectual culture) and "lowbrow" (commercial culture). The terms "highbrow" and "lowbrow" originate with that ornery journalist H.L. Mencken, who fashioned them in 1915 to, as Seabrook says, "render culture into class" with a phrenological punch. In America, Seabrook argues, "people needed highbrow-lowbrow distinctions to do the work that social hierarchy did in other countries." But by the '90s, the cultural hierarchy that they defined (and preserved) had collapsed, leaving "Nobrow" -- "not culture without hierarchy, of course," but an area where "commercial culture is a source of status, rather than the thing the elite define themselves against."

Forget the fact that Seabrook's thesis isn't news -- postmodernism has been remarking on that hi/lo hybrid for some time now -- and isn't even particularly convincing. (Isn't he really just saying that lowbrow won?) His argument is merely a setup for a portrait of Tina Brown, the much-maligned hi/lo maven and erstwhile editor of the New Yorker. According to Seabrook, Brown's arrival marked the coming of nobrow to the bourgeois sanctum of classy Manhattan magazine culture, and the beginning of her tenure neatly coincided with Seabrook's own as a staff writer. And if you're the kind of person who cares about the tempests that have tossed that magazine -- if the names Renata Adler and Robert Gottlieb give you goose pimples -- then you're in for a dishy feast. Otherwise, prepare for some seriously overcooked meat.

What Seabrook has done in "Nobrow" is repurpose his New Yorker essays on MTV, George Lucas and David Geffen with the curtain drawn back on how the pieces were "relationship brokered" by Brown. For example, Brown was a friend of Judy McGrath's, the president of MTV, and called on Seabrook to spend June there doing a profile on the place. What one comes away with from "Nobrow" is the sense that a) Brown was almost entirely responsible for Seabrook's subject matter and b) when you leave Seabrook alone to come up with his own subject matter, he will talk about his father's suits, Dean & DeLuca tomatoes and the irresistible urge to buy $200 Helmut Lang T-shirts in SoHo.

Next page | Is there a cure for being culturally late?