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"Nobrow" by John Seabrook and "No Logo" by Naomi Klein | page 1, 2
You get the sense that Seabrook's intended audience is strictly magazine editors, the cultural commissars who feel most guiltily bound to respect highbrow culture even as they throw themselves at lowbrow. At heart, what haunts Seabrook is really a fear of being late culturally, which is strictly a pathology of the media elite, and weren't they always nobrow anyway? Fortunately, we have Naomi Klein's athletic and expansive "No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies" as an antidote to the soft writing and sloppy thinking in "Nobrow." Klein, who has written for the Village Voice (where I also write) and the Baffler, knows her enemies well: the "brand-bombing" Wal-Mart; Starbucks and the Gap, with their "clustering" tactics; the beer and cigarette companies that think the world is their billboard. She also knows her allies, like the culture jammers (Adbusters), the third world unionists and the new urban guerrillas (Reclaim the Streets) who are throwing wrenches into the machines. Here we get profiles of the hi/lo/nobrow mix, but this time with political teeth. Klein tracks radical chic ad agency Weiden and Kennedy trying to tap Ralph Nader to sell Nike shoes: "The idea was simple. Nader would get $25,000 for holding up an Air 120 sneaker and saying, 'Another shameless attempt by Nike to sell shoes.' Nader responded, 'Look at the gall of these guys.'" "No Logo" seems to be pitched as a textbook (it's giant and heavy), but its best elements are personal and journalistic. Klein has an easy way with her own complicated brand memories: her pre-adolescent hunger for Happy Meals, her mall-rat humanism, her survival at the Esprit store as a high school student. The best sections travel to the Philippines, where Klein plants herself outside one of the 52 Export Processing Zones at which workers receive $6 a day to make Nike shoes, Gap pajamas, IBM monitor screens and Old Navy jeans. These free-trade zones, the dystopias of late capitalism, are squeezing the hope from the local communities as they sedate them with the best salaries around. The EPZs are the point of origin of Seabrook's $200 T-shirt, and they are terrifying. Klein's book came out late last year, and the writing was obviously concluded long before then. But it's impossible not to notice the prescience of her argument that there is a rising opposition to the brand bullies, optimistic as it might seem at first blush. The rambunctious World Trade Organization protests in Seattle were in part organized (or hatched) by Reclaim the Streets. The success of Linux and open-source code like it is evidence of the rise of democratic, publicly owned brands. Klein may be traveling somewhat familiar terrain with "No Logo," but her aim is expert. And at least, unlike Seabrook, she's carrying a weapon and not just an ambivalent valentine.
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