No Doubt: The End of Solidarity Is Irony
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No Doubt and that “just a girl” Gwen Steffani are certainly having their fifteen minutes. Cover stories in Details (April) and Rolling Stone (May)… and, of course, they’ll be here in Salt Lake in June. All of which calls for some old school (read: came of age in the ‘80s and grumpy in the ‘90s) reflections on the changeless theme of changing times in music.
I’m not going to tell you No Doubt sucks — the experts on that issue can be overheard in food courts across the land. Nor am I going to tell you about the far cooler (and consequently obscure) band I know that just can’t get a break because of mega-bands like No Doubt. I’m not even going to warn you that the wrong type of people are listening to them now that the band is so popular and that the Delta Arena will be a vortex of air-fisting yahoos on June 7th. No, Gwen expounds on that herself (with all the faux-angst of the recently successful wondering how they’re perceived on the indie scene) telling Details just how much those “jocks and nerds” snapping up Tragic Kingdom bother her. That’s fine, but not germane.
The gist: No Doubt is loathsome because they are the surest sign yet that “alternative music,” once merely domesticated by capitalism, now actually propels the most insidious aspects of commercial culture. No Doubt’s nefarious marketing strategy heralds the end of an era — the end of irony as a way to carve out a little mental autonomy in a consumer culture run wild.
There was a time (say, 10 years ago) when alterno/indie was still playing coy with the idea of remaining free of big label record contracts and compromises. That semi-mythical golden age, celebrated in films like Hype, was defined by the interaction of artist and audience. Tendrils of irony spun off the stage and united clubbers and performers in a delicate bond that spoke of a shared knowledge of the nasty world outside with its enmeshing schemes and scams. Sure, you plunked down your eight bucks for sonic assault and slam-pit battering in the classic exchange of capital for commodity, but you knew what was going on and so did the kids on stage. And the anti-bullshit guarantee was irony, expressed in mimicry, mockery and moshery. The rituals were all there, but leavened with a wink: the pit was only violent from a distance, and the “rock stars” crossed the country in a van. If Van Halen was a church, then the indie crowds were the atheists. It was, in the end, just a scene, but it sure made the 80s more livable. The worst that could be said about it was that it was populated by the annoyingly earnest, and policed by rules of indie-dom that bordered on elitism.
Gwen and friends seem to have the familiar irony down. Ironic winks to consumerism infuse their album art, from the word “brand” slapped next to the band’s name to the shopping cart that appears almost as often as Gwen herself in the photos. “We’re one of you,” the references tell us, “We hate advertising and consumerism as much as you do.” But as Gen X philosopher Ethan Hawke taught us all in Reality Bites (and I challenge you to remember his character’s name), irony is the difference between intended and actual meaning. But with No Doubt, there isn’t any difference — they’re the moral equivalent to Microsoft on stage, but with better fashion sense.
To understand why, don’t read the pierced-navel gazing journalism of Details or Rolling Stone, which gush about such pressing concerns as Gwen’s romantic life (she’s not pregnant) and her struggles with success (it was hard at first, but she’s okay with it now). No, the best information about No Doubt appeared in the Wall Street Journal, snuggled in suggestively with the stock quotes. There on April 10th, band managers Rob Kahane and Paul Palmer revealed to other captains of industry how they boosted No Doubt’s sales from lame (their first album barely breathed before disappearing and the second was dumped as unsellable) to SIX MILLION UNITS. Theirs was no run-of-the-mill marketing plan with fliers, posters, touring ads and plentiful payola. No, that would have been understandable, even forgivable in the music world. Messrs. Kahane and Palmer had, in fact concocted a scheme so masterful that you could almost hear the Journal staff cooing with delight: expose teenagers without their knowledge to ads for No Doubt and get the tax-payers to subsidize the whole thing to boot.
To understand their scheming, we must return to the 1980s (a suitable mantric prelude to most explanations these days). Crumbling public schools in poor neighborhoods strike a Faustian bargain with media giant Whittle Communications, Inc.: in return for badly needed audio-visual equipment, principals agreed to Whittle’s television programming (under the vaguely Soviet rubric of Channel One), complete with ads. In fact, the twelve-minute news segments themselves are often thinly veiled ads. And here’s where No Doubt comes into the picture. Kahane and Palmer arranged to have “perky” (the Journal’s word) Gwen beamed by satellite to more than half of a million students in public classrooms as the host of the program in January of 1996. The result? Surprise! According to the Journal, the next week sales shot up across the country. Your tax dollars at work.
Granted, none of this has anything to do with the basic reason for seeing any band: the music. But remember: that brand sign (indie/alterno rock) used to connote something a little different before it metamorphosed. Maybe the progression from DIY to SubPop to Indie/Alterno Inc. was inevitable and we were even more duped than the honest dupes slurping up Van Halen. Maybe all the irony was just arrogance. Maybe the brand sign was just too powerful to undermine. But is it really too much to ask of the self-styled alterno crowd to avoid inventing invasive and, let’s just say it, evil forms of advertising that would impress even the greediest of Harvard MBAs? Maybe.
But bear the following in mind: another ploy has bitten the dust. The irony — “I’m just a girl,” oh no I’m not -— that once set a scene apart has been adjusted and commodified. Notch another victory for the market. So enjoy the show, and keep that Wall Street Journal tucked firmly under your arm. It just might be your best source on the next big thing. —Fritz Umbach and Dan Kimmage
Fritz Umbach has taught popular culture at Cornell University and currently lives in Salt Lake City while researching a book on Mormonism and consumer culture.
Dan Kimmage is a professional musician, Russian translator and freelance journalist who lives in Ithaca, N.Y. His most recent article (also with Franz Umbach) on the use of the drug qat in Yemen and in the rave scene of London will appear next month in auJuice: the journal of eatin’, drinkin’, and screwin’ around.
Read more 90s insights from the SLUG archives:
Smart Brown Handbag
Rage Against the Machine
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