Enter Lady Gaga. As Nancy Bauer writes in her NYTime philosophy blog post, Lady Power,

“Gaga wants us to understand her self-presentation as a kind of deconstruction of femininity, not to mention celebrity. As she told Ann Powers, ‘Me embodying the position that I’m analyzing is the very thing that makes it so powerful.’ Of course, the more successful the embodiment, the less obvious the analytic part is. And since Gaga herself literally embodies the norms that she claims to be putting pressure on (she’s pretty, she’s thin, she’s well-proportioned), the message, even when it comes through, is not exactly stable. It’s easy to construe Gaga as suggesting that frank self-objectification is a form of real power.”

This is a symptom of something I’ve written quite a bit about: postirony, a toxic byproduct of a peculiar American brand of pessimism that gets its sea-legs in Film Noir, but finds full expression in the commercial exploitation of Gen X cynicism. Postirony is a little hard to define, but is essentially irony turned in on itself: such as selling T-shirts that say “Your rebellion is my marketing strategy.” Thus we get to the perennial debate explored in Bauer’s piece: is the self-conscious exploitation of sexuality by female pop stars an act of empowerment? This discussion began in earnest with Madonna, and in particular her celebration by media critic Camille Paglia, but threads through Tila Tequila’s claim to DIY fame to Lady Gaga’s faux-performance art schtick. Bottom line: the music sucks and we’re venting far too much hot air about the subject (this post guilty as charged).

(You might be interested in Mark Dery’s take on whether or not Lady Gaga is stupid.)

But I have a larger project in mind, one that is tangentially related. After reviewing some of the comments at BoingBoing regarding Xeni Jardin’s post of a videotaped interview with a Gulf boat captain’s exposé of turtles getting fried by BP’s controlled burns, I was particularly saddened by the tone of respondents whose only (written) response to the horror was to joke about the futility of compassion for nature. I’m sure this can be psychoanalyzed to reveal that these cynical posts are actually masking a great deal of pain, but there is too much ironic disposition in the cultural atmosphere to even broach the subject. This may be specific to the kinds of readers at Boing Boing, whose writers are probably a bit dismayed by the pessimistic responses to their generally sincere concern for social justice.

Boing Boing’s writers are cut from the same cloth as punk. Mark Frauenfelder is a veteran zine publisher, and his maker ethic is true to the spirit of DIY. The openness of Boing Boing, and more broadly speaking libertarian Net culture, includes creating space for media freedom fighters like Douglas Rushkoff. But I was utterly dismayed by the overly cynical responses of Boing Boing’s readers to Rushkoff’s call for DIY participatory media democracy (I couldn’t find the link in their archive). I’m horrified by the thought of ever living up to the expectations of such a nasty bunch of readers who are more concerned with cleverness than dialog. Alas, trying to stick out from the fray through tricky turns of phrasing laced with cool bits of humor is what counts in the neoliberal economy that celebrates individual achievement above social cohesion.

Which brings me back to Lady Gaga. I’ve tried my best to ignore her, but every other TV and radio ad has her music in the background, and not a day goes by when my favorite news sites don’t feature a picture of her on their front pages. I’m forced to ask the perennial question of “why?????” But the answer is deceptively simple, and can be reduced to economic discourse: the bottom line is that it makes money. We can argue all we want about the celebration of fan and pop culture, and pooh-pooh the elitist critics for pointing out that we are arguing over the quality of dog crap. So be it. But I’ll go back to something I read when Lady Gaga was just first getting attention. Her big artistic epiphany happened while performing in college. Everyone one was ignoring her until she stripped to her undies. Suddenly the audience took notice and the idea stuck, albeit its expression has been elaborated to the extreme.

Now, I don’t get why someone like millennial it girl Kate Perry–another student of Madonna who learned that it earns interest to kiss a girl and show a lot of cleavage–can get away with calling Lady Gaga’s latest video, Alejandro, “obscene” (OK, I do read Huffingtonpost’s gossip page), when she can do a video with porn-maker Snoop Dogg while simultaneously giving head to a lollypop and sporting a Jesus tattoo on her arm. Honestly, when I began writing this, I didn’t mean to end with Kate Perry. I didn’t even know who she was until last month when suddenly I saw her image everywhere. Initially I thought perhaps her fame was due to some hidden song-writing talent, but discovered after a few quick views on YouTube that there was no there there. Sugary pop is as old as Coca-Cola advertising, and there is nothing to report here of any particular interest other than to reiterate the point that this whole philosophical exploration began with an inquiry into why it is we care to talk so much about the marketing of mammary glands under the pretension of writing about culture.

I suppose I’m engaging in another American tradition, the flipside of all this, iconoclasm, which puts me on the side of fundamentalists and their ilk who hate all images because they are somehow bodily and inherently sexual. Indeed, the lone commenter on my Tila Tequila post was a rabid Christian who obsessively tracked Tila and Suicide Girls in the name of god. Given that Kate Perry is a good Christian, I wonder how this will play out among the true believers who may have not realized that Christ can also be sold with a pair of bosoms. Madonna, who loved the play the Catholic card, got some good milage out of that one. In this sense, we could say there is nothing more rich in pop culture discourse than the mixing of sex and religion. Indeed, at the source this whole discussion is religion. After all, who speeketh? The priests of our age: marketers. And we have gotten on our knees to pray, once again, to their holy discourse. Such is the life of blogging.

Case study number one is the “Green Police” ads by Audio, which couches its anti-PC message in ironic humor, thereby softening the seriousness of its subtext. It confirms the fears that environmental regulation will result in a police state, and turns anyone who cares about the environment into a potential fascist. While we may laugh at such cartoony fears (it’s only a joke, right?), the Rush Limbaugh crowd takes them very seriously.

(It’s not an illegitimate protest. From an eco-justice point of view, the threat of global regulations forced upon local populations is real, but in the latter case the concern is that corporate interests will hijack environmental rhetoric in the service of obliterating local autonomy in the same way that trade liberalization promoted by the WTO has done.)

Here Audi defends the rich white male’s perceived loss of autonomy and his right to be a jerk. My particular peeve against Audi is based on personal experience in Europe where Audi drivers across the board are the most arrogant and dangerous exemplars of the tragedy of commons (for example, watch this ad). On highways one must be in constant alert of Audis rushing at jet fighter speed, lest your leisurely Sunday afternoon drive through the Tuscan countryside ends in a pile of crushed steel, bones and shattered glass.

The paranoia exhibited by Audi plays into the general meme that government regulation of corporate abuses will translate into socialist totalitarianism. Say “Green Police” ten times fast and you may end up with “Greenpeace.”

Call this a backlash shot across the bough of environmental activism. Green consciousness becomes the work of thought police.

You can see more “Green Police” ads and PSAs here.

Case study number two comes from Bud Lite, which (yawn) sticks to its failsafe storyline. In it Bud Lite’s primary target audience (those possessed by an inner 13-year-old “mook“) must retreat to their boys-only (stripper exception clause allowed) playhouse to take cover from moralistic authorities (women) who condemn their innocent behavior. But now the right to secrecy, addiction and misogyny is threatened by ecological activism. In this ad, rather than a house being built of recycled beer cans (which excites a young female foil), its owners have constructed a living refrigerator, without realizing, however, that symbolically it’s also a morgue.

Case Study number three is the Budweiser bridge. The only thing surprising about this ad is how it blatantly demeans humans as mere slaves to their corporate overlord. In this case, people are willing to let the truck (a symbolic container of the Budweiser corporate brand) drive over their backs. So while the previous ads play into people’s fears of losing individual freedom to ethical constraints, here people voluntarily become the servomechanism of corporate power and control. How’s that for ironic Super Bowl humor!

Bonus footage: Go here to see a hilarious Daily Show deconstruction of Super Bowl ads from 2004.

The pith* theory of advertising.

* Pithing is when you stick a needle in the brain of a live frog. The goal is to scramble its brain in order to immobilize it for dissection while it is still alive. When applied to advertising a paradox or insult is used like a needle to confuse and conquer unwilling media gawkers into immobile rage. In protest I won’t post a link.

Apparently, even nothing can be commodified.

Via IdentityCampaigning.

Not to be a bummer on this great inauguration day (can’t believe it’s happening), but in perfect postironic, postmodern harmony, a presidential slogan and soda marketing campaign mash-up perfectly. Is Pepsi cashing in on Obama? Consider article 1) Pepsi’s Refresh Everything, and article 2) Obama’s campaign site. Hmmm.

(images from Instapundit)

Pepsi: “Every generation refreshes the world.” (I insist you click this link for sardonic humor purposes)

Further links:

AdAge: Pepsi, Coke Try to Outdo Each Other With Rays of Sunshine

Bog Garfield: There’s Nothing Wrong With Spreading the Joy of Cola

This should come as no surprise but marketers are taking a perfectly great public theater tactic and turning it into a advertising technique. In the above ad T-Mobile takes the idea of flash mobs and Improve Everywhere to turn them into a hokey displays of corporate performance art. Why is this a problem? Obviously everyone are enjoying themselves. The difficulty is that practices like this contribute to an increasingly confusing environment in which the work of activists and artists get mixed up with marketing. People will no longer be able to tell the difference between guerrilla theater, performance art, street protest and marketing tactics. Ads like the above clip trivialize human creativity in the service of selling objects.

Yet another chapter in which a major corporation postitions itself as the savior of culture against the oppressor. As I wrote previously about Snicker and its clever Webisodes that somehow tried to convince kids that Mars Inc. is the savior of hip hop and youth culture, another caffeinated sugar pusher, Mountain Dew, has created this small semi-interactive universe in which Dew is equated with the elixer of freedom.

As high budget cartoon dystopias go, DEWmocracy is the mother of all corporate cannibals, riffing on the Matrix, The Invisibles, 1984, while managing to include a requisite Native American (with a really bad wig) to tell our skateboarding hero that he is “The One.” Hard to believe, but this bad acting trumps Keanu Reeves. Mountain Dew even includes pseudo participation in which user generated designs can become the next Dew label. Yeah for democracy.

The project also has a bunch of mysterious interrogation videos uploaded to YouTube, by one mysterious seedvideos1234, which is an odd bit of art imitating life given the recent scandal of the alleged destruction of CIA torture videos. But you won’t see the viral videos on YouTube associated with the DEWmocracy site, either because it’s just so bad PesisCo is disowning it, or it’s now too old to be bothered with (I have been sitting on this post for six months– sorry to be so out of it).

Just for fun, here’s an anti-Dew piece that attacks Pepsi for hypocritically advocating corporate responsibility while plastering the city with its ad graffiti.

This ad takes a systems approach to anxiety by showing the psychological impact of buying the wrong shoes. Though tongue and cheek, the ad makes visible its own persuasion technique. This should be considered a small victory for us viewers because we have become so cynical about advertising they need to show us that we’re right. But still buy their shoes anyway!

UPDATE: Surprise, surprise the Daily Show is all over this one.

When satire isn’t enough, you can depend on the Republican to insert a little more comedy into the routine.

GOP’s New Slogan Already Being Used To Market Anti-Depressant – Politics on The Huffington Post:

What the GOP doesn’t seem to realize, because they are idiots, is that “the change you deserve” is the registered advertising slogan of Effexor XR, a drug that many of you might have started taking as a result of all the…you know — terrorism. (Hat tip to Bluestem for catching this gem.)

Effexor, also known as Venlafaxine, is approved for the treatment “of depression, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and panic disorder in adults.” Its common side effects are very much in keeping with the world the House Republicans have striven to build: nausea, apathy, constipation, fatigue, vertigo, sexual dysfunction, sweating, memory loss, and – and I swear I am not making this up – “electric shock-like sensations also called ‘brain zaps.’”

Its less common side effects are equally awesome in their appropriateness.

And when the Food And Drug Administration reviewed the ad copy that included the tagline, “The change you deserve,” it took issue with Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures Effexor, saying that the company made “unsubstantiated superiority claims.” Sounds like the GOP have picked an ironically accurate tagline for their efforts!