Customer Reviews

Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler

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I consider myself a die-hard leftist, and I agree with most of the conclusions that the authors of _Commodify Your Dissent_ come to. It reminds me a lot of Noam Chomsky, another leftist who reveals modern consumer culture for what it is.

The problem is that the left is remarkably short on solutions, or even the feeling that solutions are possible. _Commodify Your Dissent_ is a collection of essays whose premise is that the U.S. situation is hopeless:

* as many other authors have said, our main means of dissent - our writing, particularly irony - has been swallowed up by our enemies; it's now hip to be ironic, so advertisers adopt irony about advertising as their pose toward the world. So we can't use irony anymore.

* In the U.S., "identity" now means "what car I own and what clothes I wear." We define ourselves as consumers. Once again, we've moved so far in this direction that it's impossible to imagine a way out.

* The culture of business dominates American discourse. We look up to American business leaders as our new gods, and we assume that The Market will correct everything. Resisting The Market is futile, because it is infinitely more intelligent than any policymaker. Hence, leave the world to the Bill Gateses.

* Music is corporatized junk.

and so on, ad nauseum, for a couple hundred pages. After a while, we - or at least I - get numbed to it. Great, so the world has been utterly cheapened by corporations. Sure, corporations own the political process. And? What do I do about it?

_The Baffler_ has no suggestions, which in the end makes it a shrill mouthpiece of powerlessness. We've grown up on a steady diet of powerlessness. The left would assert that this is because the power structure *wants* us to think we're powerless; it helps them when few of us resist. Now _The Baffler_ - with the totally altruistic goal of helping us out - has told us again that we're powerless, has strengthened the case, and has done nothing to correct this impression.

_Commodify Your Dissent_ ends with one of the most shrill, paranoid, counterproductive essays I've ever read, bringing to a crescendo all the doomsaying that peppered the foregoing pages.

Nothing's wrong with being shrill and unproductive. I just thought it fair to warn people that they're getting more of what they're used to.

A mix bag of 23 mostly provocative essays culled from the pages of The Baffler magazine, collected with the aim of critiquing the "new American cultural order." While a many of the ideas and theses presented will be old hat to thinking observers of popular culture, the essays are valuable in that they connect the dots in often highly entertaining (if sometimes overly snide and self-congratulatory) prose. The essays are separated into four sections: The Rebel Consumer, The Culture of Business, The Culturetrust Generation, and Wealth Against the Commonwealth Revisited. Of these, the essays in The Rebel Consumer and The Culturetrust Generation are probably the most lively, entertaining, and accessible to those who haven't thought about this stuff. Should be made required reading for all 9th graders.

This collection of essays provides a gutsy, incisive, and energetic critique of American consumer culture that surpasses and even ridicules the limp, flaccid, self-referential verbiage that academics try to pass off as a "radical", and "critical" examination of culture and power. "Commodify Your Dissent" is a series of critical essays, or "salvos" as the authors prefer to call them, that were printed in The Baffler during the 90's largely in response to the hypocrisy, and gluttony of the America's expanding techno-consumer culture. Using lucid, forthright language, direct examples, and actual critical thinking (not the mental self-gratification generated by tenured radicals) the authors demonstrate how corporate America has commercialized the concept of revolution and employed it along marketing and production guidelines that are-guess what-conformist and conservative. In the 90's culture, as these essays so aptly demonstrate, "free thinking, revolution" and "breaking the rules" really amounted to a double-speak ideology centered around buying more gadgets and helping companies to make more money, a process that was reinforced in words and letters by such "radical" cultural critics as Camille Paglia.

This book is bound to anger a lot of readers because, it's gutsy, direct, and ruthless in its battering of the misused tropes and recycled clichés that enable legions of consumers, workers, and managers to feel like they're breaking the rules when in fact they are merely conforming to and reinforcing them. I know it's a hard fact to face, but buying a recycled pair of bell-bottoms is not an act of rebellion.

With topics from the lottery, the music industry, and the co-opting of rebellion, all in layman's [sic] terms, this book is a bargain at twice the price.

Forget what critics have said: From solid reasons against cultural studies (which tends to look at what college professors consider "alternative," aka Lauryn Hill instead of Chopin), to how corporations control what you read and hear and how to fight back, and the fact that this can all be communicated in simple language makes this brilliant gem so much more precious.

Agreed: one can no longer seem credibly rebellious merely by wearing certain clothes, enjoying certain bands, or otherwise embracing some aspect of youth culture. This shouldn't come as a shock for anyone over the age of eighteen. I for one am happy to see the crass commercialism of, e.g., John Lydon's ads for Mountain Dew, because they make it clear (even without the help of the Baffler's editors) that listening to albums is not in and of itself a significant political act.

Commodify your Dissent is a collection of essays from the Baffler magazine. The essays are social critiques of Mass Media and corporate and consumer culture. They have the sarchastic and hilarious style of H.L. Mencken and, like the latter's work, they end up exposing many false 'truths'. The quality of the writing is excellent, i became extremely envious. My favorite section was The Culture of Business and the critique of businees literature. there are also critiques of commercial grunge music, packaging of artists (one of my favorite essays, exposes pretentious writing for what it is), elites and youth consumerism. You'll learn and laugh. I enjoyed this book so much that I bouught other titles from Thomas Frank and subscribed to the Baffler.

There are few things less entertaining than the rich and sucessful whining about the dreadfullnes of it all, so one might imagine that this book would be a pain to read. Not so, it is a gem.

While it is certianly true that US citizens lead the world in having more of everything than they could possibly want or need and being *so* upset about it, the writers of The Baffler have a genuine gripe: that dissent has become one lifestyle choice amongst many, with a thriving support industry. The best sections of the book are the ads and market report promoting a dissent products and services company; all too credible.

This collection provides a very valuable insight into the Amrican psyche: I would heartily recommend it to any Europeans who were wondering just what is is that the Americans are complaining about all the time.

I've just finished reading the six or seven preceding reviews and have little to add because I strongly agree with virtually all the comments made. So at the risk of wasting more of your time, I'll say this is clearly the best book I've read in the last two years (Of course, this statement is of limited value because you have no way of knowing what my reading habits are like.) In addition to superb content, many of the articles are riddled with memorable phrases. This does not mean the collection of essays is flawless. As others have mentioned, some of the (earlier) essays are downright adolescent, with a strictly antithetical viewpoint. A few others seem to suffer from a somewhat simplistic Marxist slant. But even these make fine use of language. Of the 20+ essays the majority are incisive excoriations of contemporary, market-dominated American culture. It's very likely this book will surprise, entertain, invigorate, and inform you. I also think you'll find Tom Vanderbilt's pieces particularly worthwhile.

Commodfy Your Dissent is meant to be a critique of American consumerism, as well as such things as cultural studies, which it appears to think of as just another version of the same. Well and good one supposes. At the same time, however, it is interesting to note that Commodify is written in a remarkably clear language, as many of the above readers note. The counterargument from the point of view of cultural studies would attack this clarity as lending itself to a reinforcement of consumerism, citing Adorno's attack on liberalism's insistence upon clarity in Minima Moralia perhaps. (That is why, for those who are unaware, academia today is filled with people who, apparently, can't write, as one of the above reviews demonstrates.) One might say that Frank is a person who failed at academia for exactly this reason, which might give a certain credence to the cultural studies argument. For myself though I regard this book as a hopeful sign, for I think of these academic arguments as rather beside the point; for too long a time the Left in this country has eaten its young, and this book looks like it may be a sign that that might be changing. For me a sign of a healthy society is not how many ideas are in play but how many ghettoes there are and how many people are in prison, and though academic "Critical Theorists" would say that that sort of thinking merely plays into the hands of the Right, I can't help thinking that way, which makes me a liberal I suppose. But all you have to do is look around to see that radical thought isn't doing much of anything these days. Tragic, I know, but there you are. Frank and the rest of the Baffler crew have I think taken a good first step: they have gotten out of the universities. We'd all do a lot better if more people did the same.

A collection of some of the best writing from the magazine known for its scathing critiques of modern business and media practices. A good read, although at times I felt like they just hated everything. Still, some interesting looks into how rebellion and "alternative", among other things, have been co-opted by the mainstream and thus stripped of meaning.