Stop eating Lady Gaga's Oreos
experimental-history.com
experimental-history.com
Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire filming a Pepsi commercial in 1984. Bill Cosby famously hawked Jell-O Pudding. Sports stars were on Wheaties. Ronald Regan (the actor!) was a spokesperson for GE.
But that being said, celeb endorsements aside... I do think that the author is right that everything these days "feels fake/contrived" and almost nothing exists without an angle to make money somehow.
Everyone now has the ability to go viral and make it big financially, so it does feel like much of our actions (even if that's not our goal) are shaped that way. A random person may not want to be a rich, famous Instagram influencer... but that doesn't stop them from acting similarly (posting photos for likes).
Humans have always had versions of trying to monetize their lifestyles (tupperware parties?); now we all have the tools to do it at scale.
>Maroon 5 is covering Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” as a tribute to Hyundai
Because that sentence hits hard in the smh.
"I'd like to teach the world to sing" was covered as a tribute to coca cola in 1971, that's classic now.
Michael Jackson did a parody of his own song Billie Jean for Pepsi ("You're the Pepsi generation")
Scrovegni Chapel by Giotto was made to help the reputation of the scrovegni family who were big creditors.
This is as old as time.
The author was a teen back then, and teens to be countercultural, but I don't think they're drawing the right conclusions from that.
Sellouts have always existed at some level, but now it's different, I don't even think a lot of kids know what "sellout" means.
I think they still do, but selling out to do a deal with a brand to put your name on some clothes or cookies is so far down the scale it doesn't really register to begin with. At worst, all the harm it does is a potential harm to their future art, but a man's gotta make money somehow. It is capitalism after all.
Selling out when there are moral or ethical problems in the mix, they're still able to get very mad about that, but most artists are smart enough to not sell out to Northrup Grumman, OpenAI, Nestlé, nor to your favourite local crypto coin or gambling website.
Some define themselves in relation to mainstream, but others just don’t care about what is or isn’t popular.
When I was 5 I had every Backstreet Boys CD. I had Backstreet Boys action figures from Burger King. I love the Spice Girls and stadium bands like Pink Floyd. They stay on rotation. And I also really love finding the most obscure music possible and frequently dive into old, obscure artists, particularly folk and early electronic music. I love hearing masterpieces that have gone unnoticed for decades. I love hearing some stranger's brand new shitty song with 20 views on YouTube. My algorithm knows this too and very frequently shows me videos that are 10 minutes old with 5 views from accounts with a dozen subscribers. All of these things bring me different joys.
The line is when a celebrity starts actively hawking harmful things to everyday people. Doing a Pepsi commercial is a sellout move. But I still listen to the Jackson 5 all the time. It's good music.
By and large if you were part of the indie music scene it was incredibly common to consider anything in mainstream commercial music "not cool." Boy bands were reviled for it, and people felt strongly about it.
From a cultural standpoint much of this sentiment has been lost entirely. This is part of the change the author is talking about.
It was particularly prevalent in a lot of New Wave and the various branches of post-New Wave music (see the whole New Romantic movement for plenty of examples). And Sigue Sigue Sputnik even sold ads between the songs on their debut album!
(Hell, rock and roll was born as an anti-establishment thing in the 1950s)
Maybe we're just due for another one of the inflection points where being anti-cool will become cool again.
The late 80s to early 2000s was a distribution sweet-spot for groups like that.
Early MTV didn't always line up with what mainstream radio played, but gave more new artists opportunities. This continued up at least through Eminem getting his breakout in that way - I wouldn't say he shunned fame, but until breaking through with a music video there the radio machine wasn't giving him that fame. Tapes, and later CD burners, also massively accelerated word-of-mouth for stuff that wasn't the immediate first choice for top-40 format radio stations because it let more people share more things. Then you had the internet/napster era supercharge that. "It Wasn't Me" by Shaggy became a huge hit because a local DJ in Hawaii found it on Napster and started playing it.
Now we've crossed a tipping point where there's more indie stuff available than ever, but also so much personalized listening where it's getting harder again to get Nirvana-level famous outside of the system. But a Chappel Roan still fits the bill pretty well. Did you have lesbian dance-pop with 80s camp on your bingo card for massive mainstream popularity a few years ago?
So which is it? Was Cobain a big deal in the mainstream, or was he countercultural? I don't think you can have it both ways.
But why not? Result (huge sales, mainstream popularity) and process (not aiming at that goal, or even resenting ending up there) are entirely decoupled because the result is the sum of actions done by everyone else and only the process is the action of the person involved.
To be a big deal in the mainstream is about saturation and mass appeal.
To be countercultural is usually to be celebrated for the process/intent.
Entirely possible to hit both of those.
An even longer-lasting example: Radiohead repeatedly shifted directions after huge hits into more-and-more avant garde styles. But many of their songs kept ending up hugely popular regardless. Their intent was "let's do what we want to do, not just try to appease the lowest common denominator" - a classic "indie" sentiment. But it ended up appealing to huge numbers of people anyway, time after time. Even today's kids are picking them up in substantial amounts.
Both, and it's referenced in the chorus of the song In Bloom. They were becoming popular in the mainstream and attracted an audience who were the antithesis of what they believed in:
"He's the one who likes / All our pretty songs / And he likes to sing along / And he likes to shoot his gun / But he knows not what it means / Knows not what it means"
see also: people who sing along to their favorite patriotic song Born In The USA.
Ever since made-for-cable TV series went mainstream with HBO in the late-90s, a huge chunk of yesterday's non-blockbuster movies have become today's TV series. And there are massively more TV series than ever before.
That "25%" in the 80s shows you that there were already tons of those, and it's easy to remember them (Jaws 2, Empire Strikes Back, Temple of Doom, Aliens, Godfather Pt 2, etc etc etc).
So is it that there is no culture that feels this way about selling out in the present? I'm pretty skeptical of that! Is it really true that if I went to a high school or university right now and asked every kid there what they think about selling out and consumerism, that I wouldn't find a subculture there that feels that way? I suspect I would find that subculture.
So is it just that this subculture is smaller now? Ok, maybe so. But this seems like a much weaker thesis?
Or is it actually that this subculture is less visible now? This seems the most plausible to me. Kurt Cobain and Pearl Jam were interesting and frequently reported upon. But then this is a more boring phenomenon: things that are interesting become less novel and less interesting over time.
I do very much like the section in this essay pointing out that the masses in the US have changed from temporarily embarrassed millionaires to temporarily embarrassed celebrities. That resonates!
I well remember the "sell out" musicians of the 90s - even the Rolling Stones sold a song to... Microsoft! They might have lost their cool with some people, but that didn't stop them from remaining one of the most influential bands of their generation, and they've continued their success for decades.
As you say, Pearl Jam are the exception that proves the rule, the non-sell-out who managed to get huge anyway.
There's no numbers there to show that disliking fame was bigger than compared to now. Billie Eilish has written big hits about not being happy as a result of fame or the downsides of it.
Also, look at the amount of anti-AI/anti-big-tech memes/commentary/activity today. You can draw a straight line from No Logo to that. And I don't think it's that hard to extend that line MUCH further back than Naomi Klein. Open Source itself has plenty of adherents and is inherently a don't-sell-out movement and mentality.
"Selling out" as a concept back then only came about because everything felt fake and contrived (to some people). Just like today, not everyone would agree that everything is fake and contrived - look at how many people are still listening/watching some of the "nepo babies" or suspected"industry plants"...
The pop-culture part of this article is just "I have nostalgia for this thing I remember and knew a lot about" while ignoring the pre-existing-and-continual Michael Jackson / New Kids on the Block / Vanilla Ice / N Sync / Britney Spears mega-stardom super-celebrity mainstream hype machine that was also massively successful through the whole period.
This is a good point. Though I think I'd phrase it as: the ubiquity of the revenue streams means all behavior plausibly looks like profit seeking behavior. I don't mean to be nitpicky, but I think the problem or danger lies in the effect it has on the observer, rather than the actor. To me, it's not so bad that someone might engage in profit seeking, as a little treat or way of life, but that this seems indistinguishable in social media means I engage skeptically to what could be genuine social behavior. "The only winning move is not to play" if you want to avoid being a pawn in someone's profit game. But this comes at the cost of killing the social game, the reason I'm on the app to begin with! Of course, I could just log-off; but also not playing the (profit) game could mean ignoring goal, while still making moves in the social game.
But everything can be co-opted. When whatever real world Don Draper managed to use hippieism to sell Coca Cola in 1971, that began the discrediting of this first wave, and punk eventually emerged as a second wave. The rockers versus disco shenanigans may have included punk, but punk as its own distinct culture rejected larger scale rock and roll just as much. As a musical movement, it was a rejection of Kiss and Aerosmith more than Donna Summer.
But then punk, too, stayed underground in the hardcore movement the cited Beastie Boys were a part of in the 80s, but also influenced mainstream rock, and grunge emerged as a rejection of that, the excesses of hair metal, glam, and even something like Guns n Roses.
Then grunge softened into "alternative rock" and Nirvana became Goo Goo Dolls. The author's point is where is the reaction to that? It feels like grunge was the last true anti-consumerism rejection of musicians selling out, softening their sound to become more popular. I've been watching Daria for the first time in 30 years the past few weeks, which I watched originally but barely remembered, and it hits hard these days. It explores this exact dynamic quite well. Daria's parents are middle-aged ex-hippies questioning themselves for becoming an attorney and a consultant. Daria herself won't wear makeup and worries about replacing her glasses with contacts because it will make her more attractive and thus less authentic. She gets mad at Jane for joining the track team because of how bought-in she to the notion that a jock of any kind is already selling their soul whether they have success or not. She isn't mad at being unpopular. She wants to be unpopular. That was a very real ethos of the 90s I remember experiencing quite starkly myself. Popularity as inherently bad, aligning your incentives as a person less to being true to yourself and more to being what others want you to be.
Do teens of the 20s still experience anything like that? You'd think it would be universal, but if there's any musical movements associated with it, I'm not aware of them. There's the revival of socialism and distrust of capitalism, eat the rich, but as I think the author is getting at, Che and Castro probably wouldn't have spared Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift. The remaining question for me is whether this is still true in actual youth culture. I think the author and myself are probably dating each other here. Even Taylor Swift is nearly 40. Her concerts are selling for so much because her fans are in their 30s and actually have money. I'm not sure this is what actual kids and teenagers are listening to and whatever their sentiments about culture and consumerism may be, us adults probably don't even know. It's the nature of underground movements that most of us don't learn about them until they go mainstream.
"I have a problem with artists doing commerce under the guise of art. I listen, I read, and I watch because I want to inhabit, even if just for a moment, the mind of another human. I want to feel what it’s like to be them, and in so doing, I want to better understand what it’s like to be me. But if I journey to the center of someone’s psyche and all I find there is a billboard for Pizza Hut, I’m turning around. If your art is just one node in your business empire, if your albums are merely commercials for your cologne, if you’re trying to turn your first billion into your second billion, you are no longer an artist at all. You are a credit default swap with a discography attached."
But I don’t follow with the whole premise. The mobility hypothesis is interesting, that people no longer see rich people as something attainable. But becoming famous through influencing or something on that vain. But famous people have been sellouts for far longer than i can remember. Kate bush did some weird promotion for a Dutch theme park called de Efteling and we have been messing with millennials for the past 20 years that nirvana is headlining the biggest Dutch music festival every year. “Ooh yeah i love that song”. And as far as I know Paris Hilton played half of the world into thinking that she was dumb as a rock.
Think that brands have given up on old school advertising. Just god lazy to give people a big bag of money for exposure. For how long will that work until people get bored of that? Yes, a music artist aligning themselves with Pantone as a color once is novel. But how many times does that really stay interesting? Just lazy advertising what only work for a couple of years until the larger crowed stops caring about the next branded Oreo deal.
Chromatica Oreos were absolutely wonderful (as far as mass produced garbage that is unfit for human consumption is concerned) and I miss them dearly. Telling me to stop eating them is like telling me to stop seeing a boyfriend who died tragically years ago.
Worse, it brings up painful memories of when Oreo Coke (actually good, unlike Coke Oreo) came into my life, showed me that true love is possible, then disappeared forever in barely a month. I’m still reeling.
Edit: boo, hiss!
Yea, that's a little awkward, but what is life for if not the awkward enjoyment of a musician's flavour.
When marketing collaborations are used to inform people of something actually good, then they can actually be great for everyone. The best example is Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream collaborations. It's hard to communicate "no, it's hard to understand, but this blend of candies is especially worth trying," so the best way to do that is to have a celebrity vouch for it. And, what do you know, those collaborations have been wildly successful. It's hard to convince people that "putting ice cream cone in the ice cream" is surprisingly good, but if you just put Stephen Colbert on the label with a big thumbs up, most people will give it a try.
Marketing can be manipulative, but it can also be very, very helpful to customers who don't have perfect information. This is exactly the point of Rory Sutherland's book Alchemy: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26210508-alchemy
Your view is very optimistic, you're trying to see the mega-brands in the best possible light. I would almost call it euphemistic. Celebrities don't vouch for a product, they're not reviewers (although they can be paid to pretend to be one), they can't provide neutral or negative feedback. They're advertisers. The ice cream brand could pay them to promote ice cream blended with shredded cardboard for all they care, and because of the celebrity's face on it there would be an uptick in sales regardless of the quality.
If your product is that good, it'll spread the same way products became popular in the past - through word of mouth, people recommending it to one another, getting their friends to try it. Of course, some good ideas that deserved the light of day may not get appropriately rewarded, especially if the product is good but revolutionary. But I would take that possibility over having our singular, sellout, corporate mass of sludge of a culture dominate everything.
Most products fail. All the products you see in the stores are the result of a massive war that’s constantly being waged by companies fighting to the death.
Anyone serious about selling something either needs to bootstrap the crap out of it on tiny margins forever, or they need to launch their product.
Again, most products fail which often means bankruptcy for their creators. Having someone put their reputation on the line for something good-but-unintuitive is a great way to have consumers become more willing to take a chance on something they might otherwise be skeptical of. The George Forman grill is the perfect example of a bizarre product that benefited from a celebrity endorsement. I seriously doubt a “two sided griddle” is successful at all unless you give people a reason to listen to the sales pitch, and even then to give it a shot.
The products used by many are the products their investors have an interest boosting. One example look at what SaaS startups seeded on this site use, other SaaS from same network and investors.
Nothing about it based on war of pricing, quality or experience.
Sometimes I think Americans are completely lost to the rest of us, residing in a haze of consumerism and political divide as they do. Then sometimes I read something like this and I cannot deny a certain curiosity as regards the finer differences between Oreo Coke and Coke Oreo.
We have coke in my country (of both the Coca Cola and cocaine varieties, and even the pure carbon variety used for steel smelting) and also Oreos are readily available in most supermarkets. Can any of the US based HN visitors enlighten us about the exact mixture required to produce Oreo Coke (but not, preferably, Coke Oreo)?
Coke Oreo = Coca-Cola-flavored Oreo cookies
welcome to hell
I found out recently that Oreo is in fact made with real cocoa; I find this surprising and still somewhat hard to believe.
The drink’s unique combination of flavors somehow made the whole experience less cloying than a typical zero sugar coke. And also, mysteriously, it was quite satiating, almost like I had eaten actual cookies. Except not, because any American can tell you that Oreo has negative satiation - you can eat an Oreo from a state of not being hungry at all, then discover you have eaten a whole Family Size pack.
Epic
I feel like this only really makes sense in contrast to specifically the 90s? This wasn't some eternal cultural rule that changed in the 2000s, it's just two pretty recent trends in mainstream culture. You can still find people who are snobby about Drake compared to Kendrick or Taylor Swift compared to Chappelle Roan nowadays anyway. That mindset isn't gone?
Having fun colors for one of the world's most popular cookie brands is pretty low on the scale of harm compared to, say, actively promoting people to go use online gambling services or buy snakeoil supplements.
But I do think there is a real difference here. I just think it's a media difference. It's true that in the 90s (and I would say longer than that) culture writers would pretty universally scoff at "sellouts" and lionize auteurs. But those gatekeepers have lost all their power to control the message. I think that's the real difference.
It really was “I hate success. Down with consumerism, buy my t-shirt”
As people become brands—or aspire to become brands—every meaningful aspect of life, from intimate family moments to vacations, is pushed toward commodification and monetization. The craving for fame becomes intertwined with that process, with each reinforcing the other. And when you're a modern equivalent to a hunter and gatherer, there's little time or (incentive) to step back and reflect on the system that led you and your cohort to this bleak place.
Celebrity themed oreos shouldn't be a thing, but not because we demand our celebrities think of themselves as above crass commercialism, but because no one would consider "celebrity themed" to be anything even remotely close to a selling point for oreos, and that therefore there is no value in them being hired by Nabisco.
But I may as well be pissing in the wind. Celebrity worship seems to be incredibly deeply ingrained in human psychology. Maybe he's right that we can't get rid of it, we can just change the norms around it.
People read one person's opinion now almost as much if not more than people read the news.
I do think its on the nose about belief, people want to believe they want to be famous and can be famous and people feel less like they can be rich.
I also wonder if its just counter culture though and we're due another cycle. I find it upsetting that so many people aspire to be digital beggars.
Not that I'm happy about it or want it to continue, but we're already there, have been since 2016.
Kind of sounds like they have a bigger problem with what everyone else is doing when they listen to popular music. One can simply not listen to Lady Gaga; I've succeeded at that for decades.
I realize most people aren't like me. But that's even more reason to not bother to tell people this. People who like Lady Gaga are going to feel inspired to buy her Oreos, no matter what you say. They know she's already mega-rich, and they are happy to keep giving her money. You aren't going to stop that.
The post seems to have found a strange niche of HN, or maybe the Selena Gomez Oreos had wider appeal than I thought.
One of the reasons why I knew the video game Mixtape was made by phonies, most of whom did not understand actual 90s culture and may not have been alive during the 90s, is because while the main characters adopt grunge aesthetics, they do not have that hyperawareness of authenticity (or lack thereof) that characterized being a teenager back then. Which is kind of fitting for a game made during an era where everything is boiled down to an "aesthetic". Being a kid in the 90s was a stance of mind, it wasn't just about what you wore or what bands you listened to. A lot of us thought we were Holden Caulfield back then, able to spot phonies and waging a quiet, desperate struggle against them for our own minds.
As for the point of the article, the problem isn't that people are eating the Oreos, it's that Lady Gaga sold out. Doesn't matter how well they sell.
No, now this is not how I remember it at all. It was entirely limited to that era of music. Back then, Michael Jordan got hundreds of millions on just his sneakers. Nobody dared to think he was "selling out". George Foreman grills were hot. Gretzky was into selling you quite a lot of stuff. Shaq has never stopped doing TV commercials since the 90s.
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19950219/2105837/gr...
https://adland.tv/diet-pepsi-ray-charles-uh-huh-you-got-righ...
Oreos are as important a part of life as anything else. People have feelings, memories, and good experiences with it. Just because a big company makes them instead of a small doesn't make that any less valid.
Hell, michaelangelo had to balance the art of his soul with what his patrons wanted.
And the same artist can make one spiritually deep, untouched by consumerism piece and also make a music video with Mario the next week. A healthy life and mix can include both.
I noticed this young girl, no older than 20, wearing a Pink Floyd "Dark side of the Moon" t-shirt, I asked her what she thought of the band.
To my abject dissatisfaction she responded "I bought the T-shirt because it looked cool".
In that moment I a GenExer, felt a profound generational dissonance.
Pink Floyd's popular Dark Side of the Moon artwork, meanwhile, involves an illustration of a prism splitting a beam of white light into a rainbow.
There's no reason to expect someone to have listened to an album released 50 years ago. That would be like upbraiding an 80s kid for not caring about Elvis.
(Anyone want to talk about OS/2 Warp like that's still a current event?)
The filling for Oreos used to just be lard that was folded together with granulated cane sugar. That's all that the white stuff was (according to a good friend of mine who made Oreos way back then, and still makes them today). It definitely was a different experience back then.
So was IBM's now-completely-forgotten WebExplorer browser, especially when hacked to have 8 network threads downloading at once instead of 4. :)
And that's OK. Modern Oreos are still tasty; they're just not quite the same. And the modern web experience still works, even though it is very different compared to what it was back then.
Part of that issue is people think "reviews" and "criticism" is one and the same. Ideally, a critic places the artwork in appropriate historical context and provides analysis. But most people just want Numbers or THumbs Ups.
Hey, Gen X dudes, who was your favorite spice? Posh? Sporty?
For me ... LTSpice all the way.
Just fake the circuit, not the smile, personality or relationship, ya know?
Bode plot over bodacious.
My question is whether they really changed the recipe again to now taste like music instead of cardboard, or is it just clever marketing in a shiny smaller package?
I enjoyed reading both, then popped over to see if this one had ever been submitted to HN. It hadn't, so I did. Figured that if people liked the first one, they might like this one as well.
It's because the Powers That Be don't put it on the ballot. If you put "take 99% of the money from the 1000 richest billionaires (about $10 trillion, I think), and nobody has to pay any income taxes for the next four years" on some sort of national ballot, I think there's a very good chance that it would pass.
There is no market to buy all of Amazon, or all of Tesla. Not at the current valuation.
You can take their fortune, but you cant spend it. Not in 4 years.
Not good.
Needing bodyguards, and not being able to afford them, is a problem.
Yep, that's enough internet for me today.
Products into obsessions
Employees into ambassadors
And brands into religions"
I think this is a more important line than the author even appreciates. It's complex, but it's easy to see that people have generally leveraged the label of "art" is a defense against criticism, and it usually takes this form.
If someone likes to listen to whatever clearly "trashy" pop music is famous at the moment, they have learned that they don't need to feel shame for doing so- all they have to do is call it art and all of a sudden they're absolved of all the negative connotations associated with the consumerist aspects of that music.
Of course, it's not hard to recognize that if you're willing to call anything made by a person "art," then the concept of "art" will have lost all meaning. Sure, the newest Marvel movie was engineered by a huge team of professionals who designed it to generate as much profit as possible, but there's a human involved who likely put some creative effort into the project, therefore it is art and it is absolved of any criticism that doesn't treat it as such.
>I think this is why we now tolerate such blatant greed among famous people: we think we have a chance of becoming one of them. We once saw ourselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires; now we see ourselves as temporarily unknown celebrities.
I don't buy this exactly. I think it's more like: people associate their being so personally with celebrities that they feel as though they're already almost famous themselves just by being their fan. It's the "parasocial" dynamic that people have been recognizing more and more.
I think this does end up cropping up in the form of leveraging fandom to make yourself a celebrity (e.g., the fans that appear the most obsessed are the same ones who can be known for being the fans which are the most obsessed), but I don't think that is the core motivation.
>If we want this to stop, the solution is simple: we have to stop eating Lady Gaga’s Oreos. We have to stop pretending that celebrities are just like us, and that their success is our success. We have to redraw the line between art and entertainment, and more importantly, we have to redraw the line between art and advertisement.
This is the "fun" part of all of this.
If "we" need to do something to stop this, then "we" are fucked. People are in way too deep at this point to turn this around anytime soon in any meaningful way.
The reality is that "you" need to do what is best for "you" and to recognize that the huge swaths of the population who are addicted to consumerism on this level should be treated similarly to how we treat people addicted to drugs or gambling: have pity, try to help them help themselves, but ultimately don't let them drag you down with them.
This might seem overly dramatic, but this dynamic does come with a huge cost: literally money. If you're spending your money on overpriced bullshit, then you're no longer able to spend or invest that money on things that can have a much greater ROI (where that return may be in the form of money, or it could be more meaningful experiences, things that make you genuinely happy, etc.). Just the same, all of these products detract from your capacity to experience in general. When you're spending any amount of your capacity thinking about, consuming, discussing, etc., Lady Gaga's Oreos, then that as capacity not spent on things that matter much more.
The worst part is that this isn't limited to people irrationally consuming celebrity endorsed products. Right now, you're reading my comment about some dumb post on a dumb website where my point doesn't matter. You're consuming this instead of spending your time being productive. Embarrassingly, I've sunk way more time into this comment than you have reading it, so I'm not any better off. But I like to think I'm getting something more meaningful out of this than just mindlessly consuming products made for the lowest common denominator (even if it is just marginal), so at least I can feel a bit superior in that regard.