welcome to the machine

not to harp on one particular subject too much today, but during my lunch hour i took tracy's advice and streamed frontline's piece "the merchants of cool." the singular sense i got from the show is that advertisers may be the only group to truly appreciate the potential of the generation of teenagers alive in the west today, a generation more populous even than that of the baby-boomers. and what are the advertisers selling? in short, guys as "mooks" and girls as "midriffs." sex, image, rage, cash, violence, "cool" -- these are the medium and the message of the marketing machine. if postmodernism heralds the death of the metanarrative, these guys aren't listening. instead, as one of the interviewees remarked, they are targeting teens @ a worldview level, programming kids w/ the "official worldview" as conceived and presented by mtv and huge media conglomerates. i hate the "slippery slope" argument, but i think it's applicable here. as jimmy iovine, the head of interscope records and the man behind limp bizkit (remember them?) said in the last segment: there's no way to stop a movement in popular culture -- there's just no way to stop it, it's gonna happen w/ or w/o you -- there's absolutely no way to stop that train.