Customer Reviews

Nobrow : The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I searched amazon under "nobrow" and discovered another book on the same sumject, though infinitely better than Seabrook's self-indulgent musings (see the first 3-4 reviews below, they tell the whole story). From Lowbrow to Nobrow by Peter Swirski is lucid, engaging, intellectually stimulating and funny, on top of leaving Seabrook's superficial analysis in the dust (nobrow literary culture, it appears has been around for a century at least).
In fact I'd go so far as to say Swirski's book (released very recent too) is the ultimate study of the subject, at least according to the dean of popular culture studies, Ray Browne, who praises it in the editorial. Check it out for yourself, you're in for hours of happy reading.

This book is not as interesting as it sounds. The author has a single insight which he strings out over several hundred pages of gloriously self-indulgent prose.

The book sounded intriguing, so I bought it. The basic idea was interesting so I started to read it. The writing was facile and fluent, so I kept on reading, hoping to find something in it besides self-indulgent reflections on popular culture and how cool the author is to be on the "inside".

I believe that MTV has some kind of deep meaning, but this book's discussion of it fails to uncover that meaning. I suppose there is something new to say about Tina Brown and the New Yorker -- this book fails to say it.

This book holds the promise of explaining what the convolutions of the New yorker in recent years mean as a parable of the changing cultural mores. However, and sadly, it fails to deliver on its promise, and in the end is a self-indulgent memoir of one man's odessey through popular culture.

Not really bad, this book is primarily a disappointment.

Although the title looked enticing, I was greatly disappointed as I read this slim volume. I was vaguely told what "Nobrow" was, but no whys, no wherefores. Was it a celebration of Nobrow or a critique? The book contains profiles of what the author sees as noted Nobrow figures, like David Geffen and George Lucas. They seemed to be re-edited New Yorker articles, and are nice as they go, but after 200 or so pages, I still don't have much of a clue as to what Nobrow really is. I did, however, learn who the author was. He seems to be the sub-text of this book. We know he is a feature writer at the New Yorker, a Princeton grad, and lives somewhere in Tribeca. If you want to read a book about today's culture and its roots, read Thomas Franks' The Conquest of Cool. If you want to read a book about the New Yorker, try Bright Lights, Big City. At least it's more honest.

In much the same way that Henry Adams skewered the cultural pretensions and greed of America's robber barons at the end of the nineteenth century, Seabrook portrays the status-hungry vapidness of today's fin de siecle media barons. His portraits of George Lucas and David Geffen, alone in their California fantasylands, are creepy, funny, and ultimately damning. Nobrow's surreal opening scene--a walk through Time's Square on Clinton's inaugeration day--perfectly encapsulates Seabrook's larger themes. We now live in a culture where everyone and everything are for sale. This book is superb.

John Seabrook's "Nobrow" fails on just about every level. The basic concept of this book is to explain how today's culture no longer separates activities and art into distinctions of "highbrow" and "lowbrow," and that really anything can be for anybody, albeit with slight modifications. As an example (assuming I'm reading this right), you could look at the world of fashion, where fashion icon trendsetters like actors and musicians might throw together an outfit based on stuff they found at thrift stores, clearly a source for lowbrow items. However, because this celebrity has sported this fashion, designers across the world will mimic this style, placing similar clothing styles, with better craftsmanship, in boutiques where the similar article of clothing may sell for hundreds of times what the celebrity paid for their initial outfit. The people buying the designer duds are purchasing them, thinking it's a "highbrow" investment, when really the same thing can be had at a "lowbrow" establishment (the thrift store), thus this item has transcended the easy identification and fallen into the realm of Seabrook's "nobrow."

Regretfully, he never explains what this has to do with marketing, as promised in the subtitle "The Culture of Marketing + The Marketing of Culture." Sure, there are snippets of this, particularly in the chapter discussing the band Radish and the "kid band" craze that also happened to involve Hanson. I'm willing to give Mr. Seabrook the benefit of the doubt, and maybe the publisher just wanted to attach that subtitle in an effort to convey the essence of the book to the short attention span-addled customer at the local Barnes & Noble.

The book succeeds in certain parts. Personally, I found the chapters about Ben Kweller and George Lucas to be particularly interesting, because I enjoy books about media and media marketing. Seabrook does have a way with words, and some of the descriptions of Ben Kweller's saga are quite good, though as a whole the book didn't have the "Klosterman-esque" feel I was hoping for.

In fact, my biggest complaint about the book is the author's tone of voice - that smug, detached, preppy rich boy in New York air of over-confidence. The man doesn't even bat an eyelash when confronted with a $200 price tag on a t-shirt, but on the first page of the book, he wants to convince the reader that his urban lifestyle (complete with Biggie Smallz lyrics) is authentic. He may very well have grown up in New York City, but Seabrook was definitely born with a silver spoon firmly planted in his mouth. No amount of borrowed gangsta-rap bling can hide that, and I find his attempt to be everything to every subculture not only unconvincing but outright appalling.

We all sense a radical change going on in the culture, I think, and it leaves most of us uneasy and confused. Old ways of judging and thinking about art, class and culture seem obsolete. But what, if anything, is replacing the old ways? Should we lament the passing of the venerable but elitist "high-brow, low-brow" distinctions? Or should we feel liberated? Is the ascendency of marketing and buzz leading us to cultural doom? Or are we somehow muddling forward to a new and ultimately richer, more democratic form of culture?

To his credit, Seabrook doesn't deliver pat answers to questions like these. Who can know at this stage? What he does, brilliantly, is to parse the questions and dissect the culture in completely fresh and illuminating ways. The hardest thing to pull off in the midst of swirling change and chaos is to impose a bit of order, to see a few things clearly. This is hard work and Seabrook has done it well - and not just idly from his armchair but by venturing forth into the new world and embracing it and providing us with irreverent portraits of perplexing new avatars like David Geffen, George Lucas and the haunchos at MTV.

The book is also very funny, as it ought to be given the material. There's a lot of Seabrook in the book, which is good because he's as honest and blunt about himself and his high-brow background and his New Yorker peers (especially Tina Brown) as he is about everything else. Like our new culture, the book swirls with energy and challenging ideas. You can't read it and view the world the same way afterwards. Bravo!

Seabrook offers a series of fresh observations of "buzz" culture in this book, including MTV from the inside, alternative band concerts (he describes his own drug use during one of them), profiles of George Lucas, David Geffen, and a fourteen-year-old rock musician hyped as the next Cobain (his CD and video failed). Seabrook contends that there is no difference between this culture and what was once considered "high" culture, mainly because he likes the "low" stuff and Tina Brown (then his editor at The New Yorker magazine) preferred it to more "serious" subjects. I enjoy pop culture too, but do not buy the idea that cultural distinctions have collapsed. Seabrook also equates marketing with culture (it's the closing line of the book), which suggests that advertising and the product it advertises are one and the same. That's true of MTV, where the video exists to promote the album and the cable network. But "Puff Daddy" is not going to displace Verdi's Otello, or the novels of Ralph Ellison, any time soon. In short, as good as Seabrook's observations are, I question his analysis. The best parts of this book are the shrewd descriptions of the immiscible cultures that coexist in the same locale, such as a music superstore, or even Times Square. He had only to look more carefully at their failure to mix to understand why Brown couldn't survive at The New Yorker, as well as why that magazine changed from trendsetter to trend-follower under her editorship.

In his peregrinations for the New Yorker magazine, author John Seabrook noticed a curious thing. The old cultural elite's distinction of high, middle and low culture seems to have broken down. (Example: classical music is somehow "better" than jazz, jazz better than rock, rock better than hip-hop, etc.) Instead, opines Seabrook, we live in an age of "Nobrow," in which cultural consumers and cultural providers read each other's needs so acutely that it is marketing that drives the culture and in turn, culture drives the marketing. In other words, the hegemony that cultural critics enjoyed in deciding what was art and wasn't (defining hegemony as "taste as power pretending to be common sense" [p. 53]) has pretty much been blown away.

What do we have now? We have Nobrow. People who pick and choose from all kinds of options without worrying too much whether it used to be considered trashy, egghead, mainsteam, avant-garde, cutting-edge, or declasse. We have saturation of the culture by media to the extent that culture and media--particularly televised media--become synonymous: "MTV has produced a new audience for whom the distinction betwen the market and culture was almost nonexistent." (p. 94)

Since the old distinctions are all but gone, the old venues have changed, too. You don't have to visit a museum to see museum pieces any more. "In Nobrow, paintings by van Gogh and Monet are the headliners at the Bellagio Hotel while the Cirque du Soleil borrows freely from performance art in creating the Las Vegan spectacle inside." (p. 162).

For Seabrook, the consummate example of this culture-marketing-culture interplay is George Lucas: "You could see Lucas as the first . . . appropriator of world culture, which he sold back to the world as Star Wars. Or you would see Lucas as an early sampler, a groundbreaker in which would become the essential Nobrow esthetic: making art out of pop culture." (p. 145).

All of this is interesting, even provocative. Occasionally I felt the journalism overexplained the thesis or was irrelevant to it (especially in the chapter on MTV); many if not most of this material originally appeared in the New Yorker and the magazine origin occasionally shows through. For the sake of good sportsmanship if nothing else, Seabrook should really have dealt with one of the bastions of high culture--a museum or symphony orchestra--to see how they are dealing with the new, allegedly classless, era of cultural distinctions. But he definitely has given me a new yardstick to measure things by. And I finally figured out why The Simpsons is my favorite TV show; it's so Nobrow in its mix of cultural references, everything from flatulence jokes to Eudora Welty and Steven Hawking.

This book is very self indulgent. I can't think of any bad things to say about this book that have not already been said. Seabrook has a flimsy Idea of what he thinks Nobrow means and builds it up to be a philosophy that doesn't really get executed. The only good things about this book are the four or five interesting stories about the behind the scenes of MTV, Star Wars/Lucas, Ben Kweller and so on. Mind you these subjects are only loosely drawn into his mindless philosophy. I was hoping I would like this book, I was very dissapointed.

The book has some poignant insights that made me think and sometimes laugh - like when he's in a museum in NY and sees an attractive area of space, only to find out he's looking out the window onto the street - really a great metaphor for the whole book.

Another reviewer gave a great synopsis of what I consider one of the most valuable ideas in the book: the etymology of culture. The very influences of the original words still mingle and impact what we know as "culture."

As far as John Seabrook, I must defend that he is aware of his affluent upbringing and fully admits it, and fully admits that he probably can't completely know just how that has influenced his ideas of culture - most notably, while at a lecture in his youth he revealed a moment when he was speaking out about "taste" and figured out he was too affluent to understand what he was talking about.

Too few non-fiction authors I read these days include moments of realizations of their shortcomings. All we can ask of authors are to pay their respects to what they currently know as their shortcomings or shortsightedness, and try to gain knowledge and understanding of their flaws with time. I think John is a good example of someone who works with and learns his subject while still remaining humble enough about his perspective on it. Actually, I considered this one of the most positive aspects of the book. His references to his father, to me, were just an attempt at being honest in helping the reader understand where he was coming from in discussing culture.

If you like broad socio-cultural analysis and wonder why some people pay two hundred dollars for t-shirts, this book is worth reading.