Our Corporate Masters…
Merchants of Cool Documentary

Originally aired by PBS in February, 2001, this episode of Frontline, “Merchants of Cool,” both gives a context for the media landscape of today and holds relevance for the teen culture of 2011. Despite the accelerated pace of history, and the ubiquitous presence of the Internet and technologies to access it, we have not been able to escape the corporate masters of this world. “Merchants of Cool” examines the teen market of the late 90s and early 2000s, and how corporations have infiltrated teen culture, packaged it, and sold it back to teens in the form of mass entertainment media, gendered caricatures and products. In 2001, teens had an estimated market value of $150 billion, and today they have an estimated $216 billion in spending power, between their own pocket money and their parents’ guilt spending. They are a hugely coveted market, and as the PBS correspondent Douglas Rushkoff asserts, corporations will do anything it takes to find the next “cool” thing and use it to market their products to teens. They have even created characters for teen boys and girls to follow – the “mook” is the male patterned after the Jackass boys, and the “midriff” is the female patterned after Britney Spears, and later Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. Being the parent of a teenager in 2011, I can tell you that very little has changed despite their access to more underground subcultures via the Internet. Indeed, the prospect of being marketed to by infomercial channels like MTV is almost inoffensive to the majority of teens today – it has become an accepted part of their lives, just like the constant state of war this country is in. Corporations like Apple have made themselves an indelible part of the teen landscape, which is pretty impressive considering how expensive their products are. Teens today know that if they own an iPhone, an iPod, an iPad and a MacBook, they are on the cutting edge of cool – they know it because Apple tells them so. For the majority of teens, it’s not a problem when an artist they like puts out a record that is sold in Walmart, or Starbucks, or Whole Foods. Blogs with audiences of 15- to 18-year-old boys that used to champion underground streetwear now cover Coca-Cola and BMWs, and they barely touch on brands at the independent grassroots level. Of course, a lot of subcultures are started by teens, and the underground is just as much the realm of teens as it is adults, so I’m not trying to say that they are all bought and paid for. But let’s face it – underground doesn’t make you a lot of money, and money buys you an iPad.

Continued after the jump…

The scariest thing about “Merchants of Cool” is how the actual “cool hunters” themselves (the people hired to tell the corporations what their market research has shown to be the next best thing) acknowledge that once they have discovered a trend, researched it and sold it to the corporations for a $20,000 annual subscription fee – they have killed it. They do it with music and they do it with subcultures. It makes me very afraid for subcultures like the ones we cover on CVLT Nation – especially when Lil’ Wayne shows up on the cover of Interview in full crusty gear. This is not to say that crusty will die as a subculture, but that those who are truly in the subculture may have to put up with it becoming a mass phenomenon for a while. Hopefully, the “mook” and “midriff” masses will find underground punk and metal too “unsexy” for their tastes, and will stick to shopping in Santee Alley. But the fact that such a mass-marketed individual is embracing underground subcultures like crust does not bode well for its’ future. However, for those who use the Internet properly, there is a wealth of independent and underground music and art to discover, and that is what we will always champion at CVLT Nation.