Rating: 
Summary: Some interesting insights
Review: A collection of some of the best writing from the magazine known for its scathing critiques of modern business and media practices. A good read, although at times I felt like they just hated everything. Still, some interesting looks into how rebellion and "alternative", among other things, have been co-opted by the mainstream and thus stripped of meaning.
Rating: 
Summary: A book-length sneer for indie-people
Review: A curmudgeonly anti-consumerist myself (I don't own a car, I ride my bike to work, and I've recently killed my television), I plunged into this book greedily, looking for a little self-validation. There was plenty of that. But not much else. There should have been. _Commodify Your Dissent_ is a book-length sneer sure to thrill folks like me. But for all its excoriation of that which claims to be "alternative," the book offers no real alternatives itself. Oh, wait. It does approve of unions (without a whisper about union corruption or thuggery). It also lauds "punk rock" as somehow salvific, but only, apparently, if the punk rock is recorded on "indie labels." When this phrase "indie label" first appeared in the book, it came with no explanation. I guessed I wasn't cool enough (in the _Baffler_'s, sense, of course) to get it. At first I thought of blue men with multiple arms. But no, that couldn't be it. Then I figured it must refer to an Indianapolis punk underground. But it turned out to be none of these: in _Baffler_ speak, "indie" means "independent." That they used this insider's slang repeatedly with absolutely no sense of irony undercuts their swipes at phrases like "street cred" entirely. I was also mystified by the fact that the clear plurality of selections come from "Baffler #6, 1995." Was something in the air? I would advise potential purchasers to find out whether that back-issue is cheaper than the book.
Rating:
Summary: Food For Thought
Review: A mix bag of 23 mostly provocative essays culled from the pages of The Baffler magazine, collected with the aim of critiquing the "new American cultural order." While a many of the ideas and theses presented will be old hat to thinking observers of popular culture, the essays are valuable in that they connect the dots in often highly entertaining (if sometimes overly snide and self-congratulatory) prose. The essays are separated into four sections: The Rebel Consumer, The Culture of Business, The Culturetrust Generation, and Wealth Against the Commonwealth Revisited. Of these, the essays in The Rebel Consumer and The Culturetrust Generation are probably the most lively, entertaining, and accessible to those who haven't thought about this stuff. Should be made required reading for all 9th graders.
Rating: 
Summary: Argue with your friends!
Review: A very good book. The other reader reviews are accurate: sometimes it's sophomoric and short on answers, but most of the essays are right on target. I gave it a '10' in part for the arguments it's launched between my friends and I. Tom Vanderbildt's essay, 'The Advertised Life' alone is worth the price of the book. (And buy this book at your local independent bookseller.)
Rating:
Summary: Perhaps it's for the best...
Review: Agreed: one can no longer seem credibly rebellious merely by wearing certain clothes, enjoying certain bands, or otherwise embracing some aspect of youth culture. This shouldn't come as a shock for anyone over the age of eighteen. I for one am happy to see the crass commercialism of, e.g., John Lydon's ads for Mountain Dew, because they make it clear (even without the help of the Baffler's editors) that listening to albums is not in and of itself a significant political act.
Rating:
Summary: Steal this book. Then give away your TV
Review: And you thought you were the only person in America who wouldn't take a Land-Rover if they gave you one.
Frank has summed up the malaise of the young, underemployed intellectual class quite nicely, thank you.
And he does deserve to be thanked, because he puts his finger on why everything from TV to publishing to your temp job has you despairing about life in America at the turn of the century.<b> Thank him by buying this book (From an independent store, of course. Steal it from Barnes & Noble), and pass it to your friends.
Then subscribe to his journal, The Baffler. After that, though, you're on your own, pal. Good luck.
Rating: 
Summary: Kvetch Kvetch Kvetch
Review: As others have pointed out, this book is merely a collection of self-referent smug platitudes. The essays are so angry and virile... yet they offer nothing in the way of solutions. At least when Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer pointed to the exact same problems centuries ago, they offered solutions. We must infer from this lack of proposed alternatives that the Baffler feels that speaking the name of its enemy will slay it. And so all the authors are witty, pithy, and humorous in their outright disrespect for things as they are. The fundamental problem is that for all this screaming, the hegemony isn't listening and couldn't care less about what some idiots in Chicago with poor distribution have to say. So, while the book is fun, "when one comes down to earth, one has to admit that laughter does not kill and that neither slaves nor tyrants are extinguished by mere amusement." (Hannah Arendt)
Rating:
Summary: Prose with energy and brains
Review: By all means, *do* buy *Commodify Your Dissent*. The volume is filled with wonderfully energetic and brainy articles from old *Bafflers*, with a remarkably low number of duds. I've been able to buy only a handful of *Bafflers*, and I'm quite close to Chicago, where it's published. Therefore, *Commodify* is a special treat. And it has indeed inspired me to get off my asthmatic rear and get a subscription: writing this good simply has to be supported. It's a relief to see such sharp analyses of our amusement-driven, I Consume Therefore I Am culture. Special kudos to Thomas Frank, too. At the risk of hyperbole (but the risk is quite small, actually), Mr. Frank is one of the finest prose stylists writing today, and his "Dark Age" is every bit as good as its reputation as an article that's gone thru many Xeroxes, from one reader to another. Mr. Frank could turn out to be America's best essayist since Gore Vidal: he shares Vidal's precision and often hilarious, though well-earned, anger. Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: Another Salvo
Review: Commodfy Your Dissent is meant to be a critique of American consumerism, as well as such things as cultural studies, which it appears to think of as just another version of the same. Well and good one supposes. At the same time, however, it is interesting to note that Commodify is written in a remarkably clear language, as many of the above readers note. The counterargument from the point of view of cultural studies would attack this clarity as lending itself to a reinforcement of consumerism, citing Adorno's attack on liberalism's insistence upon clarity in Minima Moralia perhaps. (That is why, for those who are unaware, academia today is filled with people who, apparently, can't write, as one of the above reviews demonstrates.) One might say that Frank is a person who failed at academia for exactly this reason, which might give a certain credence to the cultural studies argument. For myself though I regard this book as a hopeful sign, for I think of these academic arguments as rather beside the point; for too long a time the Left in this country has eaten its young, and this book looks like it may be a sign that that might be changing. For me a sign of a healthy society is not how many ideas are in play but how many ghettoes there are and how many people are in prison, and though academic "Critical Theorists" would say that that sort of thinking merely plays into the hands of the Right, I can't help thinking that way, which makes me a liberal I suppose. But all you have to do is look around to see that radical thought isn't doing much of anything these days. Tragic, I know, but there you are. Frank and the rest of the Baffler crew have I think taken a good first step: they have gotten out of the universities. We'd all do a lot better if more people did the same.
Rating:
Summary: Time to graduate from college, guys!
Review: Commodify Your Dissent has some well-argued attacks on the economic situation in this country, the imbalance of wealth, and the plight of the poor. The "cultural criticism," however, left me with the sense of listening to a group of pretentious youngsters who feel they know better than the rest of us about "authentic" modern American culture, which for them consists almost exclusively of obscure punk rock bands. So rather than observing that the success of early 90's bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam may have had a good deal to do with their musical talent and creativity, the Baffler team chooses to whine about how crummy those bands are in comparsion to the unsung heros of the "real" Seattle music scene. This sense of smug hipper-than-thouness combines with a bizarre fixation on the most obvsiously silly excesses of corporate and advsertising culture (Tom Peters' name is repeated incessantly), which most people either never take seriously to begin with, or soon see through. So we are treated to a walking tour of not just one but two corporate propaganda museums, where our fearless author finds -- gasp! -- lots of dumb and dishonest exhibits to grouse about. In general, these dudes don't seem to grok that the best way to deal with the onslaught of advertising on TV and in popular magazines is -- gasp again! -- turn of the tube and read a book. It's as though they've OD'd on Advertising Age and can't see that there are simple ways for anyone to avoid this garbage. Finally, name-calling and character assassination have nothing to do with serious criticism. The authors of this book would have done well to avoid epithets like "New Age freak" when referring to people they find fault with (in this case, Ariana Huffington). Of course, all that exhuberant anger and fun-poking is part of the undergraduate experience, but it's not the stuff of serious writing.
|
