Jeans are so much more than X and Y

Let’s talk about fashion. To be specific, let’s talk about Replay Jeans™ because, as their corporate profile elegantly stipulates: “Jeans are perhaps the only truly successful alchemy of the individual and the universal, because every pair exclusively mirrors and represents the wearer – just like a strand of DNA.”

Such poetic interpretations of casual denim elevate jeans unto something more metaphysical, something beyond just clothing.

Truth is that Replay Jeans―a European brand that sold its products to gullible Euro kids by implementing a completely Americanised promotional tone―is arguably one of the most fantastic manipulators of consumer awareness that ever existed. To follow Replay Jeans’ advertising campaigns is to learn something about how much brands will alter their approaches to selling stuff in accordance to generational attitudes and expectations.

To illustrate, we need to examine:

Exhibit – A

Exhibit – B

Ain’t these a pair that totally sum up the generational shift from X to Y? Notice how the actual product being sold never feature in the commercials. Why is that? Well, it’s because Generation X’s young populace was a different breed. They were a generation that strived to not ‘sell out,’ and to keep things ‘real.’ They were more than willing to buy shit they didn’t need but demanded a degree of artifice on part of the seller, a level of chicanery whereby they were happy to be exposed to brand awareness as long as it was masqueraded in layers of earnestness and value-positive messages. Therefore, monochrome vignettes of a stand-up comic wanting to extol the virtues of respecting ones parents and sepia coloured clips of a young man caught in some existential travelogue was all the rage for Generation X. Materialism was cool as long as the advertiser contemporaneously stuck two fingers up at it.

To bring this argument full circle, click:

Exhibit – C

It’s still Replay Jeans pretending to be all-American but notice how much of the seriousness has been dialled down. This new Replay commercial for 2012 puts jeans at the core and embellishes it with big explosions and silliness. There is barely a frame in which denim and/ or flannel doesn’t take centre stage. This is Replay Jeans for Generation Y, a young populace that’s totally cool with being a bunch of ‘sell-outs.’ Generation Y is completely comfortable with the prospect of brands selling them shit they don’t need and they will not coerce the manufacturer into feeling guilty about promoting its overpriced products to them just as long as it’s fun to watch. In that sense Generation Y is arguably more honest than its predecessor, albeit, somewhat less overtly demanding and conceited.

Looking at the Replay Jeans commercials for its Generation X audience is a reminder of just how much trends have changed yet remained totally the same in other respects. There’s slight suspicion that had either of those first two adverts been made in 2012 then both protagonists would be caked in tattoos and superficial attitudes. The meditative comedian of Exhibit A will have to find something cooler to do than go on a road trip with his kid. Rather than coming home and mumbling sweet nothings to his implausibly young parents, one suspects that Exhibit B will now be about some dude who puts on a pair of jeans and goes partying with hot chicks in exotic destinations. Both these Replay Jeans commercials are as corporate as Exhibit C, but there’s something absorbing about them, perhaps even meaningful.

One suspect that the branding of Replay Jeans will forever evolve, though its fake American stance and phoney messages about how denim is close to Godliness will never alter. If every generation has its own sound then every generation also has its jeans, only the material stays the same, the ways to get you to buy them modifies.

Have Middle-aged White Men Killed Rock ‘n’ Roll?

American filmmaker Harmony Korine in an interview with GQ magazine last summer said: “I don't listen to music made by white people. I especially hate anything where a guitar is used. I don't listen to white people and guitars.”

It is a tough statement to understand because back in 1995 Harmony Korine and musician Lou Barlow oversaw arguably the greatest movie soundtrack ever in the form of Kids. The soundtrack for Kids was as incendiary as the movie itself, featuring the rawest New York hip-hop and American alternative guitar music of the period. Barlow’s own group, Folk Implosion, featured heavily, but other bands like Sebadoh (another Barlow side project) and Slint nestled brilliantly well with rap acts such as Lo-Down and A Tribe Called Quest (though the latter was only used in the movie). It was the perfect marriage of yin and yang, encapsulating a skater youth culture that had omnivorous music tastes, with rock and rap holding equal importance. It was a soundtrack assembled by angry young men who love music, including that made by white guys with guitars.

Korine may now only favour black music, but why has white guitar music suffered in recent years? It’s only fair to say that black music has cheapened itself by prostituting its services to manufactured pop outfits (Wiz Khalifa being Maroon 5’s bitch-for-hire, for example), but it still has not received the backlash that rock music endured.

The truth may be that alternative music remains a genre presided over by relics of an older age. Take for example Green Day, the celebrated Californian rock band that has been in existence for over 25 years now. Green Day will release ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, and ¡Tré!, a new trilogy of albums that will be issued within months of each other. For diehard fans this news will be heaven, but one has to question why it is the same old faces that refuse to call it a day, putting out records every few years that sound remarkably like everything else they’ve attached their name to?

Green Day’s newish video for Oh Love demonstrates a great reluctance to do anything from the ordinary. Directed by ‘90s music video helmer Samuel Bayer, Oh Love has Billie Joe Armstrong and co. playing an intimate concert to a group of barely dressed models that are young enough to be their daughters.  If anything, the video exemplifies exactly what Green Day has become: A bunch of middle-aged men that have nothing new to offer other than an established formula and common denominator tropes.

Green Day hit the big time in 1994 with their first major record label release, Dookie. An entire generation has passed since its coming yet the interim has struggled to offer another, younger, global rock band to take their place. In fact, the case of middle-aged rockers refusing to call it a day means that we have bands like the Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chili Peppers insisting consumers take them as seriously as they may have done when they first came to prominence. Even more ‘recent’ acts like Linkin Park, The Strokes, Muse, The Killers and My Chemical Romance have been in circulation for over a dozen years now. These people are essentially sat on their jobs, turning rock music into an embarrassing joke that wallows in an anachronistic stubbornness, refusing to be invigorated by a new generation of musicians that may take the genre into fresh directions.

Before this post is vilified for being an attack on middle-aged white guys with guitars, it must be pointed out that there is no issue with musicians of a certain age continuing to make music just as long as the material they create actually demonstrates progression. Although a band like Radiohead may be accused of being stuck in a rut, one cannot say they’re not trying to evolve and discover new sounds. What is absolutely certain is that the Radiohead of 2012 is in no way what it was back in 1993.  The band has an innate desperation to avoid ground already covered, keen to circumvent looking like mature people attempting to pass themselves as being younger than their years. Although the middle-aged rockers of Green Day, Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chilli Peppers will do everything from emblazoning themselves with fresh tattoos to applying liberal amounts of guyliner and purchasing corrective cosmetic laser eye surgery in a bid to keep relevant, Radiohead has aged admirably and maintained their importance in the music arena.

Middle-aged rock musicians refusing to bow out gracefully is as much the fault of the bands themselves as it is of the music industry. As piracy and alternative means of acquiring music proliferates, the music industry is less willing to sign up new acts that will require heavy promotion and distribution in order to register with consumers. Britain’s sage middle-age rocker, Noel Gallagher, recently told the Daily Express that rock stardom is an endangered species primarily because it is impossible to make the vast amounts of money that previously came with the territory. Gallagher said: “There was a way of making money and selling records that got happened upon in the 1960s, and it worked for 30-odd years.” He went on to say, “Then all of a sudden, in under a decade, it’s gone, never to return."

Therefore, the music industry would rather preserve established acts, regardless of their sell by date, and have them reproduce the same style of music that worked for them when they first came about.  2012 has seen albums by Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden, alternative rock acts that were a breath of fresh air a generation ago, but have little to contribute in a post-millennial music culture steeped in diminishing sales and a stagnant music broadcasting culture.

Harmony Korine may have given up on rock ‘n’ roll but its salvation will be compromised further if bands which have had their time refuse to accept that there is something fundamentally wrong in trying to insist they are as important as they were when record companies first took a chance on them. Likewise, if record companies don’t discover new guitar bands then there will eventually come a tipping point in which younger generations will completely turn their backs on a music scene identifiable by having artists that are as old as their grandparents.

But maybe such an arrangement is cool. After all, this is a generation that is more attuned to the tastes of its parents than perhaps their parents were to their own folks. As long as money is being made and nobody is complaining loudly enough, then maybe 40 can be the new 20. After all, rock music is the gateway to transcendence.

-Music Videos on my Mind- Charli XCX’s “So Far Away”

While teenage girls of the American Midwest may have declared Taylor Swift's We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together as their official existential anthem to broken heartedness, British girls of the same age demand much sterner stuff to convey similar sentiments, profanity included.

Charli XCX ‘s underground instincts remain intact, though, if we’re being totally honest, you’ll have to admit her song writing is every bit as superficial as any generic American pop star singing about hopeless boyfriends, hence why Teen Vogue is a big fan of hers. The video has a distinctly British edge to it in that it was probably cheaply put together by her big brother, who will no doubt incur the wrath of Disney lawyers for having utilised footage of their iconic princesses without legal clearance.

Even with the backing of Warner Music, Charli XCX isn’t exactly a big name, but So Far Away, and its raw music video, seems to indicate that the efforts to turn her into a mainstream goth pop star hasn’t worked out very well. Perhaps she’s better off sticking to the style that initially got her a major record deal, though, if that will be enough to pay off the imminent Mickey Mouse lawsuit is yet to be seen.

-Music Videos on my Mind- Lana Del Rey’s “Ride”

This isn’t an official music video for Lana Del Rey’s brand new song, and if it is then the music industry is in much worse state than imagined.

While a still image of Rey on a tire swing may do the job in the short run, a song as sumptuous as this one deserves the expensive treatment. Ride reminds us why some music lovers got excited about Rey in the first place, capturing the dreamy splendour of her initial singles Video Games and Blue Jeans.

It’s obvious that Rey's fast tracked EP, Paradise Edition, is nothing more than a quick cash grab to take advantage of the singer’s current popularity, not to mention an opportunity to benefit from the profitable approach of a coming Christmas, but this is simply too good a song to be cynical about. If the record company has any sense then they will supersede this austere clip with a proper music video that incorporates spectacular moving images of an all singing and sulking Lana Del Rey.

-Music Videos on my Mind- Supafly’s “Happiness”

9/11 was a numbing event. The world changed in an instant, with broadcasters reacting insanely to what and what wasn't permissible anymore. MTV was so shaken by the event that they temporarily suspended Foo Fighters' Learn to Fly and Goldfrapp's Pilots music videos on account they were set in airport terminals and were, therefore, too controversial to air. For years the airport terminal music video was a no go area, that is until Feist gingerly ventured back into the aeronautics domain with My Moon my Man. The end result helped us realise that air travel and music videos could, once again, be inspiring bedfellows.

Now London's dance outfit, Supafly, has taken airport music videos to another level, transforming the very serious task of mandatory security checks into the world's best party. Rudeboys, strippers, religious people and everyone else gets down when an illegal psychedelic gas is unleashed by passport control, causing all delayed passengers to dance like crazy.

Supafly's Mista P and One recruit Shahin Badar to lend the track an Eastern flavour, though it primarily works by harking back to the '90s sound of Touche and Regal's The Wiseguys. Happiness is a fun video and you can never have enough of those, especially when they remind us that airports are portals to happier destinations.

-Music Videos on my Mind- Psy’s “Gangnam Style”

Fame is like a swift tornado. It comes with sudden force, fiercely shaking and rattling the windows and doors, renders a few dent marks and scratches, only to disappear as quickly as it arrived.

Psy is a South Korean pop star who's too old and unconventional looking to make it as a global pop phenomenon, yet that's exactly what's happened. His music video for Gangnam Style is racking up a billion Youtube hits every hour and is playing, at this very moment, on every radio station, in every continent, on planet Earth.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, has declared their love for Gangnam Style. Tom Cruise, Katy Perry, Nelly Furtado, Jay Leno, Simon Pegg, LMFAO and everybody and their mother has come out this week to venerate Psy's genius, announcing we should all worship him as our new God.

In true US style, media personalities immediately shipped Psy onto American shores so that he can do his gimmicky dance routine with both Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears, showing them that the emotional toils of messy breakups and tabloid scandals can easily be remedied by a bit of Gangnam. (The Americans pulled a similar stunt with the Slumdog Millionaire kids a few years back before jettisoning them back to their ramshackle existences when the whole act got boring and stopped being cute.)

Music novelty acts during a global recession are, it seems, a necessary evil, designed to distract us from the bigger problems in life. They are a reminder that when all seems lost, happiness can easily be gleaned by watching an awkward looking Korean guy dancing like a madman. What's more, personal joy can be brought by joining in and imitating the crazy dance moves. It seems to have done the trick for Mitt Romney.

-Music Videos on my Mind- Ellie Goulding's "Anything could Happen"

Tragically, legend has it that Ethel Goulish, a great ancestor of British singer Ellie Goulding, was burnt at the stake in 1782 by the elders of Herefordshire council because of suspicions that her big chin was a signifier of being a witch.

Fortunately, centuries later, Ellie Goulding's big chin is no longer a marker of being the Devil's concubine. Nay, Ellie is cultivating big money making pop records that have sold massively in all the markets that matter. Not only that, Ellie is the proud girlfriend of a famous American musician called Skrillex, who really should be burnt at the stake for making awful dubstep music.

Ellie is back with a brand new album called Halcyon and has released the first video titled Anything could Happen. As a song, the best praise that can be given is it's not as boring as some of her other stuff, but that doesn't mean it's much better. The video is a rather predictable affair, featuring car advert stylistics and pretentious pagan motifs (good luck getting that stuff on American television).

There's a strong suspicion that Anything could Happen may launch Ellie Goulding into the big time. It has all the hallmarks of song that will play from station to station. In fact, it's probably a song that sounds better on the radio without being compromised by its lackadaisical music video.

This may be the kind of music that plays better to women than men, but that's only because guys are scared of big chinned females. Had a pop star like Rihanna recorded this song, with her respectably sized chin, then everyone would buy it.