Patrick McGee
Department of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
finnegan@uiuc.edu
Media and commerce do not just cover but help construct music subcultures…. Subcultural capital is itself, in no small sense, a phenomenon of the media.
–Sarah Thornton, “Moral Panic, the Media and British Rave”
If you only talk to people who already agree with you, you are not a political organization. You’re a support group.
–Elizabeth Gilbert (Spin April 1995)
In the June 1995 issue of Details, Generation X was declared dead-on-arrival by the very author who had himself risen to instant fame only a few short years earlier with his first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. And indeed in the years since Douglas Coupland’s Details pronouncement perhaps nothing has been assumed to be so thoroughly incorporated, so cliché, as the term Generation X. The common-sense consensus in both academic popular culture studies and subculture theory, as well as in the “alternative” youth culture industries themselves, is that Generation X is so passé, so universally un-hip, that even by remarking its passing one risks marking oneself as square beyond repair, like foolish white tourists who go to Harlem and speak nostalgically about the lost authenticity of the original 1920s Cotton Club. The word Generation X is deader than dead. Yet media images invoking the iconography of Generation X continue to proliferate in the youth culture industries, particularly in the pop music, television, fashion, and junk-food markets. With the now familiar mix of manic-paced MTV jump-cuts, a multicultural brew of post-punk haircuts, piercings and retro-seventies grunge styles, neon-streak color bursts, roller-blade grrrl-power “attitude,” and the requisite “cheese” of self-mocking irony, Pepsi’s 1997 “Generation Next” campaign typifies the current alternative youth marketing scene, except perhaps insofar as its slogan came dangerously too near speaking the signifier that dare not speak its name.
It is in this cultural climate of “alternative” simulacra, or a simulacra of alternativeness, that I want to take up theoretical issues surfaced by Spin magazine from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, as it sought to take avant-garde pop undergrounds and transform them, and itself, into post-avant-garde, alternative “overgrounds.” My theoretical goal is to make a first pass at “reading” Spin magazine in a Cultural Studies context, and in the process map the boundaries of Andreas Huyssen’s construction of the “post-avant-garde” as the hope of a political postmodernism. “Some hope!” you may be thinking. For many people with personal investments in youth subculture scenes Spin represents at best a laughable example of counterfeit “alternative” culture and at worst the very enemy of genuine subcultural resistance, the thing that threatens to rob a subculture scene of its essence of oppositionality.1 While I agree with much of this line of argument, I am equally suspicious of the knee-jerk refusal of any-and-everything “commercial” expressed by so many subculture members and theorists who seem to have forgotten that, as Stuart Hall reminds us, opposition to the current state of capitalist society and culture does not necessarily mean a blanket refusal of the reproductive power of the commodity and commodification (“Meaning”). Opposition to postmodern capitalism, Hall points out, does not mean refusing a priori the productive and cultural forces of mass society and mass culture. Oppositional culture, or revolutionary ideology, means critiquing current hegemonic discourses of modernity/postmodernity; it also means rethinking and reconfiguring the cultural-material forces of modernity/postmodernity at multiple local, national, and trans-national levels.
Perhaps what offends most about Spin is its brashness, its haughty prior claim to cosmopolitan cultural hippness. Spin magazine, like Andy Warhol’s Pop Art interventions a generation earlier, presumes to have already obliterated and transcended those traditional boundaries between mass-cult and high art, pop culture and progressive oppositional politics. And it does so despite the fact that the contradictions of capitalist production and distribution, which fuel the worlds of Pop and mass-cult, have only become more pronounced–despite, that is, Spin‘s unlikely insistence that one can have a genuine cultural revolution and maintain a brand-name consumer lifestyle too.
Realizing the unlikeliness of my own thesis, I nevertheless contend that Spin is a step in the right direction, and that Spin magazine may function as a popular progressive model–a structure of pop culture resistance. The Spin model offers a form that combines (sub)cultural opposition and mainstream fun, and it’s a form that proved itself capable of keeping pace with the shifting forces of cultural Reaganism and the New Right in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The Spin model might, therefore, function as a counter-balance to the infinite adaptability presumed to be the defining characteristic of so-called “late capitalism”: its apparently endless capacity to appropriate any-and-all forms of subcultural resistance, oppositional meanings, or semiotic critique.
As such, Spin magazine also offers itself as an excellent case study to explore the practical implications of Michael Bérubé’s claim that perhaps the single most important and difficult challenge for Cultural Studies critics is to think through the problematics that arise when academics theorize popular audiences and subcultures who are already theorizing themselves. This is an important challenge because, as Bérubé argues, the very “existence and autonomy of the academic professions,” which have been under relentless (and frequently successful) attack by misinformation and de-funding campaigns from the cultural and political right, depends in no small part on mobilizing popular support from the very “ordinary people” which Cultural Studies frequently writes about and for, but not to; it depends, in other words, on our ability to popularize academic theory and criticism, which means “struggling for the various popular and populist grounds on which the cultural right has been trying to make criticism unpopular” (176). This is a difficult challenge, however, because academics must carry on this struggle in a world in which, as Bérubé notes, “there isn’t a chance that academic criticism will ever be popular [and yet at the same time] the kind of criticism known as critical theory already is popular” (161). In such a context, academics must not only struggle for cultural ground that the Right explicitly targets; we must continue to build and strengthen coalitions with otherwise left-leaning mass-media culture industries, where much of the fall-out from the more explicit PC wars ultimately lands–that is, we must reach out to consumer subculture media like Spin, a magazine which in many ways is already popularizing academic criticism, but which frequently does so by rhetorically positioning itself against academic discourses portrayed as being either too “serious,” too “obscure,” or too “PC.”
Such academic work is of course already being done. Indeed, for many it’s what Cultural Studies is all about in the first place. The most notable, sustained example of this kind of academic-popular criticism can perhaps be found in the pages of Social Text, which regularly brings together people from a wide range of cultural positions (people who work in various culture industries, mass media, and academic disciplines) in an attempt to forge alliances and cross the great theory/practice divide. In the Fall 1995 issue of Social Text, for example, Andrew Ross hosts a symposium on “The Cult of the DJ” in which Ross, two mass media music critics and two prominent dance music DJs discuss, among other things, the “changing role of DJs in the history of popular music” (67) and reasons for the general neglect of dance music in the mainstream music press. Though later on I will take issue with the way the term “mainstream music press” gets deployed in Cultural Studies subculture criticism, the discussion in this Social Text symposium, as well as in the more fully developed book-length symposium on alternative youth culture edited by Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture ), suggests that the relationship between academic discourses, “alternative” artistic practices or “underground” scenes, and commercial subculture/Gen X magazines like Spin is more complex, more symbiotic and, as I hope to demonstrate here, not so problematic as many academics might be conditioned to assume. It demonstrates, for one, that one doesn’t have to dig too deep to find so-called “academic” cultural criticism lurking just below the surface of nearly everything in the Gen X scene, despite the fact that anti-academic rhetoric (bordering sometimes on outright neo-conservative anti-intellectualism) is standard Gen X fare.2 It is within this more general context of symbiosis between critical theory, Madison Avenue, and oppositional subcultures that I want to apply a few Cultural Studies subcultural models to one specific “mass-cult” medium which explicitly markets itself as “oppositional.” By working through the magazine’s structure and then taking a close look at Spin‘s coverage of Riot Grrrl in 1992 and a 1995 Diesel Jeans advertisement depicting two sailors kissing (which is an appropriation of an ACT UP/Gran Fury poster), I want to see what might happen if we try to take Spin magazine at “face-value.” What happens if I accept their unlikely marketing claims that, in the acts of consuming/reading Spin, I too can identify with, and participate in, an on-going youth-music cultural “revolution” [see Figure 1]–what if I accept their claim that, with Spin‘s help, I too can be a Riot Grrrl [see Figure 2]?
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| Figure 1. “The Voice of a Generation: Yours.” Junk mail subscription renewal notice. Reprinted by permission of Spin. |
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| Figure 2. “For Girls about to Rock.” “Flash” section article in Spin April 1992: 26. Reprinted by permission of Spin. |
Though Spin is frequently scorned (alike by academics, its own readers, and various self-identified subculture members) as being nothing more than a slick Gen X fashion magazine pimping corporate rock and Madison Avenue to the masses of middle-class (mostly male) suburban youth, the writers and editors of Spin repeatedly defend themselves against such criticism, both directly in their writing and indirectly in their editing and design choices, insisting that Spin is a genuine organ of an on-going youth revolution even if it is brought to you by the corporate world’s latest-and-greatest, newest-and-coolest, mass marketing gimmicks. Spin‘s tenth anniversary issue, “Ten Years That Rocked the World,” for example, is framed by two essays that specifically position Spin at the forefront of an on-going Gen X youth “Revolution”–a theme that is foregrounded in the title of this special issue, which, in its echo of John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, locates Spin within a longer historical tradition of radical journalism and a generationally-identified revolutionary temperament centered on images of “youth.” Both publisher Guccione, Jr., in his editorial column (“TopSpin”), and Senior Contributing Writer Jim Greer, on the back page (what used to be called “SpinOut”), tell a retrospective narrative that links the evolution of Spin magazine with the emergence of a “cultural and generational wave at the beginning of its ascension” (Guccione, Jr., April 1995, 24); both define the mission of the magazine (Guccione refers to it as the magazine’s “higher calling”) as one that has evolved from an unselfconscious rock and roll naiveté into a self-conscious mission to give voice to “Gen X or whatever we’re calling it this week” (Greer 224):
[I]t was precisely our complete inappropriateness to the prevailing zeitgiest [of mid-'80s cynicism] that gave us our power and value and readership, all of which, eventually, became our conscious mission. We wrote about and for a then-disempowered generation, to which we belonged not (by now) by the citizenship of similar age, but by the universal solidarity of purpose. Our readership's culture and causes and self-defining discoveries were ours too, and so were their enemies. (Guccione, Jr. 24)
Responding to those readers who repeatedly attack the magazine in “Point Blank” (the letters page) for merely exploiting the Gen X scene for commercial gain, Greer not only defends the mission of the magazine as a “rock magazine,” he also defends the magazine’s Madison Avenue commercialism as well, insisting that Spin is “more independent, both in terms of corporate structure and mindset, than most so-called independent record labels.”3
These are no small claims–claims, I suspect, at which most academics and subculture members would raise a skeptical eyebrow.4 Nevertheless, I contend that, sometimes by design and sometimes in spite of itself, Spin does in fact manage to articulate what constitutes a popularized form of Cultural Studies criticism–a kind of Social Text for a particular mass youth audience as it were–in which the cultural-political meanings of youth music (not always rock) and “alternative” subculture scenes are explicitly addressed and in which issues of representation are repeatedly brought to the surface, even if academic discourses are specifically avoided. More specifically, I take issue with the kind of disgust that Dick Hebdige vents in Hiding in the Light towards the Face, the 1980s British subculture consumer magazine which likely inspired, or at least certainly influenced, the original conception and design of Spin. The first sections of this essay read Spin‘s Riot Grrrl coverage to address both Hebdige’s critique of the kind of facile “flat-earth” postmodernism produced by the Face and Sarah Thornton’s critique of the tendency of subculture theory to ignore the role mass media plays in the formation of youth subculture identities. The final sections engage the Diesel Jeans advertisement to question the larger tendency within Cultural Studies to read subcultural practices as models for more traditional forms of political organization.
I. Generation X: A Generation By No Other Name?
To say that Cultural Studies academics must get beyond their aversion towards Gen X posturing does not mean, however, that we must silence our criticisms of those who speak in the name of Generation X (including Spin), particularly since, as Andrew Ross has noted, the Generation X moment is one in which American youth are being scrutinized by a glut of journalistic and sociological hacks in the most “frankly exploitative way” since the late fifties (Microphone Fiends 4). Ross’s own take on Gen X seems to be guardedly sympathetic at best, suggesting that the crucial questions for academics writing about Gen X at this juncture are: 1) whether or not Gen X discourses can free themselves from the journalistic and sociological voices speaking from above on behalf of Generation X (even the more sympathetic ones such as Howe and Strauss’s 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?) and 2) whether or not the “subject” of Gen X can be expanded beyond the narrow voice of white, middle-class heterosexual males–what Ross refers to as “those postadolescents who were temporarily confused but [are] more likely to succeed in the long run, and thus fill the target consumer demographic with high-end disposable incomes” (3), what one of my students has referred to as “all those Reality Bites kids, the MTV Real World kids or those people on NBC’s Friends.” Whether or not some construct of “alternative” culture (call it “Generation X” or whatever) can become a touchstone for a wider and more inclusive range of youth culture formations is by no means certain. And it will take more than academics analyzing grunge, rave, gansta rap, or riot grrrls in papers with Gen X in the title and delivering those papers in conventional academic venues to forge any such multicultural alliances. If “Gen X” fails to become common-coin to a broader range of youth subjects, then academics rushing to speak about or in the name of Gen X risk merely duplicating and sanctioning journalistic exploitative discourses.
It is perhaps fittingly ironic then that at the very moment a 1995 MLA Convention special session and a collection of academic essays was being prepared under the title “Generation X Culture,” Douglas Coupland had declared “Gen X” dead-on-arrival in an article published in Details, the preferred “cross-over” magazine for many Cultural Studies academics. According to Coupland, Gen X has been eaten alive by the marketing “trendmeisters,” who have taken what he believes was a genuine “way of looking at the world”–an implicitly “authentic” and “original” aesthetic perspective–and they’ve turned it into just so much more white noise (72). That the term Gen X, along with the terms “slacker” and “grunge,” has become one of the “most abused buzz words of the early ’90s” is hardly debatable, nor is the fact that Gen X has been appropriated by Madison Avenue style industries to a degree that exceeds all previous generational signifiers, such as those of the 1920s and 1960s, which have also been reductively associated with avant-garde and counter-cultural movements. What is debatable, however, is Coupland’s specious attempt to maintain his status as “author” of the concept “Generation X” based on the fact that he has penned a decent, but hardly exceptional, first-novel by the same name–a novel which I personally see as the epitome of the Gen X cliché, in which Coupland’s aestheticized middle-class male suburban angst and self-indulgent narrative posturing cancels out whatever 1990s social realism may be at work in the novel. Generation X is a novel that may arguably mark, not the beginning of the Gen X moment, but rather the beginning of the very corporate marketing appropriations he now only half-heartedly bemoans (Coupland’s own characteristically camp-ironic phrasing here is to say that it “was harsh”).
By expressing my personal distaste for Coupland’s novel, I do not mean to deny the important role that the mass popularity of his novel has played in generating the cultural currency that Gen X signifiers now possess, however appropriated or narrow that currency may be. Nor do I mean to deny the very real economic, political, and cultural changes (everything that makes up the historical “reality” of the postmodern, late capitalist moment of our “accelerated culture”) that inform and shape the generational angst of Coupland’s novelistic world, however privileged and aestheticized the expression of that angst may be. Certainly I do not mean to align myself in any way with the openly hostile mass media cranks, such as David Martin in his infamous Newsweek piece, who dismissively attack self-identified Gen X twentysomethings as whiners who should just shut up and live with it.5 My objection to Coupland’s representation of Gen X is less an aesthetic judgment as it is an ideological judgement about the kinds of narrow subject positions and the historical narratives that his novel articulates.
The way Coupland summarizes his novel and bemoans its mass-media appropriations in this Details article is itself enough to see the narrow focalization and ahistorical aestheticizing tendencies that make up Coupland’s Gen X world. Though his three characters presumably live on “the fringe” and work at “dreary jobs at the bottom of the food chain,” they do so because they, like Coupland, “decided to pull back from society and move there.” Though they find themselves struggling to patch together individual identities in a dramatically reshaped environment, this environment is ultimately one that is, in Coupland’s own words, a “psychic” reality more than a social or historically specific one. Coupland’s claim that the worldview his characters manage to cultivate (“simultaneously ironic and sentimental”) constituted “a new way of thinking I had never before seen documented” is merely another self-promoting throw-away comment which seeks to affirm the originality of Gen X as his baby at the same time that it attests to the representational “authenticity” of his characters as part of some larger Gen X whole–an authenticity that only gets asserted again as Coupland claims authorship in the very act of his “Gen-X-cide,” as if it were his to kill or to declare null-and-void because something called “boomer angst-transference” has reduced his characters and ideas to Madison Avenue stereotypes and media clichés:
The problems started when trendmeisters everywhere began isolating small elements of my characters' lives... and blew them up to represent an entire generation. Part of this misrepresentation emanated from baby boomers, who, feeling pummeled by the recession and embarrassed by their own compromised '60s values, began transferring their collective darkness onto the group threatening to take their spotlight. (72)
The problem with such reductive narratives, staked out in neatly packaged us/them terms, is that they have in turn become the standard line of post-Coupland mass media Gen X historical clichés. (See, for example, the “valedictorian speech” delivered by Winonna Ryder’s character in the opening scene of Reality Bites, as well as Douglas Rushkoff’s self-aggrandizing, pseudo-intellectual, misinformed, and homophobic manifesto and introductory blurbs in The GenX Reader.6)
Whether or not one believes Coupland when he attempts to set the record straight and locate the “origins” of the title of his book in the final chapter of Paul Fussell’s book Class rather than the name of Billy Idol’s punk band is really beside the point. Historically, long before there was Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, Generation X was there–both as a signifier and a signified, an attitude, a pose, an aesthetic, a sensibility, a way of looking at the world, but also the economic and cultural political realities of post-Fordist capitalism and cultural Reaganism. Whenever it can be said to have arrived, Gen X was certainly as much a punk sensibility as it was the kind of neo-beat Bohemianism Coupland now (re)locates in Fussell’s X class. Fourteen years before Coupland’s novel caught the wave of media interest in Richard Linklater’s independent film Slacker, Billy Idol’s Generation X opened at the Roxy Club, and a month prior to that the Vibrators released their single “Blank Generation.” This on-going punk theme would be taken up again in 1985, the first year of Spin, by the Replacements in “Bastards of Young”:
God, what a mess
On the ladder of success
Where you take one step
And miss the whole first rung.
Dreams unfulfilled
You graduate unskilled
But it beats picking cotton
And waiting to be forgotten.
CHORUS:
We are the sons of no one
Bastards of young
We are the sons of no one
Bastards of young
The daughters and the sons...
Clean your baby room
Trash their baby boom
Elvis's in the ground
There'll be no beer tonight.
Income tax deduction
One hell of a function!
It beats picking cotton
And waiting to be forgotten.
CHORUS:
Now the daughters and the sons....
A willingness to claim us
You got no word to name us.
If there is in fact an “X sensibility” that describes “a way of looking at the world” rather than “a chronological age,” it is nonetheless a historically specific sensibility, one that is popular now because of the more general and on-going cultural and political backlash against youth, one that is not so new after all and one that’s much more complex than Coupland’s reductive Boomer v. Buster narrative suggests. One that should not therefore be limited to the privileged romanticisms of new-Bohemian aesthetes.
I invoke this brief sound-bite from punk history (a kind of “roots-of-GenX” narrative) here, not to try to distinguish between “authentic” and co-opted strains of Gen X, but rather as a check to the tendency in many self-identified media and academic Gen X discourses to define Gen X as an uniquely late 80’s/early ’90s scene or aesthetic. Regarding punk, I agree with David Laing, who argues that to talk about the history of “punk rock” is really to talk about a discourse–a loose, fluid (frequently contradictory) consensus of users between 1976 and 1978 that can be found circulating in punk artifacts (records, zines), punk events (concerts, interviews, staged media hoaxes, and interventions), and punk institutions (underground, scene-specific record labels, clubs, and shops, as well as established record companies, radio stations, and the music press) (viii). If in the early 1990s a similar kind of new consensus or discourse formation emerged under the sign Generation X (even if there can be no such directly stated signifier), then one thing that seems to separate it from its punk predecessors is the lack of any clearly identifiable artifacts, events, and institutions. If there are no artifacts of Generation X but only a handful of novels and films about the lack of generational artifacts now taken up as artifacts in themselves, if with Generation X what we have is an emerging consensus that positions itself as a subculture but lacks any clearly identifiable subaltern scene, then what happens when we try to apply our tried-and-true academic questions about the mainstream’s appropriation of subcultural resistant practices only to transform their original oppositional cultural politics into trite morality clichés for middle class fashion consumers? Does it make any sense to even ask whether or not GenX-identified symbols of disaffection and dissent have been appropriated as fashion symbols? Or should we be asking instead what happens when fashion symbols of images of disaffection and dissent are taken up and disseminated by people (like Coupland) who may or may not be disaffected but who nonetheless identify themselves as part of a newly disaffected generation emerging on the scene of their imagined post-Boomer wasteland?
How then, in other words, do I deal with the fact that everything I have just described and critiqued as the narrow privileged range of Coupland’s Gen X world frequently gets articulated in the pages of Spin as it presents itself as “the voice of a generation”? How do I explain the fact that, when I discussed Spin magazine and Generation X with my undergraduate rhetoric students in the spring of 1996, we ended up switching roles and I was the one defending Spin against their teacherly-intoned, ironic, and theoretically informed critiques? This essay has, in fact, largely grown out of that 1996 course, where I found myself in the unlikely position of defending Spin against my students, half of them senior English and Rhetoric majors ten years younger than myself. As part of this on-going debate, one of my students wrote an essay arguing that this whole Gen X thing is all just one big (M)TV media scam in the first place. He only half-ironically, and rather convincingly, argued that Gen X is something that was invented by the MTV-Spin-Geffen music industrial complex, that the whole thing is just so much more white noise–the projection of pop industry workers and academics in their lower thirties (he meant me) waxing nostalgic for a punk past that they never really lived in the first place: “The whole thing makes me want to barf,” he wrote. “The fact is that there is/has been an ongoing and Real punk movement since the mid seventies and it lives and thrives in the streets and in the underground–where it belongs–and this Gen X crap is just yet another attempt to appropriate and somehow control the anarchy of real punk culture.” And of course I think he’s partly right on that. The thing that interests me, however, is that Spin magazine frequently says basically the same thing, and I think my student was getting some of his arguments against Spin for exploiting and appropriating the punk scene in their cover story “Greenday: The Year Punk Broke” (Nov. 1995) from that very article. And if that’s the case, then what the heck does that mean!? What it means is you end up trying to “read” Spin by reading someone else reading Spin reading itself. Then you get thrown into theoretical tailspins–brought to you by the “Tailspinners,” which is Spin‘s name for their list of this month’s feature writers, editors, and contributors, who, not unlike the contributors in a typical issue of Social Text, are drawn from a wide range of cultural positions, including established music critics, new journalists, fiction writers, musicians, and artists, as well as pop culture academics and other public intellectuals.
There is in fact another, perhaps even more significant, reciprocal chain of signification going on here alongside the example I just cited of my student’s reading of Spin reading itself: take this sound-bite from Bob Guccione, Jr.’s January 1994 “TopSpin” column specifically addressing the Gen X phenomenon, which is also where my student was getting some of his rhetorical ammunition against Spin and which pre-dates Coupland’s Details “eulogy” of Gen X by six months:
This year belonged to something that doesn’t exist: Generation X.
Generation X is a phantom, an hysterical hallucination of baby boomers, suddenly realizing they are no longer the life of the party.... With a speed befitting long-honed instincts of self-interest, they created the mythology of a blank generation that has inadvertently wandered onto the stage, awkward and whining, clueless as to what to do. (12)
Unlike Coupland, however, Guccione isn’t just haggling over Gen X property rights under the guise of narratives about “corporate marketing appropriations” (though that may be a factor too and a legitimate critique of Spin); rather, his complaint against Boomer-sponsored Gen X narratives is aimed at the insidious side-effects they are producing: deflecting attention away from the social and economic devastation wrought by 1980s Boomer-complicit Reaganism and, most importantly for Guccione, further deflating the politically energized atmosphere of youth cultures which had galvanized around the 1992 Rock the Vote campaign. Guccione concludes his year-end editorial on a hopeful note, predicting that 1994 would be “a watershed year. Because, like it did in 1968 and 1969, America is ready to burst again.” The prediction itself turned out to be woefully off the mark. 1994 of course brought instead Newt Gingrich’s other, all-too-familiar kind of Republican revolution and ushered in the era of the Clinton compromise, and if anything, the usual academic suspects tell us, youth political apathy seems to be on the rise. Yet, Guccione’s allusion to the barricades of 1968 ironically locates Gen X once again back in the discourses of punk rock–not punk rock as my student would construct it (and as Coupland would re-construct Gen X), as an aesthetic “way of looking at the world” forever living in the wishful imaginary space of some “authentic” media-free underground streets, but rather punk rock as The Clash attempted to define it in explicitly extra-generational political terms on the back sleeve of their first single release “White Riot”/”1977”:
there is, perhaps, some tension in society, when overwhelming pressure brings industry to a standstill or barricades to the streets years after the liberals had dismissed the notion as "dated romanticism"... the journalist invents the theory that this constitutes a clash of generations. Youth, after all, is not a permanent condition, and a clash of generations is not so fundamentally dangerous to the art of government as would be a clash between rulers and ruled. (qtd. in Marcus Lipstick Traces 11-12)
That Guccione, Jr. and Spin will repeatedly critique the concept of Generation X as a Boomer-Media-Madison Avenue phantom while at the same time marketing the magazine as the voice of a (Gen X) generation, and frequently do so in explicitly political terms, is, to say the least, a contradiction, one that’s not easy to work through. But it’s a contradiction that we will have to get used to if academics are going to, in Huyssen’s terms, “catch on” and work in the same postmodern, post-avant-garde world that has been “home” to Spin and the youth cultures and subcultures it has been reporting and disseminating since the mid 1980s.
II. “Bone-Crunching Contradictions” and Theoretical Tailspins: Spin is Not Just a Magazine
To live in the postmodern moment of contemporary youth cultures, according to Andrew Ross, is to live in a world in which confronting “bone-crunching contradictions” is the norm, a “daily item” (1). The particular “contradiction” that Ross uses to frame the academic/pop-cult dialogue taking place in Microphone Fiends (co-edited by Tricia Rose) is the fact that, in the opening feature page of Vibe‘s preview issue, Greg Tate launched the first major commercial magazine devoted to hip hop by hosting a “swinging assault on hip hop commercialism consciously spoken from within the belly of the Madison Avenue beast” (1). This is precisely the kind of contradiction that is both found on the pages of Spin and that constitutes the underlying logic of the magazine’s mission, design, and style–a logic that may or may not be merely another face of the logic of consumerism as we have no doubt been conditioned to assume.
As a way of framing Spin‘s specific coverage of Riot Grrrl in 1992, let’s skim the surface of a few brief, relatively random samples of Spin‘s own spin on its relationship to the postmodern:
Spins
Everything in Spin spins off the metaphors of the word spin. There was a good deal of media flap back in April of 1985, the date of Spin‘s first issue, as to just what it meant to have another mass-circulation rock magazine enter the market. Was Spin Rolling Stone revitalized for a new emergent youth culture formation (a rock re-formation)? Is it Rolling Stone for an accelerated culture? If so, how so–as in merely having “advanced” one generation or as in having “progressed” (as in accelerating the revolution)? Or is the title of Spin merely a self-reflexive wink at a consumer culture gone mad, spinning out of control–spinning directionlessly in a world where there is no more up or down? Is “spin” a self-conscious, self-implicating metaphor for postmodern vertigo? Or, does it refer to political spin? A particular political spin or more generally the politics of spin at work in a media society, a testimony to the power of media in shaping the spin of the world? Or, is it something even larger in its philosophical implications: an entrance sign into a poststructuralist world where all meaning is relational and contingent? A world where Guccione’s editorial column is titled “TopSpin” because that’s how he both is positioned and positions himself–how he is positioned within the management hierarchy of the magazine itself, but also how he is socially positioned in terms of class, race, and gender more generally? Or, is the answer the obvious one: all of the above?
“Spins” is also the title of the album review section in the magazine, which (until recently) came framed by the following “Handy Omniscient Rating System” and which is typical of Spin‘s logic of the “bone-crunching contradiction”:
Green = Go directly to your local record
store. Buy this album.
Immediately. Kill if you must.
Yellow = Whoa! Slow down pal! This album is
pretty good, but you can't buy
everything in the store. Can you?
Red = Stop it. Put that down. Go buy
something to eat instead. You have
to eat, too, you know.
But what kinds of critical space does Spin open up with such a gesture when the reviewers then go on to make serious critical distinctions about specific albums up for review? And exactly what irony survives when those reviews are framed by columns of advertising for these same newest CD releases? What picture is being drawn here of the reciprocal relationship between music industry advertising goals and those of Spin (an alternative music media industry) as it implicates itself in this process by drawing attention to the fact that a good review means you should go out and buy the merchandise? What does it mean, however, when each and every month anywhere from six to ten albums get the green light and another half dozen or so get the yellow? What narratives of youth poverty and affluence are being invoked here by this ironic ratings guide? How does it map out consumer categories? Here’s one possible reading of the implied ironic critique:
Green = poverty/the poverty of desire. Urban
kids (implicitly of color?) killing
for a pair of sneakers or a cd,
killing for the (false) "image"
behind some mass-produced band or
album.
Yellow = affluence/the boredom of getting what
you want. You suburban white kids who
can buy everything, plus the guilt of
knowing that your satiated poverty of
(false) desire is got by someone
else's (real) poverty.
Red = junkie/consumerism itself as a
cultural psychosis. The shop-aholic
and the alternative music aficionado
collapsing into one with Spin
magazine as simultaneously the
ultimate aficionado and the
compulsive consumerist ideologue.
In the movement from “green” to “yellow” to “red,” Spin not only offers a critique of advanced capitalism’s multiple forms of false consciousness (affecting both the haves and the have-nots), they also ground these “individual” or internalized moments of false consciousness in a deeper, cultural logic of consumer society, which, like the shop-aholic/aficionado, is driven towards a commodification of desire to the exclusion of basic social needs (“you have to eat, too, you know”). Yet, there’s still the question of gauging the end effect of Spin‘s ironic posturing and whether such irony facilitates or nullifies the possibility of any “cultural critique” taking place at all. Has Spin so thoroughly implicated itself in the advertising function of album reviews that it frees a space for critical narratives to speak themselves and, in that way, paradoxically lays bare an otherwise hidden logic of consumer capitalism? Or is the irony here (and throughout Spin more generally) merely another superficial postmodern wink at the reader that reasserts a consensus ideological space for business-as-usual in a world where “there is nowhere else to go but the shops” (Hebdige 168)?
Similar sets of ironic questions can be generated by just about everything in the pages of Spin.
AIDS: Words From the Front
This is serious spin by Spin dropping its standard line of parodic Thompson-esque outlaw journalism. The fact that from January 1988 Spin maintained a sustained monthly discussion of AIDS under the subheading “Words From the Front” and gave it a central place in the magazine is itself somewhat remarkable and commendable. However, it may also, as does everything else in Spin, raise more questions than it answers–which, regarding AIDS discourses, sometimes is and sometimes isn’t necessarily a good thing. How, for instance, should one read Spin‘s long-running series of stories on whether or not HIV is the cause of AIDS, particularly as they take a pro-sex stance and popularize certain Cultural Studies analyses of AIDS discourses (e.g., Crimps’s AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism)? On the one hand, these articles appear to popularize the Cultural Studies assumption that “AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it” (Crimp, “AIDS” 3). As such they may successfully deploy the discourses of pop culture journalism to deconstruct medical/scientific discourses and their authoritative claims to objective knowledge, demonstrating that, when it comes to AIDS, “no clear line can be drawn between the facticity of scientific and nonscientific (mis)conceptions” (Treichler 37). Celia Farber’s “Words From the Front” articles in particular seem to give popular voice to what Crimp describes as “the genuine concern by informed people that a full acceptance of HIV as the cause of AIDS limits research options, especially regarding possible cofactors” (“How to Have Promiscuity” 238). They certainly seem to “perform a political analysis of the ideology of science” and in doing so also take a pro-sex stance. On the other hand, one might also argue that Farber’s articles do so in a regressive tabloid fashion by celebrating Duesberg as a “maverick hero” without critiquing Deusberg’s views on the causes of AIDS, or without adequately reporting the controversy surrounding those views (as The Village Voice did when Ann Fettner characterized Deusberg’s views as a “regression to 1982” when the medical community viewed AIDS as a collection of diseases related to “the gay life style” [see Crimp 238]). Other AIDS articles written for Spin are even more suspect, suggesting that Spin‘s preoccupation with the HIV controversy may be motivated more by a need to confirm a political-medical “establishment” conspiracy against “sex” than by a genuine desire to engage in AIDS cultural analysis-activism. If this is the case (and I’m not concluding here that in fact it is), what then separates Spin‘s reporting from the kinds of exploitative reporting that Crimp finds in the pages of the New York Native, which, according to Crimp, merely trots out “the crackpot theory of the week” and exploits “the conflation of sex, fear, disease, and death in order to sell millions of newspapers” (Crimp 237-238)? Certainly the fact that Spin would run an article rehashing the “poppers theory” (Nov. 1994) in a totally unselfconscious article that makes no mention of the homophobic medical-politics surrounding this theory is cause for some concern if not outright alarm. If silence equals death, and it does, Spin is at least not silent. But the fact that silence equals death does not, of course, mean that the inverse is always true: sound does not always equal life. Sometimes sound isn’t voice, it’s just more noise, and, as ACT UP Cultural Studies analyses of AIDS discourses have all too frequently demonstrated, some kinds of noise can be deadlier than viruses. By positioning itself on the “front lines” of the AIDS War, has Spin succeeded in articulating and popularizing an ACT UP frame of reference on AIDS, as well as, in the process, popularizing Cultural Studies notions of hegemony as a “war of position,” not least perhaps in Spin‘s 1989 infamous ad-stunt/political intervention of including a free condom with one of its special issues?7 Or, has Spin merely appropriated ACT UP rhetoric as a kind of cutting-edge neo-punk style, exploiting the AIDS epidemic and PWAs as a way of furthering its own self-promoting image of Spin as front-line pop (i.e., Spin as shades of Michael Stipe)?
In fact, Spin‘s relationship with the tabloid-style New York Native may be even more complex and problematic, as is made clear in Celia Farber’s outrageously off-the-mark “TopSpin” editorial on ACT UP published in May 1992. Most outrageous (it would be funny if it weren’t so dangerously misinformed) is Farber’s completely unselfconscious presumption to lecture ACT UP on the dangers of being “absorbed” by the mainstream media. ACT UP and other activists need to realize, she concludes in her lecture about the dangers of being too “entertaining,” that the mainstream media always gets the last word: “We don’t use the media: the media uses us. And the government uses the media. If AIDS activism did not exist, as a vent system for AIDS fury, the government would have reason to worry. As it is they’re grinning from ear to ear” (12, my emphasis). Talk about a bone-crunching contradiction! Who’s the “we” here? If Spin ain’t “the media” then who is? Again, if it weren’t so dangerously inane, it might be funny. I won’t bother to detail the contradictions here, except to note that it’s hard to imagine how it is that Farber, who has led the charge of Spin‘s own brand of mass media appropriations of ACT UP activism, can be so blind as to turn around and try to blame successful ACT UP media interventions for derailing some imaginary “AIDS fury” that would otherwise unleash itself, when of course those ACT UP and Gran Fury successes are themselves the only reason Farber can conjure up the signifier of “AIDS fury” in the first place.8
Sex in the ’90s
After ACT UP AIDS activism had lost much of its radical, alternative cachet, Spin shifted gears in 1995 and ran a series of self-identified, third-generation, sex-positive “feminist” articles under the heading “Sex in the 90s”–which again raises questions about the commodification of oppositional culture. How, for example, should one read Elizabeth Gilbert’s feature article on “feminist porn” titled “Pussy Galore” (April 1995)? Here is an article that has clearly been informed by Cultural Studies positions on the anti-porn/”pro-sex” debate within feminism–positions such as those articulated in Ross’s chapter on “The Popularity of Pornography” in No Respect, or in the Social Text special issue “Sex Workers and Sex Work.” Again, however, one might ask whether this article, or similar Spin discussions under the heading “Sex in the ’90s,” survives the seemingly masculinist framing devices that accompany it? Take, for instance, the way this article gets framed on the contents page: “Pussy Galore. Sick of the same old sleaze, feminist pornographers are getting off their backs and behind the cameras. Meet the revolutionaries in the flicks-for-chicks business. By Elizabeth Gilbert.” This blurb, along with the rest of the contents blurbs, is printed over a black-and-white still photo from an S/M film covered in the article depicting a topless woman gazing down at her outstretched feet which are being suckled by a blond submissive dressed in a teddy and collar. In small print off to the side is the following photo caption: “Toe-lickin’ good: A scene from An Elegant Spanking. See Elizabeth Gilbert’s article on feminist porn.” Of course, the first academic question is likely to be (and with emphasis), who is being invited to gaze into such a “revolutionary” porn world? Or rather, whose gaze is being invited to gaze? Do such phrases as “pussy galore,” “toe-lickin’ good,” or “flicks-for-chicks” appropriate masculinist porn-speak and rearticulate it in a sex-positive feminist-porn voice? Or are we seeing instead the limits of such acts of appropriation which have become increasingly commonplace in Gen X underground scenes and discourses? Is such a world, framed as it is here, revolutionary or merely exoticized for the titillation of male readers looking to rationalize their heterosexist porn appetites? Or, are we freed from struggling with these questions because Elizabeth Gilbert raises most of them herself in the article, as when she puts down her pen and picks up the camera to shoot some footage for a director while on the set of an S/M film, remarking in retrospect that she felt more like a tourist than a pornographer?
“The A to Z of Alternative Culture”
Let’s take as one final example the issues raised when one attempts to analyze Craig Marks’s multiply-ironic introduction to Spin‘s April 1993 “A to Z of Alternative Culture,” a highly eclectic, kitsch “dictionary” of what it means to be Gen X in 1993 that lists, in mock encyclopedia style, items ranging from consumer products like Snapple to “in” bands like Nirvana and TV shows like The Simpsons, as well as underground subculture scenes like rave and Riot Grrrl. Marks’s introduction to this feature offers itself up as a perfect example of Spin‘s trademark ironic style (marked by MTVish Gen X posturing):
The outpouring of scribblings recently about the generation born in the ’60s and ’70s reads like a misguided conclusion to that psych experiment where twins are separated at birth to answer the nurture versus nature debate. Could it be that these profiles of you and yours are nothing but covert attempts to reduce a complex, confounded generation to its lowest common denominator, thereby making it easier to blame you for all that’s wrong with the world, and easier to exploit you when there’s a new soft drink on the market? Does the word “duh” mean anything to you?
What your birthdate does provide you is common ground, a shared vocabulary. The items we've selected, when added together, do not equal your thoughts, feelings, fears, and aspirations. That's for you and your confidants to sort out. There is, though, a lexicon that develops among the members of a generation, a secret language that's so pervasive it's taken for granted. Asking a 40-year-old to comprehend a conversation between two 24-years-olds is as fruitless an exercise in code-breaking as reading the Daily Racing Form. What you'll find on the following pages is more the result of sifting through the contents of your pants pockets than of unlocking the door to your soul. We'll save that for next year's anniversary issue. (38)
What does it mean when Spin, which already ironically sells itself as THE monthly tour-guide to “Alternative” scenes, publishes an A to Z tour-guide to Alternative Culture? What does it mean when the music editor then writes an introduction to this pastiche cultural dictionary by announcing that these profiles you are about to read are reductive and commercially exploitative and that such a list could never really be compiled except as a set of already appropriated mass media stereotypes of a self-identified generational youth culture that could never really exist? What does it mean when Craig Marks goes on to suggest, in a seeming reversal, that a generational lexicon is “so pervasive it’s taken for granted,” and cites as proof of its existence the fact that it lies in the shared consumer goods found in the contents of our pockets?
Two months later, the editors throw into the mix, as Spin always does, that one last twirl: a reader’s response to the A-Z tour-guide to the always-already-thoroughly-appropriated-GenX-scene–a letter published by Spin further implicating Spin as it simultaneously represents, constructs, and exploits the scene that never quite yet was:
Just when I thought SPIN had a clue, we get "The A to Z of Alternative Culture." Why can't people realize that the basis of an alternative culture is that it can't be alphabetized? A better title for the piece would have been "26 Steps to Becoming Trendy"--or better yet "What's out for '93."
Insofar as the article at issue is a simulacra of Spin, each of these substitute titles may be read as already popularized meta-commentaries on what it means to read Spin magazine itself. Staked out here between these two alternative titles to Spin‘s alternative tour-guide, lies a wonderfully complex and illustrative debate about the relationship between popularized postmodernism and essentializing patterns in Cultural Studies subculture criticism.
“26 Steps to Becoming Trendy”: Spin as Just a Magazine
Of course, Spin magazine is only one of a growing number of mass-circulation pop-cult magazines which have learned, in a sense, to talk the talk of academic theory and cultural criticism. And even though I’ve invested more time than I’d care to admit in this paper and I consider myself a “fan” of Spin (whatever that might actually be), I, too, am sometimes inclined to dismiss it wholesale as so many of Spin‘s own readers do. I too am tempted to read Spin as merely a tour guide to what’s trendy–to interpret Spin according to the logic of Hebdige’s reading of the Face as a magazine that articulates nothing more than a facile, flat earth postmodernism in which everything is always already commercially appropriated, where the line between the ads and the articles isn’t just blurred, it collapses altogether, and for Hebdige it always collapses into the ad.
Borrowing Jean-Luc Godard’s famous maxim “This is not a just image. This is just an image,” Hebdige reads the Face as a way of marking the differences between what he sees as “a just magazine” (Ten.8) and “just a magazine” (the Face). Comparing these two British youth culture magazines on points of design, content, and style, Hebdige maps a cultural terrain between, on the one hand, the last remnants of an avant-garde world (a three dimensional world of words capable of historical perspective and motion over time) and, on the other hand, the emergent dominance of a postmodern, post-avant-garde world (a flat depthless world of images happily fixated on its own eternally changing kaleidoscopic present). According to Hebdige, Ten.8, with its more traditional magazine style and print-dominated three-column layout, is a magazine capable of offering up “knowledge of debates on the history, theory, politics and practice of photography,” where as the Face, with its oversized “continental format,” its emphasis on photo images and a design that blurs the boundaries between article and ad, ends up offering nothing but flat surfaces: “‘street credibility,’ ‘nous,’ image and style tips for those operating within the highly competitive milieux of fashion, music and design” (158):
The Face is a magazine which goes out of its way every month to blur the line between politics and parody and pastiche; the street, the stage, the screen; between purity and danger; the mainstream and the “margins.” (161)
[…]
All statements made inside the Face, though necessarily brief are never straightforward. Irony and ambiguity predominate. They frame all reported utterances whether those utterances are reported photographically or in prose. A language is thus constructed without anybody in it (to question, converse or argue with). Where opinions are expressed they occur in hyperbole so that a question is raised about how seriously they’re meant to be taken. Thus the impression you gain as you glance through the magazine is that this is less an “organ of opinion” than a wardrobe full of clothes (garments, ideas, values, arbitrary preferences: i.e., signifiers)….
As the procession of subcultures, taste groups, fashions, anti-fashions, winds its way across the flat plateaux, new terms are coined to describe them.... The process is invariable: caption/capture/disappearance (i.e., naturalisation). [...] Once named, each group moves from the sublime (absolute now) to the ridiculous (the quaint, the obvious, the familiar). It becomes a special kind of joke. Every photograph an epitaph, every article an obituary. On both sides of the camera and the typewriter, irony and ambiguity act as an armour to protect the wearer (writer/photographer; person/people written about/photographed) against the corrosive effects of the will to nomination. Being named (identified; categorised) is naff; on Planet Two it is a form of living death. (170)
Hmmmmm. Smells like team Spin. What’s in Spin is out because being in Spin marks one as having already been “sold out” long enough to be included in Spin. Regardless of how frequently Spin may implicate itself in the ironic world of its own making, such acts of self-implication are themselves, however, only part of the language of simulacra… every month the world of youth cultures and pop is made anew in the pages of Spin only to be declared dead already, only in turn to be made new and declared already dead again next month. Or is it?
“What’s Out For ’93”: Spin as Not Just a Magazine
The Spin reader who wants to dismiss the magazine as a consumerist tour guide to what’s trendy also, unwittingly, acknowledges in his letter that one might read Spin as a way of gauging what’s not authentic alternative culture–as a guide to “What’s out.” The logic underlying such a critique reflects Sarah Thornton’s argument that (as well as perhaps Spin‘s self-conscious realization of the fact that) mass subculture consumer magazines such as the Face, however ironically scorned by people who identify themselves with underground scenes, nevertheless play a crucial, constitutive mediating role in the formation of subculture scenes and identities. In “Moral Panic, the Media and British Rave Culture,” Thornton challenges the way Cultural Studies subculture theories “tend to position the media and its associated processes in opposition to and after the fact of subculture” (189):
Their segregation of subcultures from the media derives, in part, from an intellectual project in which popular culture was excavated out from under mass culture (that is, authentic people's culture was sequestered from mediated, corporate culture). In this way, the popular was defended against the disparagement of "mass society" and other theorists; youth could be seen as unambiguously active rather than passive, creative rather than manipulated. In practice, however, music subcultures and the media--popular and mass culture--are inextricable. In consumer societies, where sundry media work simultaneously and global industries are local businesses, the analytical division eclipses as much as it explains. (188)
We see this kind of interpretive “eclipse” at work in Hebdige’s account of the “invariable” process he maps out regarding the relationship between the Face and the subculture scenes it covers: “caption/capture/disappearance.” In her reading of British rave scenes, however, Thornton finds that, in the mainstream as well as in niche/zine media (and everything in between), one can chart a relationship that looks more like caption/formation/caption/re-formation–a reciprocal relationship in which subcultures are not “subversive until the very moment they are represented by the mass media,” but rather “become politically relevant only when they are framed as such,” frequently by disparaging mass media/tabloid coverage which becomes “not the verdict but the vehicle of their resistance” (184). Moreover, Thornton argues that subculture theorists need to acknowledge the existence of mass media that cater specifically to counter-cultural desires of young people, what she refers to as “subcultural consumer magazines.”
III. (White) Riot Grrrl: who really wants a riot right now?
Joanne Gottlieb and Gayle Wald take up a similar post-Hebdige position in “Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrrls, Revolution and Women in Independent Rock,” where they conclude that the limits of Riot Grrrl “revolutionary” rock are to be found in the movement’s self-imposed media black-out, some of which has remained in effect since 1992. Though they concede that Riot Grrrls have legitimate reasons to fear and loathe masculinist “mainstream” media and the gaze of academia, both of which threaten (in different ways of course) to exploit and trivialize the movement and incorporate it into various forms of cultural tourism, Gottlieb and Wald conclude that such a stance against academia and the “popular” is ultimately politically regressive and elitist:
In pinning its resistance to the undifferentiated "mainstream," Riot Grrrl risks setting itself up in opposition to the culturally "popular," as well as to the political status quo; in this they echo the collegiate erudition and elitism of independent music generally. Moreover, in rejecting the popular, Riot Grrrl may preclude the possibility of having a broad cultural or political impact.... If Riot Grrrl wants to raise feminist consciousness on a large scale, then it will have to negotiate a relation to the mainstream that does not merely reify the opposition between mainstream and subculture. (271)
This criticism is perhaps especially poignant when one considers that many Riot Grrrls are themselves current or former graduate students and that much of Riot Grrrl’s neo-punk “revolution” resides in the translation of academic feminist critical theory into everyday subcultural practice. For the purposes of my argument here, however, what’s most relevant about Gottlieb and Wald’s essay is not only the fact that their conclusions about the limits Riot Grrrl counter-hegemonic practices echo Thornton’s analysis of the symbiotic, constitutive relationship between media and subculture identity but also the performative criticism that their essay enacts by violating, in the acts of composition, presentation, and publication, Riot Grrrl resolve to resist incorporation in/by the gaze of both “mainstream” media and academia. This is made all the more clear when one considers the ways Gottlieb and Wald undermine their own analysis by constructing Riot Grrrl as an “original” underground that “emerges as a bona fide subculture” and then gets “discovered” by mainstream journalism and subsequently popularized (262-263).
This is precisely the kind of violation for which Spin magazine is routinely vilified, again by academics, subculture members, and so-called “mainstream” readers alike. Moreover, Gottlieb and Wald’s implicit rationale for committing such a violation is identical to that which is frequently asserted in the pages of Spin as it reports and disseminates “alternative” underground scenes to “mainstream” readers–namely, “politics,” or in the words of Gottlieb and Wald, the “possibility of [Riot Grrrl] having a broad cultural or political impact.” Compare this statement to Spin‘s own coverage of Riot Grrrl just prior to the movement’s semi-official 1992 media blackout in the magazine’s “Flash” section (a series of short articles in the front of the magazine devoted to, among other things, alerting readers to new and emerging underground scenes):
When asked about their inspiration, many of the women involved cite Kathleen Hanna, lead singer of Bikini Kill. Hanna, however, doesn't exactly have mass-media savvy--she declined to speak to Spin and, with that, gave up the opportunity to reach thousands with her motivating voice. (Furth 26)
To punctuate their certainly self-serving critique further, and to give Riot Grrrl the benefit of the mass media advertising plug that Hanna expressly tried to refuse, Furth concludes her brief Spin article by listing Riot Grrrl Washington D.C. contact addresses for “girl bands” and “girls interested in Riot Grrrl” (a rhetorical gesture that echoes Spin‘s monthly Amnesty International updates, which appeared on donated ad-space for 12 months in 1991-92, including an entire special issue guest-edited by Amnesty International Executive Director Jack Healey in November 1991).
The bottom line from both Gottlieb and Wald and Spin‘s perspective seems to be the same: if you really want to have a progressive riot (or a cultural revolution), first you have to assemble a crowd. And you can only do that by reaching out to Others, even to those (or perhaps especially to those), who threaten to incorporate your slogans, your “look,” and your politics into their own agendas and their own practices and pleasures of everyday life; and you can only do that if you’re willing to work in the mediums of the popular. Spin sound-bite:
Sinéad O’Connor: I don’t believe that rock’n’roll is only about entertainment.
SPIN [Bob Guccione, Jr.]: I don't either, but it's certainly an entertainment medium. ("Special Child" 48)
Or, as Elizabeth Gilbert would write in her article on feminist porn after being snubbed by a NOW spokesperson who refused to distinguish between Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, Sr. and his son who publishes and edits Spin: “If you only talk to people who already agree with you, you are not a political organization. You’re a support group.” Spin writers and editors frequently echo academic critiques of the traditional divisions between the margins and the mainstream–as they do, for instance, in an article on Stone Temple Pilots (August 1995): “As mainstream rock bands continue to emulate indie ways, they become lightening rods for ridicule. ‘Poseurs!’ cry the righteous arbiters of indie. But shouldn’t we encourage the mainstreaming of indie values?” (Azerrad 57). This is the core of Spin‘s theory of its own relationship to mass culture–this is at once its angle into the market of subculture consumer magazines and its moral mission, what Guccione, Jr. calls its “higher calling.”
The arguments against Spin successfully articulating or performing any such cultural criticism should by now be familiar. Regarding Spin‘s Riot Grrrl coverage specifically, one might argue that Spin doesn’t perform an act of criticism by publishing a “Flash” article on Riot Grrrl and that it performs, instead, a double act of Madison Avenue mainstream incorporation. On the one hand, it appropriates Riot Grrrl interventions to serve a masculinist spectacle of rock ideology, the kind of thing that Ross defines as “some homosocial version of young, straight males out on the town, partying, and so on.” On the other hand, it appropriates an academic critique of the relationship between popular culture and mass media to serve its own self-congratulatory, self-promoting, moralistic editorial voice. One might argue that Riot Grrrl revolution is, to return to Hebdige’s phrasing, merely the latest commodity to appear in Spin‘s endless parade of revolutionary youth cultures as fashion that it deploys to better market its own self-styled image of “street credibility.” In this regard, one might note that the word “Grrrl”–which in Riot Grrrl usage performs a multi-valent intervention into, and recuperation of, the language of patriarchy, as well as a critique of the woman-centered discourses of mainstream feminism–appears on the pages of Spin as “girl.” Spin articles do give a certain voice to Riot Grrrl concerns about masculine-media appropriations: “At a recent CBGB Bikini Kill show, many guys panted at the prospect of seeing Hanna topless (she had doffed her shirt at a previous gig), turning a potential act of defiance into an oglefest.” But those same Spin articles also tend themselves to “ogle” at and invite male readers to be titillated by Riot Grrrl displays of women’s rage: “Some of the older females present saw the show as just a Poly Styrene/X-Ray Spex retread. But to the younger, less jaded Goo-girls, Hanna is the Angriest Girl. They understand. They see this scary, sexy girl, who pogos while singing about sexual abuse, as the future of punk rock–where girls can have fun for a change.” With the final sentence of the article collapsing Riot Grrrl anger into Cindy Lauper’s “girls just wanna have fun,” one might conclude that, indeed, “violation” is the appropriate word to use regarding Spin’s Riot Grrrl reporting and its diluted critical performances–that Spin’s refusal to respect Riot Grrrl’s “no” in response to its media advances constitutes a form of sexual violence.
Though there is no doubt some validity to each of these claims, the problem with such arguments is that: 1) they all depend upon a return to an interpretive paradigm that constructs Riot Grrrl subculture as existing apart from and outside of the multiple levels of media (mass media, tabloid media, niche or zine media, as well as subculture consumer media, and, I would add, academic media), which are in fact the materials out of which subcultures and undergrounds are made; and 2) they presuppose that a valid, qualitative (if not quantitative) distinction can be drawn between Spin‘s violation of Riot Grrrl media black-outs and the violation performed by Gottlieb and Wald’s academic essay, which is of course only the tip of a whole wave of Riot Grrrl seminar papers that began hitting the beaches of traditional academic venues. Gottlieb and Wald tend themselves to reify the opposition between mainstream and subculture, and in the process exaggerate the anti-hegemonic resistance of the subculture, by turning to Riot Grrrl performances in order to validate academic gender-as-performance criticism while at the same time holding those performances up as a model for future feminist political strategies: “Using performance as a political forum to interrogate issues of gender, sexuality and patriarchal violence, Riot Grrrl performance creates a feminist praxis based on the transformation of the private into the public, consumption into production–or, rather than privileging the traditionally male side of these binaries, they create a new synthesis of both” (268). Making such an intellectual and political investment in a “popular” scene that refuses to engage the popular almost as a matter of policy, however, makes me wonder exactly what kind of praxis we’re really talking about here, bringing to mind Steven Tyler’s joke about rock critics: “Why do rock critics like Elvis Costello? Because they all look like him” (“Cult of the DJ” 75). But even assuming that Riot Grrrl has indeed managed (in spite of itself) to mobilize a popularized form of feminist cultural criticism centered on a Hebdigian post-modernist “problematics of affect” (and I think the subsequent mass popularity of Courtney Love and other popularized “angry womyn” Grrrl-styled “alternative” rock bands indicates that is has), I would argue that it could only do so, as Gottlieb and Wald themselves hesitantly acknowledge, in its popularized forms in the mass media:
Possibly, the riot grrrl movement would have been significantly diminished had it not been for its careful coverage [in Sassy], which gave a mass audience of teenage girls access to a largely inaccessible phenomenon in the rock underground. This suggests a variation on Dick Hebdige's model of ideological incorporation in that--in this case--the media, beyond its function to control and contain this phenomenon, may also have helped to perpetuate it. Sassy's role in publicizing and perpetuating the riot grrrl phenomenon may arise from a gendered division in the experience of youth culture, with girls' participation gravitating towards the forms, often mass-market visual materials, that lend themselves towards consumption in the home. While it appropriates riot grrrl subculture as a marketing strategy, the magazine also enables riot grrrl culture to infiltrate the domestic space to which grrrls--particularly young teenagers--are typically confined. (265-266)
All of which tends to circle without directly facing the more fundamental questions of exactly where Riot Grrrl performances might be said to perform and who in fact might be said to perform them, which ultimately leads to a question of who qualifies to identify themselves as part of the Riot Grrrl revolution: underground rock bands and underground zines, certainly; readers, writers, and editors of Sassy, maybe; but presumably not readers (let alone writers and editors) of the likes of The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and Spin.
Of course, there are important differences to note between underground scenes and mass media disseminations of underground messages and styles, between the reading spaces and reading practices of contemporary teenage girls and boys (though Hanna herself allows that boys too, like Bikini Kill’s guitarist, can be “girly boys”); however, Gottlieb and Wald’s compulsion to police the boundaries between Sassy‘s “careful,” “respectful,” and ideologically “committed” mass media disseminations on the one hand, and an otherwise undifferentiated mass of “mainstream” media dilutions on the other, seems to me to overplay all of these differences, especially given the collegiate nature of “alternative” youth cultures more generally. The overall effect of this is to exaggerate Riot Grrrl underground agency in “infiltrating” the mainstream with presumably more “authentic” Riot Grrrl articulations and to discount any empowering potential in the readerly consumption of mass media marketing appropriations of those articulations.
Thornton claims that, because mass media is the stuff out of which subcultural identity is formed, we must concede that subcultures are themselves likely to be more passive than we have been conditioned to believe. The converse of this may be, however, that subculture consumer magazines (their articles and ads) are more actively subversive than we have been conditioned to assume. From this perspective, one could argue that Riot Grrrl as Gottlieb and Wald construct it not only risks “echoing the collegiate erudition and elitism of independent music generally” by positioning itself against the “mainstream,” but rather it was from the start already collegiate, erudite and elitist, and that it remained so in part because Riot Grrrl subculture identity grounded itself in limiting rather than expanding the stage upon which it would perform popularized articulations of academic feminism, which, as Gottlieb and Wald acknowledge, remains itself a largely collegiate white middle class woman’s (as opposed to “girl’s”) tradition/culture/movement. Spin writer Charles Aaron was perhaps (ironically) correct, then, when he prematurely concluded in his Village Voice article on the movement that Riot Grrrl circa 1992 would turn out to be only a white college women’s riot after all (though he might have emphasized that that’s significant in and of itself!). Aaron missed the mark, however, when he failed to see Riot Grrrl media coverage itself as a constitutive part of that subcultural resistance movement–a movement of cultural critique which (even more ironically) may have only appeared to evaporate in news photographer’s “flash” to later re-emerge (in spite of everyone) in other, more popular popularized forms.
IV. Conclusion: Post-Scripts (Again): Cultural Work in the “Always Forever Now”
Part of our point is that nobody owns these
images. They belong to a movement that is
constantly growing--in numbers, in militancy,
in political awareness.
--Douglas Crimp, AIDS demo graphics
I want to conclude by way of a brief turn back to Hebdige’s “Post-Scripts” which make up the conclusion of Hiding in the Light–where Hebdige seems to grudgingly accept that, like it or not (and he clearly doesn’t), postmodernism is “here” to stay, so we might as well “get used to it.” Meaning, it’s time to stop complaining about the postmodern (or waxing nostalgic for those more knowable “modernist” times that never quite were anyway) and figure out how to work within it–how to “work it.”
Diesel[TM]: Jeans and (ACT UP) Cultural Work
So let’s begin again by taking Hebdige at face value. Let’s allow that Spin, like the Face and Vibe and other consumer subculture magazines, not only blurs the line between article and ad, it collapses it all together. And let’s allow that it all collapses into the ad. Following Thornton’s line of thinking, ads like Diesel Jeans’ “Victory” [see Figure 3],
Figure 3. Diesel Jeans and Workwear, “Victory!”
Rpt. from Spin August 1995: 3-4.
Reprinted by permission.
which was published as a full two-page spread in the opening pages of Spinin 1995, can be read as a post-avant-garde counter-cultural intervention (commercial to be sure) that does not merely appropriate “original” ACT UP signs of subcultural opposition, but in fact resemanticizes and disseminates (popularizes) those oppositional values on a scale that no subcultural articulation ever could. There are indeed multiple moments of commercial appropriation taking place here, appropriations of what traditional subcultural theories would either explicitly or implicitly define as “original” or “authentic” ACT UP oppositional signs. The ad-series slogan and logo, which appears at the bottom corner of all the Diesel Jeans shock ads, borrows directly from ACT UP subcultural styles and rhetoric. The logo features a profile face of a punk/new wave rebel whose image calls to mind ACT UP’s initial appropriation of earlier punk-rock looks; surrounding that profile, arranged like the print surrounding an activist logo, is the series slogan printed in the fashion of ACT UP protest slogans: “Number 80 in a Series of Diesel ‘How to…’ Guides to SUCCESSFUL LIVING for PEOPLE interested in general HEALTH and mental POWER.” The central image of the two sailors kissing on the dock of a World War II home-coming Victory celebration is specifically an appropriation of a 1988 ACT UP poster titled “Read My Lips” [see Figure 4] featuring two World War II era sailors in a similar pose of loving embrace and full-mouthed kiss that gets rearticulated as an in-your-(heterosexist)-face assertion of gay pride and resistance, the visual equivalent of “we’re here, we’re queer, get used it.”
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Figure 4. Gran Fury, “Read My Lips (boys)” (1988). Rpt. in Crimp and Rolston 56. Reprinted by permission of ACT UP. |
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Figure 5. “VD DAY!” Illustration accompanying Phil Ochs’s “Have You Heard? The War Is Over!” The Village Voice 23 Nov. 1967. Rpt. in Phil Ochs, The War Is Over (New York: Collier Books, 1971) 93. Reprinted by permission. |
However, this “original” ACT UP poster, which was produced by Gran Fury to promote a “kiss in” protest rally, itself borrows from similar tactics of appropriation deployed by 1960s anti-war protests. In fact, this Diesel ad bears an even more direct resemblance to Eisenstaedt’s famously staged World War II V-J Day photograph, which was itself incorporated into a 1968 Vietnam War Protest poster promoting the parodic celebration of “VD Day: The End of the War!” [see Figure 5].
The Diesel Jeans “Victory” ad therefore ends up being not merely a commercial appropriation of ACT UP signs of subcultural resistance, but rather an appropriation of what was itself an ACT UP appropriation. The questions facing us, then, in light of Thornton’s critique of Cultural Studies’ tendency to romanticize and essentialize subcultural resistance are: What, if any, kinds of oppositional cultural work (including but not limited to queer cultural critique) may survive the commodification process? What other kinds of oppositional images might be for sale? Does this image of commodified queerness mark or elide the cultural-historical systems of power and social struggle that lie behind the multiple appropriations taking place? The expected “disclaimer” is clearly present in the lower left corner where a man is wearing a placard in which a sampling of the song “God Bless America” (“America, God shed his grace”) reads as a moral/religious invective against homosexuality. But it’s difficult for me to imagine that virtually all of the in-your-(heterosexist)-face activism of the “original” Gran Fury “Read My Lips” poster gets lost in the popular commercial appropriations here. In fact, when one considers that the timing of the ad proclaiming “victory” comes right on the heels of newly-elected President Clinton’s soon-to-be doomed attempt to lift the ban on gays in the military, this appropriation might be interpreted as reflecting a fuller image of the important role World War II played in the historical development of gay and lesbian identity and community in America because the photograph evokes a wider contextual image of the role World War II and post-war cultural environment in the development of contemporary gay subcultural identity and resistance. The realpolitik optimism of this ad may have been misplaced; however, the larger political successes of ads such as this and of commodified queerness more generally is not to be located in any direct influence they may have on public policy, but rather in their ability to win popular consent for the free and open expression of “outlaw” sexuality. As one reader of an earlier version said in response to someone else’s dismissal of the queer politics in this ad as merely appropriating ACT UP rhetoric as the latest image of suburban “alternative” hippness: “Yes, but that may be precisely the point. We want and need for young people to be able to look at images like this, or video images of Madonna kissing a woman, and see them as ‘cool.’”
The potentially successful populist politics of this ad and similar consumer culture appropriations reveals the limitations of Crimps’s claim that ACT UP subcultural pop art interventions succeed in breaking down the barriers of mass culture and high art which earlier generations of Pop artists sought but failed to achieve. In AIDS demo graphics, Crimp credits ACT UP’s Gran Fury with having successfully circumvented “the fate of most critical art” in the twentieth century, which is to be “co-opted and neutralized” by the overriding commodity constraints of the art world:
Postmodernist art advanced a political critique of art institutions--and art itself as an institution--for the ways they constructed social relations through specific modes of address, representations of history, and obfuscations of power. The limits of this aesthetic critique, however, have been apparent in its own institutionalization: critical postmodernism has become a sanctioned, if still highly contested, art world product, the subject of standard exhibitions, catalogues, and reviews. The implicit promise of breaking out of the museum and marketplace to take on new issues and find new audiences has gone largely unfulfilled. (19)
Crimp claims that ACT UP’s Gran Fury delivers on postmodernist art’s failed promise to break out of the twin confines of “the museum and the marketplace” because they target their art-politics at the “streets” of AIDS activism. Though Crimp is justified in his critique of Pop as museum-bound cultural critique, in his celebration of Gran Fury he tends to fall into the reverse trap of exaggerating and romanticizing the authenticity and independence of queer subculture, much in the same way as George Chauncey does in his analysis of gay subcultures in the 1920s and 1930s, and as Hebdige does regarding punk in the late 1970s and as Gottlieb and Wald do with Riot Grrrl in the late 1980s.
Cultural Studies subcultural theories, as important as they are in mapping the complexities of power relationships operating according to the “spectacle” logics of consumer capitalism, frequently fail to take full account of the constitutive role that mass media technologies play in the long history of dissatisfied people locating ruptures in the hegemonies of cultural dominants and rearticulating resistant cultural practices within those ruptures. What Spin magazine offers us, then, is a demonstration of the limits of relying on subcultures as a paradigm for political action and activism against a global system of multinational consumer capitalism. That’s the bad news. The good news is that rethinking the post-avant-garde politics of Spin may lead to new, more successful strategies of Left coalition-building between intellectuals, counter-cultural celebrities, consumer-subcultural media industries and “the people” which Stuart Hall called for in the conclusion of The Hard Road to Renewal.
When one more fully acknowledges the interdependent, symbiotic relationship between the media and subculture identity formations, the Face becomes more than “just a magazine,” even if one doesn’t yet want to call it “a just magazine.” And so too does Spin, which has from the late ’80s on increasingly positioned itself in more explicit political cultural terms and which had always been more explicitly “political” than the Face from the very beginning. But Spin may arguably be “a just magazine” as well, not because it offers up the kind of academic-friendly, rational argument and criticism that Hebdige locates in Ten.8, but rather precisely because it is able to use irony and hyperbole to mobilize an effective form of “sound-bite” criticism–because Spin manages to reach, with its Gen X posturing and hyperbolic irony, the kinds of readers that neither Hebdige nor media-phobic undergrounds ever will: those center-leaning, educated-but-decidedly-not-academic, generally-conservative-but-still-reachable mass cult readers against whom both subculture theorists and undergrounds scenes ritualistically define themselves, but upon whom they must also depend if their alternative cultural politics are going to be effective.
Jeans II: Celebrating Whose Specialness?
In arguing that contemporary Left pop culture academics need to rethink their relationship to commodified media technologies that shape the shapeless mass of the known world through which progressive cultural politics work, I do not mean to suggest that Spin magazine has arrived at the promised land of post-avant-garde political postmodernist practice. Rather, I’m suggesting that its appropriations of Riot Grrrl and ACT UP counter-culture have functioned progressively and that the Spin model of commodified resistance represents a viable strategy. In many ways, of course, Spin‘s appropriations do function conservatively, particularly regarding issues of race and race representations. Since the advent of Vibe (which now owns Spin), Spin appears to have abandoned its 1989 to 1993 political vision of an alliance between alternative rock and hip-hop manifesting itself under the banner of some vaguely defined multi-cultural Gen X signifier. The magazine continues to market itself as Gen X radical chic, but regarding race, Spin in 1996 and 1997 resorted to merely paying lip service to hip-hop as an imaginary post-racist ally to the (now more than ever) implicitly-coded white world of Gen X iconography.
In the post-Gen X, post-punk, post-Vibe world of the late 1990s, “Gen X” ironically remains a potent signified for both Spin and its fashion-music advertisers, even though any and all explicit signifiers of Gen X have long since past being passé. Moreover, the percentage of multi-ethnic imagery associated with Gen X iconography continues to grow in inverse proportion to the rise of de facto ethnic segregation and racial conflict over the last two decades. Similar to Spin‘s Riot Grrrl coverage, the current proliferation of multi-ethnic Gen X signs again raises complex questions about commodified images of progressive political ideals and the resistant practices of subordinate peoples. In the construction of an explicitly multi-racial Gen X hippness, are we seeing a progressive proliferation of racial integration imagery in a neo-racist age that seems to have forgotten the brief respite of 1960s integration idealism, or are we seeing instead merely another set of “post-racist,” feel-good images that only fuel current, so-called voluntary segregationist trends by white consumers who deny the existence of racial difference and racism even as they run out to buy stylized images of urban, racially-coded hippness?
The narrative logic of Spin‘s racial positioning can be seen in a Levi’s Silver Tab advertisement featured in the October 1997 issue of Swing: A Magazine About Life in Your Twenties, itself a spin-off of the Spin phenomenon. In this ad, which is typical of the Silver Tab campaign, a kitsch late ’70s family portrait that screams white-bread suburbia gets intruded upon by a moment of inter-racial “contact” [see Figure 6].
Figure 6. Levi’s SilverTab,
“Celebrate Your Specialness.”
Rpt. from Swing: A Magazine
About Life In Your Twenties
November 1997: 14-15.
Reprinted by permission of Levi’s.
The authenticity of the 1970s suburban dress, the stiff poses and the sterile smiles of the family stand in stark juxtaposition to the relaxed posture, the gently mocking smile and the “alternative” street style of this urban female hipster whose punked-out afro touches the white house-wife’s do-it-yourself-perm cut. Of course, the “in joke” of the ad is that white people aren’t hip. But the deeper irony, the implied commercial message of the ad, seems to be that white people, these twenty-something college students who read Swing and Spin,can in fact purchase a kind of second-degree hippness through Levi’s SilverTab products. White people can’t be hip, but they can achieve a level of hippness by ironically acknowledging the fact of their unhippness. This is the appeal of urban hip-hop styles for suburban whites more generally, made all the more ironic here since the product is not really hip-hop attire at all but instead pretty run-of-the-mill suburban causal wear, which is perhaps also designed to sell images of economic and social uplift to a secondary market of black middle-class twentysomethings. (Note, for example, in the photograph of the black woman relaxing alone in the elegant chair that she has now lost much of her former punk/hip-hop signifiers in favor of a decidedly more assimilated, middle-class posture.) For the white twentysomething, the emotional appeal is partially located in the way that wearing an image of inter-racial integration offers the consumer a feel-good sentiment of racial harmony in the midst of racial segregation, racial tensions, and perhaps even their own race prejudices.
The images of multi-racial, multi-cultural harmony are now common ad stock. But in our increasingly segregated society, it remains to be seen whether any of the progressive taboo-shattering meanings of ads like the popular Benneton’s United Colors series [see Figure 7]
Figure 7. United Colors of Benneton,
rpt. from Spin October 1996: 9-10.
Concept: O. Toscani.
Courtesy of United Colors of Benetton.
will survive the neo-colonialist race or race essentialist meanings implied by these kinds of shock “idea” ads which are so crucial to Spin magazine’s own street-wise and “alternative” hip currency. Benneton’s United Colors ad series has become for many skeptics of political postmodernism the epitome of commercial appropriations masquerading as social protest imagery. Appignanesi and Garratt contend, for example, that Benneton’s appropriation of photojournalism and the stylized imagery of social protest “art” merely appropriates the “hyperreality” cachet of those original forms, gleaning that reality onto the unreal construct of the magazine ad page and condensing it down to the image of the Benneton product name and logo–a purely commodified image (and for Appignansesi and Garratt it is also onlyan image) of global identity and “social conscience” (138-39). In this particular ad, the scene is obviously staged and, similar to the camped-up homosexual overtones in the Diesel jeans ad, the visual racial marking is really over-the-top. The straight blond mane of the female horse and kinked and curled mane of the “black” horse is as camped-up as the applauding, beef-cake sailors or the phallic shape of the submarine with “sea-men” descending from the tip in the Diesel ad. But there is still the vexing question of whether this image of interracial contact deconstructs race as a binary black-white discourse or whether it reconstructs race essentialist myths by reifying race as a set of natural attributes? Does this image force readers, particularly young white readers, to confront their internalization of deeply entrenched racial taboos? Does it make the braking of taboos “cool” in the same way that the Diesel Jeans “Victory!” ad makes the image of homosexuality a cool transgression, or does it merely allow the consumer to trick themselves into feeling multi-cultural, “third-world hip,” or radical-chic, through their fashion purchases? The questions are easy to form. The answers, of course, are the hard part. It should be clear, however, that it is too easy and counter-productive to dismiss as appropriation the constitutive role that commercialism and commodification play in the historical, material construction of progressive cultural studies ideals: internationalism, economic justice, racial harmony, gender parity, and sexual liberation [see Figure 8].
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| Figure 8. Ben Thornberry, photograph from ACT UP “Stop The Church” March on St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City, December 10, 1989. Reprinted by permission of ACT UP. |
Always Already the Spin Doctors
Subcultural capital is, as Thornton points out, “in no small sense” constructed out of and by media and commerce–by the likes of Spin, which includes its photo spreads and fashion ads as well as its articles, editorials, and album reviews. It is equally important, however, to keep reminding ourselves that subcultural capital is at once a form of academic cultural capital as well. The cultural dollar signs may take different forms, but Gottlieb and Wald, Ross and Rose, and Social Text are all cashing in on the Riot Grrrl phenomenon, too. Though academics do so in the higher registers of subculture theoretical discourses, and only after first expressing the appropriate academic sensitivity about “who will speak for whom, and when, and under what conditions or circumstances” (Bérubé 271), we all unavoidably traffic in the spectacle of “street credibility.” As am I in this very essay. As are so many other graduate students who are trying to scramble for Cultural Studies vita credits to compete in a job market which, professors tell us with simultaneously sinister and apologetic jocularity, probably isn’t going to materialize after all. As were the hundreds of graduate students who paid $95 to deliver papers at an open-invitation Cultural Studies conference at the University of Oklahoma in 1990, which, according to Cary Nelson, only “testifies to the sense that putting a ‘Cultural Studies in the 1990s’ label on your vita is worth an investment in exploitation and alienation” (26). But Cultural Studies capital circulates beyond the traditional academic systems of credentials and rewards as well. As Clint Burnham notes in the conclusion to The Jamesonian Unconscious, Cultural Studies theory and criticism is itself being consumed by graduate students and other “alternative,” self-identified Gen X readers as mass culture:
I would argue that many intellectuals of my generation read the work of Jameson, and theory in general (Jameson means something else) as mass culture; by my generation I suppose I mean those born in the late fifties or in the sixties, Generation X as my fellow Canadian put it.... [I]n this milieu, Jameson and Butler and Spivak and Barthes are on the same plane as Shabba Ranks and PJ Harvey and Deep Space Nine and John Woo: cultural signifiers of which one is as much a "fan" as a "critic," driven as much by the need to own or see or read the "latest" (or the "classic" or the "original") as by the need to debate it on the Internet and in the seminar room. You think Rid of Me is good? Check out 4-Track Demos. True Romance is more of a John Woo film than Hard Target. If you like Gender Trouble, check out Bodies That Matter. Jameson's piece on Chandler in Shades of Noir is a remix of his older essay and samples some of the comments on modernism at the end of Signatures of the Visible. (244)
And this comes to us in a Duke University trade paperback that is self-consciously designed to be a simulacra of Jameson’s own Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which is itself now (in)”famous” amongst critics and reviewers for its self-consciously styled presence as “a gorgeously produced 400-page document” (Bérubé 127). By the time I finished Burnham’s text, I could no longer be certain why I had originally plunked down my VISA card and paid $17.95 for this aesthetically pleasing book (no longer merely a “text”) whose marketing blurb, appearing both in the Duke University Press mail-order catalogue and on the back of the book, sounds a lot like a heady academic version of that subscription junk mail I keep getting from Spin: “Imagine Fredric Jameson–the world’s foremost Marxist critic–kidnapped and taken on a joyride through the cultural ephemera, generational hype, and Cold War fallout of our post-post-contemporary landscape. In The Jamesonian Unconscious, a book as joyful as it is critical and insightful, Clint Burnham devises unexpected encounters between Jameson and alternative rock groups, new movies, and subcultures…. In an unusual biographical move, Burnham negotiates Jameson’s major works… by way of his own working-class, queer-ish, Gen-X background and sensibility. Thus Burnham’s study draws upon an immense range of references familiar to the MTV generation, including Reservoir Dogs, theorists Slavoj Zizek and Pierre Bourdieu, The Satanic Verses,Language poetry, the collapse of state communism in Eastern Europe, and the indie band Killdozer.”
I don’t know about you, but I definitely hear the sound of some bones crunching now–but can anyone tell me with any degree of certainty anymore who’s doing the crunching and who’s being crunched?
Notes
1. My position in relation to Spin and the contemporary music and subculture scenes it covers is primarily as a fan of so-called popular “alternative music,” what Robert Christgau insists should more accurately be called “college rock,” and even here I am more of a tourist and fan than a fellow traveler in any specific indie scene. I have, however, been reading Spin (or perhaps as Hebdige would have it, I’ve been “cruising” Spin) since 1986, when I was introduced to the magazine while attending a small midwestern state college by a friend from Decatur, Illinois, who read Spin with, what seemed to me then, an odd intensity to determine his position in relation to the “mainstream” and some notion of a true punk “underground.”
2. In a May 1994 Spin cover story on Courtney Love, for example, Dennis Cooper will point out that Love grew up in a liberal intellectual environment and “remains an avid reader of feminist theorists like Susan Faludi, Judith Butler, Camille Paglia, and Naomi Woolf” (42), but neither he nor she will articulate anything that even remotely smacks of academic criticism–even though there is clearly a long, rich history of academic feminist cultural critique and avant-garde artistic intervention associated with the name of Love’s band alone. It is perhaps true that one doesn’t need to be an academic feminist to interpret the band’s name, Hole, as a cultural critique of the hegemonic sexual ideologies of phallic domination, nor does one need to be a professor of pop culture to link the band Hole to its many punk predecessors, such as the Slits–the first all-woman punk band whose members, like so many other early punk rock musicians and contemporary “alternative” musicians, walked straight out of their university studies and into the punk “streets.” There is, however, something troubling about the way contemporary popular artists deny their academic backgrounds and intellectual influences, just as many academics, whose cultural writings may be influenced by the postmodernism they (we) encounter in pop culture, are equally reluctant to acknowledge the knowledges that they derive from their own practices as fans and consumers, though they are increasingly eager to acknowledge their pleasures. And this is true, despite the fact that both popular music artists and academics luxuriate in the art of surreptitious quotation of one another.
3. Though I don’t take it up here, Spin‘s relationship to the PC Wars is particularly interesting and, as with everything else in Spin, contradictory. Both Spin and Guccione, Jr. have been very vocal concerning the censorship of pop music. In fact, in the mid ’80s when Tipper Gore and the PMRC were waging their war against youth, Guccione, Jr. propelled himself to the status of celebrity/public intellectual, regularly debating William F. Buckley and the usual cast of right-wing pundits on CNN’s Crossfire and similar news talk shows. Yet, when it comes to academics and their battles with many of these same pundits, Spin has remained uninterested at best, too often picking up anti-PC catch-phrases from the New Right along the way.
4. I say my “suspicion” because I don’t personally know many academics who read Spin. If one can judge academic readership by the availability of library resources, then I would suspect that indeed very few do. Trying to research the early years of Spin proved to be a bit of an unexpected challenge. The Chicago Public Library was the only library in the state of Illinois that I could find holding Spin since its first issue in April 1985, including the University of Illinois, which is the only college or university out of the 42 state and private schools on the state-wide library computer search system that carries the magazine at all (and the U. of I. only started carrying it from 1994 on). Moreover, Spin is not indexed in The Reader’s Guide to Periodicals or any bibliographic indexes or databases that I’m aware of (with the exception of The Music Index, which started indexing Spin in 1989, but only very selectively music-specific articles). If you research Spin, you may feel like you’re in some warped version of a VISA card commercial–you’re walking around with Spin and everywhere you turn they only accept Rolling Stone.
5. “The Whiny Generation,” from David Martin’s “My Turn” column in Newsweek (Nov. 1, 1993), rpt. in Rushkoff 235-37.
6. On Rushkoff: 1) Self-Aggrandizing: “Exposed to consumerism and public relations strategies since we could open our eyes, we GenXers see through the clunky attempts to manipulate our opinions and assets, however shrinking” (5); 2) Pseudo-Intellectual: “Our writers are our cultural playmakers and demonstrate an almost Beckettian ability to find humor in the darkest despair, a Brechtian objectivity to bracket painful drama with ironic distance, and a Chekhovian instinct to find the human soul still lurking beneath its outmoded cultural façade” (8); 3) Misinformed: “To most of us, concepts like racial equality, women’s rights, sexual freedom, and respect for basic humanity are givens. We realize that we are the first generation to enter a society where, at least on paper and in the classroom, the ideas that Boomers fought for are recognized as indisputable facts” (6); 4) Homophobic: “We watched a sexual revolution evolve into forced celibacy as the many excesses of the 1970s and 1980s rotted into the sexually transmitted diseases of our 1990s” (5).
This is not to say, however, that academics and public intellectuals aren’t guilty of similar kinds of lazy thinking. Take for example, this throw-away comment made by Frank Owen in “The Cult of the DJ” symposium concerning the mainstream music press and its refusal to cover dance music: “What I can’t understand, though, is how the current rock scene is portrayed by some rock critics as radical. I listen to a band like Pearl Jam, and I guess they’re critical favorites, but to me they sound like Bad Company. I mean, am I wrong or are they Bad Company? Why is grunge radical? What is so radical about it?” (78). Owen, who was a music editor at Spin for two years and who received an MA from the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in England, ought to know better–making his sweeping dismissal of any and all politics of grunge in the context of this symposium on dance music DJs appear suspect, perhaps even patronizing. Certainly, he should realize that Pearl Jam isn’t just a sound but also a look, an attitude, a stance; he should realize, as Ross has noted elsewhere, that, among other things, grunge asserts “a politics of dirt… as a scourge upon the impossibly sanitized, aerobicized world of 90210” (Microphone Fiends 5). However white and middle-class the grunge phenomenon is (Ross also characterizes it as white suburban kids “style slumming with a vengeance”), there is something “radical,” or at least oppositional, about it, not least the fact that at the very moment Owen is making these comments Pearl Jam was waging its legal battle and media campaign against the monopolistic price-fixing practices of Ticketmaster.
7. Though even here, when one considers the practical uses of this condom, Spin might once again be accused of promoting its own radical image rather than any substantive subcultural resistance, in this case putting hype before health; for, as a reader of an earlier version of this paper pointed out to me, one would really have to question whether or not this condom, after going through the rigors of mass circulation magazine distribution, would even be safe. (My thanks to Elizabeth Majerus for this comment, as well as for her responses to the essay as a whole.)
8. Most of this nonsense seems to be just a case of journalistic sour grapes resulting from Farber having been publicly spanked by ACT UP and The Advocate which, I think correctly, denounced Farber’s 1989 Spin article on AZT as dangerously overstating her case about evidence of the drug’s risks and how that should impact the medical decisions made by people living with AIDS.
Works Cited
- Azerrad, Michael. “Peace, Love and Understanding.” Spin August 1995: 56-58.
- Bérubé, Michael. Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics. London: Verso, 1994.
- Burnham, Clint. The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
- Cooper, Dennis. “Love Conquers All.” Spin May 1994: 38+.
- Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
- —. “Eulogy: Death of Gen X.” Details June 1995: 72.
- Crimp, Douglas, ed. AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. An October Book. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1988.
- —. “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism.” Crimp, AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism 3-16.
- —. “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic.” Crimp, AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism 237-271.
- Crimp, Douglas, with Adam Rolston. AIDS demo graphics. Seattle: Bay Press, 1990.
- “The Cult of the DJ: A Symposium.” Social Text 43 (Fall 1995): 67-88.
- Farber, Celia. “TopSpin.” Spin May 1992: 12.
- Furth, Daisy. “For Girls About To Rock.” Spin April 1992: 26.
- Gilbert, Elizabeth. “Pussy Galore.” Spin April 1995: 150+.
- Gottlieb, Joanne, and Gayle Wald. “Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrrls, Revolution and Women in Independent Rock.” Rose and Ross 250-274.
- Guccione, Bob, Jr. “Special Child” (An Interview with Sinéad O’Connor). Spin November 1991: 42+
- —. “TopSpin.” Spin April 1995: 24.
- —. “TopSpin” Spin Jan. 1994: 12.
- Greer, Jim. “Letter From Dayton, Ohio, Bureau.” Spin April 1995: 224.
- Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. New York: Verso, 1988.
- —. “The Meaning of New Times.” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. David Morely and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Eds. London: Routledge, 1996: 223-37.
- Hebdige, Dick. Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. London: Routledge, 1988.
- Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.
- Kipnis, Laura. “(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler.” Cultural Studies. Eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 373-391.
- Laing, Dave. One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Milton Keynes, England: Open UP, 1985.
- Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: a Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989.
- Marks, Craig. “A to Z of Alternative Culture.” Spin April 1993: 38-52.
- Nelson, Cary. “Always Already Cultural Studies: Two Conferences and a Manifesto.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association. 24.1 (1991): 24-38.
- Rose, Tricia and Andrew Ross, eds. Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
- Ross, Andrew. “Introduction.” Rose and Ross 1-13.
- Rushkoff, Douglas. “Introduction: Us, by Us.” The GenX Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994. 3-8.
- Thornton, Sarah. “Moral Panic, the Media and British Rave Culture.” Rose and Ross 176-192.
- Treichler, Paula A. “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification.” Crimp, AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism 31-70.
