Saturday, November 11, 2017

Culture, jammed

I've seen this image doing the rounds on Twitter lately, and garnering quite a few "WTAF?" comments. 

It's a picture of a rather raddled looking woman in a dressing gown in a kitchen, with a glass of Smirnoff vodka (the bottle is on the table) and the caption "Every Morning's a Smirnoff Morning."

It's presented on Twitter as a real ad which common sense should tell you Smirnoff would never do. A reverse image search (through Tineye or Google images) would...eventually, after some patience, tell you where it's from.  Most of the hits are people laughing about the Bad Old Days or saying one version or another of "Jeez! Promoting alcoholism. Nowadays relegated to the bin along with tobacco and sexism in advertising. How did they every thing this was a good idea is beyond me!" 

Only one hit on the first couple of pages gives its actual provenance. The "ad" is a piece of "culture jamming" from the early 90's, a fake ad from Adbusters.  The mention is in an LA Times Op Ed from 1992, and does not include the matching picture, only a description. 

Culture jamming. A new dance fad? No, the new dissent in America.
How does it work? Simple. Take a commercial message and turn it against itself. Sabotage advertising, sabotage television.
Just as the entertainment-consumption complex filched America's most cherished images, language and values, so now culture jammers use the same tactics to obstruct their adversaries' ideology. To defend culture jamming as a First Amendment freedom is to support an insurgent idea--and that's precisely what these new radicals want.
Their strategy is to meet the enemy on its own turf. They take space on billboards, in magazine ad slots and on commercial television--they even distribute T-shirts--to plant critical messages in the style of the targeted offenders. Some examples:
* Magazine ad of a riderless horse in a cemetery with the caption "Marlboro Country."
* Billboard ad showing a bedraggled woman sitting at a breakfast table with a glass of vodka in hand. The caption: "Every morning's a Smirnoff morning." [...]
Another source a bit harder to find, Culture Jamming in the Carnival, gives an exact reference for the image:
ADBUSTERS Q., Winter 1989 ­90, at inside cover. Consider another such example: an advertising photo of a high­ gloss and expensive coffin with the caption "Absolute Silence" and the subtext "The birthdays, the graduation, the wedding day ... we were there to toast them all. So from one great spirit to another, here's to the most enduring ritual of all." 
And so there you have it. It's a splash page at Adbusters, a magazine I never bought but often eagerly read in one of those bookshops that had racks upon racks of magazines and a cafe, so you could read the magazines without buying them. Younger people don't remember those because they all went bust in the oughties for some unknowable reason. Adbusters itself is still going strong.

Adbusters' aim - to get people to think about consumer culture, by any means necessary - was admirable and still is, though of course, since it's not possible to do anything about consumer culture it's very irritating.  However, the current air of mild disbelief about this "ad" - were the Bad Old Days really that bad? I guess so! - reveals that the persistence of the memes outside their intended context simply shores up the status quo. Culture is now so distorted, and 'truth' is now so kaleidoscopic that this "ad" becomes just another brick in the wall. Culture jamming just jammed the culture tighter into place.



"Ad"dendum September 12, 2021.
With regard to the comment posted below, the so-called ad is from Adbusters Quarterly 1989-1990, vol1 issue 2.  There is a reference to it in The Death of Discourse by Ronald Collins and David Skover, 2005:





There's a second reference to it in Contested images: the politics and poetics of appropriation by Michael Alan Glassco (thesis), 2012 at the University of Iowa:



(I guess the Skover book is derived from the webpage I quoted above.)


4 comments:

KaliDurga said...

I'm going to be suspicious of every meme now.

Lyle Hopwood said...

I think that's prudent.

Joe of earth said...

Wrong. It is a parody advertisement from the old National Lampoon magazine.

Lyle Hopwood said...

No U

It's from Adbusters, as I state above. Adbusters Quarterly, 1989-1990, Vol 1 Issue 2, to be precise.

I'll amend the post with references.

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