"I think shareholders are the greatest evil of this modern world." Chris Martin, Coldplay

Chris, buddy!  What about terrorism?   AIDS in Africa?  Military dictators in the third world?

Shareholders?   Dude, take a course at LSE. 

We’’re not surprised when rock musicians don’’t understand economics.    But Chris doesn’’t even get the anthropology.  For an author of contemporary culture like Chris Martin, this shouldn’’t be so hard.

Chris and the guys are locked into the developmental cycle that controls a good deal of contemporary culture.   A band comes up.   They are eager to be included.   They listen to management and their fans.   They are interesting and accessible all at once.    Then, they decide that they are not being artistic enough, that they are not "pushing the envelope"” hard enough.  This makes them a little like medieval merchants.  Once you’’ve made your fortune, you start thinking about your soul.   

In the Coldplay case, it was time to get the "popular" out of culture. This is especially ironic because Coldplay rose to stardom because Radiohead went through the cycle.   The latter committed celebrity suicide by releasing albums that were suddenly difficult, cryptic, and inaccessible.   Coldplay stepped into the breach.  They were the new Radiohead. 

Coldplay’s debut album Parachutes sold 5 million copies, and A Rush of Blood to the Head, released in 2003, sold 10 million.    Chris is on the verge of a new album, X&Y.   He is making those artistic noises that Radiohead made before they took their leave of the spotlight.   Now that they have their capital, they are beginning to worry about their credibility.

Clearly, Coldplay is entitled to do anything they want.  But it is sad that they will forsake their celebrity because they are captive of those nutty avant garde notions of what the artist should do.    Ours is no longer a dual world that distinguishes artists into two mutually exclusive camps: popular and credible.  It’’s now a continuum and we have seen artists learn to work the continuum in a variety of ways.  One of these is to release a stream of albums, some of which are frankly popular, others frankly difficult.  The career of Stephen Soderbergh is a good case in point for the film world.  So, for the matter, is the career of Martin’s wife, Gwyneth Paltrow. 

Contemporary culture has opened up.  The audience is no longer either clueless or hip.   Everyone, I think, is a good deal more sophisticated than we used to be.   That means that new multiplicity rules apply and we are interested in a variety of music.   More than that, we are interested in artists who are sufficiently mobile to work the creative continuum.    The last thing we want is to witness celebrity self destruction that comes from the anxiety that they are not "serious"” and "artistic"” enough.   

Chris, dude, you don’’t have to choose anymore.

Oh, dear, God. According to a columnist at the Financial Times, an economy in which value comes from innovation, culture, and creativity must necessarily reflect a deeper trend: the feminization of business.

The whole vocabulary of business has changed. Bosses who were once gruff, tough, macho, dominant and bold are now expected to be open, approachable, caring, persuasive and kind. Command-and-control systems of management, with their rigid hierarchies and strict rules, have given way to flexibility, collaboration and teamwork. We hear a lot less about risk, conflict and conquest and a lot more about ethics, values and responsibility.

In short, business has become feminised. I mean this not in the sense that women have seized the reins of power – they are still lamentably under-represented in the upper tiers of management – but in the sense that stereotypically female values are in the ascendant and stereotypically male ones are in decline. These days bad companies are from Mars, good companies are from Venus.

But, wait, it gets worse.

[B]rands have replaced factories as companies’ most important assets. A high-quality product is just the price of entry to a market. Beyond that, what companies are really selling is the thing they can use to differentiate their products from those of their competitors: the set of emotions, ideas and beliefs that their brands convey.

With this in mind, it is easy to see why business is becoming feminised. Companies no longer sell products to the public simply on the basis of rational attributes such as functionality and utility. Emotion is now just as important – perhaps even more so. The most successful brands and companies are those that establish a relationship with consumers based on communicating with them, understanding their needs and empathising with them.

It is hard to imagine that anyone in the educated world imagines that the world divides so neatly, that it is women who are diplomatic, collaborative, creative, and really only women who are capable of the building and managing of brands.

I have a theory about people who think about gender in these mutually exclusive terms (that some human qualities are really feminine qualities). It’s not a very sophisticated theory, but then, hey, thanks to the FT it is, so far, not a very sophisticated debate.

My theory is that this theory is most attractive to those who went to all-boys, boarding schools. From a boarding school, the world of gender probably looks very mutually exclusive indeed.

It is fashionable to chortle over this kind of thing, because guys are just great big Labrador puppies without a trace of intellectual finesse or creativity. But hang on there, guv. The moment we indulge ourselves in this kind of nonsense we declare ourselves, the men among us, at any rate, as unfit for marketing office.

Here’s the simple anthropological truth of the matter. None of the higher intellectual or creative abilities is gender specific. I don’t care what Larry says. Until we have had several generations of bias free socialization, we are merely whistling Dixie.

And speaking of Dixie, let us remember that it was in not so long ago not unusual to hear people insist that there existed essential differences between ethnic groups, nationalities, classes, regions, and religions. (And do I have to remind anyone that the FT essay bears more than a little resemblance to 20th century treatments of the Jewish influence on German culture?) Gender is merely the last hold out of that demonic inclination to suppose that some aspects of humanness take up residence only or mostly in this or that corner of the demographic patch work.

And if historical perspective doesn’t settle this issue, perhaps you, the male reader, will at least take the self interested point of view. If the essayist for the FT is correct, it is time for a lot of the people who care about branding to give over to those with the right gender credentials.

References

Anonymous. 2005. Macho business muscle gives itself a feminine
Makeover. Financial Times. May 17, 2005. Registration and subscription required.

Acknowledgments

Tom Guarriello here, for pointing out the FT essay. I think Tom takes more kindly to the essay. I will let you know if he enters the lists in its defense.

Last note:

This is the 350th entry here at This Blogs Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. Please present your ticket stubs at the concession stand for a small Coke and a cheery wave from the projectionist.

Do you remember Eddie Murphy’s “White Like Me” routine on Saturday Night Life, the one in which he revealed that white people don’t have to pay for the bus or sign for a loan?

I always thought this was comedy…until I received this disturbing email.

The Orvis Company Store Private Shopping Night

Save the date! Thanks to the generosity of The Orvis Company Inc President/CEO Perk Perkins (Williams ’75), All-Ivy Club Members are invited to a private, after-hours opportunity at their Manhattan store located just blocks away from the club to get outfitted for summer. Members will receive a discount on all merchandise purchased throughout this special catered evening. Orvis is America’s oldest mail order company and a sporting tradition since 1856, specializing in men’s and women’s apparel, along with gear for the country home, dogs, fly fishing, hunting and travel.

Privilege, it’s a terrible thing. (Among other things, it encourages you to dress badly.)

A shopping mall in the UK is banning those who wear hooded tops. Tony Blair supports this effort as part of his “yes-to-civility, no-to-hooligans” campaign.

Cultures have a funny way of cultivating their opposite. It is not very surprising then that one of the nations most preoccupied with politesse should produce some of the rudest people on the face of the earth. I refer, of course, to the English soccer fan.

Many people who wear hooded tops are soccer fans for the rest of the week. They swagger, swear, glower, and otherwise seek to intimidate by appearance. They are, we must all agree, a deeply obnoxious presence.

But I have two words for the Bluewater mall and Britain’s Prime Minister:

bite me.

Call it the “rule of no rules,” but here’s how it works in open societies. We may not ban expressive behavior. If clothing or conduct inflicts no material cost, no substantial injury, no loss of interest, we may not ban it. That’s what it is to be an open society.

Now, if you want to get tough with holligans, by all means, be my guest. I may be the only anthropologists on the planet who does not harbor a bleeding heart. I don’t care what deeper social causes inspire criminal behavior. When people break the law (the criminal law), they go to jail (gaol).

Most of my colleagues would insist we are treating the symptom, not the disease. Not me. I say crush the little bastards. Put them in the jail for the remainder of their natural lives. With any luck, this will be time enough to see the return of public flogging.

But let us make this punishment for criminal behavior, not expressive behavior. If all our offenders have done is wear a hoodie, leave them be. No harm, no foul. No foul, no gaol.

That little tirade satisfies the libertarian within. But the anthropologist remains puzzled. How is it that Western, First world, societies continue to ban expressive behaviors (hoodies in the UK and the chador in France)?

What part of “open society” do we not understand?

References

BBC coverage of the hoodie ban, here

It’s a moment. A defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reach its peak. That instant that you know from now on…it’s all downhill. Some call it the climax. We call it jumping the shark. (from www.jumptheshark.com)

The Jump the Shark website is where TV shows are declared DOA. People identify the precise moment when technique turns into formula, when the grammar of the show is revealed. Anthropologically, this is hyperventilatingly interesting. The moment we see something jump the shark is the moment we go from being a participant to an observer. It’s the moment we get jerked out of the experience of watching a show into being its critic. The form of the program no longer engages. We are suddenly disengaged and scornful.

As Henry Jenkins notes, we are ever more sophisticated as consumers of the media feed. And this means we get to the JTS moment more quickly, more often. And this is what drives popular culture to improve or at least to turn over with greater speed. It has to stay ahead of us.

The JTS moment can be applied to anything in our cultural experience and it happened to me this morning when I was reading a preview of the new Martin Short movie: Jiminy Glick in Lalawood.

The film was improvised à la Waiting for Guffman, though the raucous riffing proved hazardous to Short’s makeup. British director Vadim Jean recalls Short laughing so hard off camera at a twisted monologue by A Mighty Wind’s John Michael Higgins that ”I saw him put his hands to his face to hold his prosthetic and run into the corner so it wouldn’t split.”

Something in me snapped. This is one too many “we laughed till we cried” PR puffs from the film set. Ok, I get it. The film set was a place of endless invention and new comedic highs. Ok, so the movie will be a work of genius. It’s enough already.

I think what set me up for this was all that press for Ocean’s 12 in which the stars were constantly talking about how much fun they had together. Predictably, Don Cheadle was the only one who pulled it off without sounding like an idiot, but the formulae is now so tired only an actor of his standing can manage to do this. There is nothing quite as depressing as listening to stars talk about how spontaneous they were…in language and a manner that is utterly not.

Now there is a particular irony here. Jiminy Glick is supposed to ridicule Hollywood. And in this event, it is, on balance, probably better not to engage in the behavior you mean to ridicule.

There is a well established division of labor here. Mainstream Hollywood creates things that become, in short order, ludicrous through craven repetition. Enter Christopher Guest or Martin Short to take the now exhausted form and declare it “over.” (We might think of them as crustaceans cleaning up the ocean floor.) Now the industry can move on. “Oh,” they say on a talk show, “we can’t do that. It’s so Jiminy.” (The cultural evolution is, I guess, inevitable. We may now expect a new comic to come up doing satire of Short’s satire. Or maybe that was Dave Chappelle’s job, before his Icarian descent.)

But the larger anthropological issue here is pretty compelling. First, I don’t think we know what is happening in the head of a culture bearer when he or she experiences that “JTS” moment, when he or she snaps out of consuming the cultural artifact and begins to criticize it. Technically, I mean. What happens here? This is a Ph.D. thesis waiting to happen.

Second, we know that the JTS phenomenon is distributed. You jump the shark on episode 3. I don’t do so till episode 8. This is a reflection of relatively intelligence and sophistication. But it is also a distribution of cultural literacy. This is one of the really important and neglected grounds for segmentation. Forget politics, education, income. The real discriminator is how fast we JTS. (And it may be that speed is not the only discriminator. Maybe we don’t all JTS in the same way.)

Third, we live in a culture that streams so fast we must all JTS with some frequency. I believe that Victorians might have experienced this as a spiritual or existential crisis. For us, it’s just so same old, same old. We expect to embrace and release constantly (with JTS as the mechanism with which we do so). New enthusiasms turn to ashes. We move on. Or, better, a river runs through us. Who and what we are at any given moment depends upon the media stream running through us.

Four, I think, in our multiple personality way, there is a new cultural formation that allows us to declare a show to have jumped the shark, even as we continue to watch and enjoy it. It is as if we all now have this hyper acute JTS detector in our heads with goes off with the same frequency of most people’s radar detectors. We are now both participant and observer, and all of us anthropologists after all.

References

Anonymous. 2005. Preview of Jiminy Glick in Lalawood. Entertainment Weekly. Issue 817/818. April 29, May 6, 2005.

jump the shark here