terminal-boredom.com
Terminal Boardumb => Music Shit => Pop Punk => Topic started by: TheKLYAM on June 29, 2013, 08:00:26 PM
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I was assigned to write an essay on media. I chose Scion Garage. I used TermBo in my research. Not really sure how you guys will react (if at all), most likely negative in some fashion, so here goes. It's academic-y and long. Most of my classmates wrote about shit like sexuality in Pepsi commercials and the role of gender in Games of Thrones. Anyway
In 2009, a new phenomenon confronted a community of believers. Their source of inspiration had always come in the form of rock ?n roll and the half century of history attached to it. Over the years, this style of music has constantly adapted to changes made to it by its practitioners. Some of these changes have been authentic contributions to the rebellious nature of rock ?n roll, whilst others have bankrupted the soul of the genre. For many, the ?selling out? and corporatization of rock ?n roll has just been a matter of occurrence, an inevitability in the culture that we are a part of. These fans might not necessarily think twice about an erosion of ideals ? after all, music is just a group of people and their instruments. The aforementioned community of believers, however, faced a rather unique corporate counterpart, Scion Audio Visual (AV) Garage, that utilized an online marketing campaign to unite many of the bands and locales that over the years had come to the forefront of an international underground, punk influenced rock music scene. For outsiders, such as myself, who were too young and far removed from city scenes that function on the premises of counter-culture and do-it-yourself ethos, the efforts of Scion AV Garage were much appreciated; the spotlight on the biggest and best names in ?garage? validated my fandom.
Looking back on the Scion AV Garage campaign, equipped now with knowledge of concepts such as postmodernism, globalization, and ideology, I have come to understand that the Scion narrative on ?garage? was not as natural as I had originally imagined. Scion, in conjunction with Vice Music and their in-house branding agency, Virtue Worldwide, attempted to create an easily identifiable and unified Garage scene for its own benefit despite appearing to support the arts. Scion AV Garage did so via postmodernism and identity production, utilizing the postmodern sublime and nostalgia in its marketing materials to try to recreate the ideal consumer of Garage as somebody who is an ideal Scion consumer as well. This essay explores Scion AV Garage in the context of a failed experiment. The implicitly and explicitly corporate presentation of the niche garage rock music scene was not effective at selling cars and sustaining consumer engagement, but it was effective at supporting and promoting the bands and independent record labels featured in addition to being a solid source of information and entertainment relating to those bands and labels.
?Remember when Toyota bought and sold all of us? Rock ?n roll?s pushing 47 MPG! Remember when we said PUNK IS BACK? It is back?with 2.9% APR financing.? These words were typed by user SteveBeat in August 2009 on the Terminal Boredom message board in a topic about an upcoming Scion Garage Fest. A sense of confusion is articulated in the posts of members of the Terminal Boredom community. In the same topic titled ?Vice/Scion ?Garage? thing in Portland,? another user, DickJohnson, writes, ?didn?t this thing happen 5 years ago in Chicago? Way to be on top of it VICE,? alluding to a tiny festival that was put on by Chicago based independent label Horizontal Action. The overwhelming take-away from reading Terminal Boredom is: why Scion? The answer, revealed through research of the brand, is not too shocking. Just as the modern garage rock adherent positions himself or herself away from more fashionable styles of rock music so does Scion in the giant automobile market.
In Richard Chang?s New York Times article ?Living the Life of Scion,? Scion is presented as different from the typical car brand. Traditional car brands have spent their marketing dollars on television advertisements, but Scion, being a young and lively brand, is about customization and interaction, both virtually and in real life. The article involves a 27-year-old ?alpha Scion citizen,? who attends Scion meetings with other enthusiasts on a weekly basis in addition to maintaining a Scion specific YouTube channel. While Chang focuses specifically on this diehard customer, a broader portrait can be painted: Scion wants the young, edgy, hip, consumer to become more than just a passive driver ? the company wants this person to constantly engage with the brand by whatever means necessary.
In a similarly oriented article by Brian Quinton on Promo, the perspective shifts to the marketing managers that are invested in the Scion brand. The article is from 2008, roughly one year before the launch of Scion Garage, but we see what Scion is going for. Division interactive marketing manager Adrian Si states, ?Our original thought was to come up with some ideas that matched well with our brand attributes, then continue to build on those every three months or so.? Such brand attributes include customization and casualness. Most important of all is cyber engagement ? exposing consumers to interactive virtual content. The difference between success and failure in this approach is in the type of virtual content that is being offered by Scion. In both the New York Times and Promo article, the content is ?openly Scion,? whether you are meeting up with other people at the bowling alley or in a chat room, you are playing around with a Scion product. With Scion Garage, inversely, there is no direct relationship between cars, the consumer, and garage rock music. The all-important intermediary between Scion and the garage rock fanatic is Vice.
Vice is a global media empire and as the apropos title of the Billboard article by Cortney Harding reads, ?Vice made a name for itself by being gleefully snotty and courting hipsters. Now thanks to its branding agency, Virtue Worldwide, corporate America is courting Vice.? Virtue Worldwide, like the larger Vice enterprise, is not typical in its business methodology. Both cater towards the hipster, one whose lifestyle and interests supposedly run counter to the mainstream. The question at the surface is: ?how can we link this alternative market type to corporate America?? The real question is: how do we get these people to buy Scions? Virtue Worldwide has attempted to answer this question through identity production and lifestyle clustering. They have mined what garage rock fans like (bands, scenes, records, festivals, radio stations, video content) to create a distinct consumer audience. They are the first company to participate in this specific undertaking and they have failed at delivering for Scion. Harding sympathizes with the cynic in writing, ?It?s all well and good to be a patron of the arts, but Virtue?s clients are for-profit companies, not Medicis. By making advertiser-supported content that?s so viral as to appear independent, they blur the lines between the commercial and the creative.?
It is exactly this blurring of commercial and creative that can be analyzed along the lines of Baudrillard?s simulacrum. In Grossberg et al, Baudrillard?s simulacrum is about how ?in the postmodern world, the difference between an image (or code) and reality is no longer important? (Grossberg 61). If we assume that what is ?real? in the case of garage rock music is the creative, authentic music being produced and distributed without corporate sponsorship, we can understand that the garage rock media that is manufactured and distributed by Scion AV are just images to be consumed. This is desired by Scion AV and Vice because the viewer (the consumer) is put in a position of exploring content that might not seem corporate at all since the major components (the bands, the music) are real. If we envision a garage rock Disneyland called Scion AV Garage Land, inside of it, we could easily identify who is important to this genre. The problem is that the very few bands (in the grand scheme of all bands playing this style of music) included in Garage Land have been such as a result of signing an agreement allowing them in. Either the bands that have been excluded from the Land did not want to compromise to Scion?s portrayals of them or they have been deemed unimportant.
Grossberg et al use Jameson?s disappearance of depth as it ?refers to the irrelevance of anything outside of the text? (Grossberg 59). When one looks at a flyer for a Scion Garage Show, the focus is on the bands playing the show. There are small Scion and Vice logos and one is instructed to RSVP on the Scion Garage website. The show is ?Free with RSVP?. That more attention is not given to the corporate side of the equation is intentional. The underlying marketing campaign (the depth) is not to appear important. The free admission, the bands, the venue - these are what truly matter, or so Scion AV wants one to believe. The show is just like any ?real? show, carrying on without a bombardment of advertisements. The artists are able to perform their music in their greatest expression of artistry. That the experience is hardly different is an accomplishment for Scion. After all, they are about consumer engagement and lifestyles, not in-your-face brand promotion.
The Scion Garage lifestyle particularly involves a heavy degree of nostalgia, a ?romanticized longing for the past? (Grossberg). Nostalgia is something affecting both old and young consumers. For the older consumer, nostalgia might involve missing the days of seeing their favorite bands before they started getting old and breaking up. The younger consumer might have been just a kid or not even alive when those bands were active. They might discover the music several years after the fact and perhaps realize that they have missed something special. Scion Garage capitalized on this specifically by making ?two legendary garage rock revivalists from decades past? (to quote Scion?s event description), The Oblivians and The Gories, headlining bands at the 2010 Scion Garage Fest, which additionally featured dozens of other bands. The Oblivians and The Gories were revered in the ?80s and ?90s, at a time well before social media, not to mention widespread internet usage. Back in those days, fans would read zines to stay up to date on their favorite bands and record labels.
Music zines were most popular in the 1970s through the 1990s and were characterized by their small circulation and not-for-profit intention. The Internet decreased the prominence of Zines greatly, but in a longing for the past, Scion resurrected the Zine in the form of a Webzine, featuring the same types of content and appearance as the old Zines, but with several advertisements of the Scion brand. These advertisements linked back to other happenings in the Scion Garage world such as In The Red Radio hosted by the founder of the In The Red label, which has released albums by Black Lips and Davila 666, both of whom had later signed to Vice Music. This radio station, only available by stream on Scion AV, features both the new and old and certainly represents a revival of a media form that has sunk with the prominence of MP3s and podcasts. In The Red Radio, unlike traditional radio, is always available for streaming and it even lets you skip in between songs. This is a modern twist to radio, one that excites both the traditional radio listener and the younger generation interested in exploring the past. Another form of connecting the young with the old and the old with the old is the vinyl record. In fact, music?s most profitable nostalgic physical commodity is the record.
An article by Robert Benson on the Record Collectors Guild website states ?just as there has been a resurgence in the sale and visibility of vinyl records, along with this is an increase in the hobby of vinyl record collecting and album cover art.? It is precisely the collectability factor of records that make them attractive. On the Terminal Boredom message board, a large sub-forum is devoted to new and used vinyl releases, with numerous record swaps and eBay auctions discussed on a daily basis. It is the dedicated consumer of limited edition vinyl that Scion Garage targeted in its own line of exclusive records featuring the likes of highly identifiable bands in the Scion nurtured scene. Scion made these records even more exclusive by only giving them away at Scion sponsored events. Soon after the events, people began selling these records online, as an obvious demand was created in the minds of collectors, limited edition fetishists, and fans who just wanted to hear new music from their favorite bands. Yet again, potential consumers of Scion were being distanced from Scion the major car brand while being brought closer to the garage rock music itself.
Postmodernism, as detailed above, clearly played an important role in shaping the overall marketing message of Scion AV Garage and allowed the brand to cultivate an identity around the consumer of Garage. Also at play in the Scion Garage campaign were the related media making concepts of globalization and ideology. A perusal of the online Scion Garage website results in a disjointed experience that is heavy on audio and visual content, but is quite confusing to navigate. To alleviate the burden of the consumer trying to make sense of everything, Scion Garage premiered a three-part documentary entitled New Garage Explosion!!: In Love With These Times that is an ?examination of the U.S. garage music scene? according to Karl Greenberg in the article ?Scion Music Film Goes Beyond Sponsorship.? Greenberg points out that the film was originally titled The Business of No Business, alluding to the smaller stature of the bands featured and the fact that they ?all have day jobs.? Scion?s head of sales and promotions, Geri Yoshizu, said the company used footage from Scion concerts and minimized product placement using the logic that ?people aren?t going to talk about [the film] if there is blatant product placement. They will talk about it if there is relevant content? (Greenberg).
The ?relevant content? featured in the documentary is a function of globalization. The film positions itself among various garage scenes in Memphis, Detroit, Atlanta, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. Without narration, ?key? figures describe their cities and the music that comes out of it. The connection between the scenes is implied and it becomes evident that garage is not necessarily a style of music as much as it is an ideology. The point of interconnectivity between the garage scenes is Scion Garage. Without Scion Garage, garage scenes operate on a low scale, local paradigm, not dependent on a bigger cause or source of funding, but rather on a network of independent and non-corporate mechanisms.
Boxing bands into the label of ?garage? effectively monetizes and normalizes them into a pseudo mainstream that operates just like the rest of the globalized music industry. The documentary shows scene ?leaders? such as Black Lips and Jay Reatard at the top of the echelon. These bands have connections with the makers of the film; the Black Lips are signed to Vice Music and Jay Reatard?s manager was the former general manager of Vice Records. Their identity with garage is crucial for Scion?s narrative and, as a result, they are on camera more than any other band, performing and being interviewed. To broaden the range of the Garage market, other bands with far less popularity and ?different? appearances are included in the documentary. The situational positioning of these bands is non-musical. The Magic Kids of Memphis (young and idealistic) are interviewed while eating ice cream and hot dogs, Hunx and His Punx of San Francisco (homosexual) are hanging out and working at a hair salon, and a member of Smith Westerns (fashionable and hip) discusses integrity in garage music while walking up the stairwell at his college. All three of these bands were very new to the scene, having only released albums on small local labels. The interpellation, or assigning of non-musical roles with regard to these smaller bands, shows how the documentary enables the dominant ideology of appealing to a wider audience by incorporating a variety of artists in typical situations that fit in with their distinct physical appearances. Bands with personas that lack excitement and peculiarity and bands that come from a smaller market are excluded. As mentioned before, all of the bands featured in the film played at a Scion Garage show, giving the appearance that the only groups that matter in the national garage scene are those intertwined with Scion.
Keeping in mind the efforts of Scion Garage AV, the question is, why did Scion Garage fail? There is no measurement of their failure other than the fact that the last known promotional web material (an album released by Memphis band Reigning Sound) is dated November 1, 2011. Looking at the other AV campaigns undertaken by Scion (metal, dance, and hip hop), there is a constant influx of information that continues up through the present. Pulling the plug on Garage is indicative of a few things for Scion; first, there was not a positive connection between selling cars and promoting Garage. Little money spent on continuous consumer engagement (festivals, shows, records) resulted in monetary return for Scion considering everything was free of charge for the consumer. They tried very hard to commercialize a target audience that is thoroughly devoted to the bands and labels that are constantly performing and releasing music. Obscuring reality, appealing to nostalgia, and attempting to globalize local scenes proved to be worthwhile in the sense that the bands and labels featured have received far more exposure now. Additionally, one label, Burger Records, has emerged as an independent, non-corporate successor to the efforts of Scion Garage.
The larger implications of the marketing of Garage pertain to society as a whole. Today, more so than ever before, niche marketing is ubiquitous. Nothing is free from being bought, sold, and transformed into a global commodity. This is especially worrisome with regard to local, community based creation. The valuable relationships fostered through a community of active, interested participants can so easily be dismantled by individualistic wants and needs. It is unfortunate and all too common that multinational corporations attempt to gain ownership of something that does not belong in the realm of commodity. Even if they appear to ?support the arts? as in the case of Scion, they are still affirming the dominant ideology and it is the dominant ideology of globalization and capitalism that is destroying the spirit of creativity and community culture.
Works Cited
Chang, Richard S. "Living the Life of Scion." New York Times 7 Dec. 2008: 1(L). General OneFile. Web.
"Auto Play." Promo 1 Jan. 2008. General OneFile. Web
Harding, Cortney. "Rock brand: Vice made a name for itself by being gleefully snotty and courting hipsters. Now thanks to its branding agency, Virtue Worldwide, corporate America is courting Vice." Billboard 6 Mar. 2010: 26+. General OneFile. Web.
Greenberg, Karl. "Scion Music Film Goes Beyond Sponsorship." MediaPost 28 Nov. 2010: General OneFile. Web.
Benson, Robert. ?Vinyl Record Collecting, Alive and Well.? Record Collectors Guild. General OneFile. Web
Keyes, J. Edward. ?Discover: Burger Records.? eMusic 23 May. 2013: General OneFile. Web.
Grossberg, Lawrence et al. MediaMaking. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2006. Print.
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Your works cited aren't in alphabetical order.
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I can't wait to read this.
And assign it a letter grade. Christgau would be proud.
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I just skimmed that. May I ask- why no mention of Beyond Marketing? That's the agency responsible for the free concerts, not Virtue. The VICE record label almost exclusively, yes, curates the talent, but the marketing side of things is run by group of people in Los Angeles.
Feel free to message me if you ever have any questions about my experience working for them.
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Hmm, I'm not sure I came across Beyond Marketing in my research. Ya see, researching for this project was pretty different than most things I had ever done. I'm curious about behind the scenes perspectives, but I couldn't find any insightful published works relating to this.. There's that NYT article that was probably the most helpful, as I had previously not realized that there was another group besides Scion and Vice involved.
I came into this with knowledge of the general dissent/cynicism expressed here on TermBo. Then as I delved more into it, I came across official mainstream, corporate branding/lifestyle, no big deal things found in press releases and in major newspapers. I couldn't find anything that explicitly analyzes the two sides of the story. As I sort of hint at in the article, it's hard to objectively tell if Scion Garage failed or what still may be going on behind the scenes.
Also, I kept in mind that my professor and peers have absolutely no idea what any of this is. I'm interested in learning more about this, aside from the mockery and indifference that is easily captured on a message board.
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This is (surprisingly) well-written and on-point. Wouldn't mind seeing you pushing it a bit further, perhaps taking Jackie-O up on her insight into the realm of the Scion Shit Show, as well as elaborating further on your post-modern analysis vis-a-vis Beaudrillard et al (and by et al I mean use some other writers in addition to some other examples from Beaudrillard. Benjamin? De Bord? Barthes?)
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I would guess the Scion experiment is a success, otherwise they would stop doing it. It's a money-making, advertising scheme presented as a "lifestyle". I would e-mail a sales rep and ask for scion sales figures and what could be attributed to the "Garage Rock" aspect of the marketing campaign. This information may be widely available for investors.
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Sometimes I entertain the idea of taking this course in Entrepreneurial Journalism, then I realize that I would have to write shit like this.
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B....................... ...+
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B..........................+
I'd say it's a SUNY "B" or a Columbia "C+."
Kiddo, at a minimum, use SpellCheck next time, and line up your citations with your "works cited." More importantly, if this subject interests you, read Thomas Frank's essays from the nineties so you know what ground has already been covered -- it'll help you understand what the issues are and give shape to your ideas. Don't get too wrapped up in Baudrillard and his idea of the real vs. the simulacrum -- it sounds cool but it's not all that useful in trying to untangle something like the Scion campaign. Try Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism -- it's one of the most important books on the subject, very specific in its examples and quite enjoyable to read.
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There's another problem with the Baudrillard thing. The difference between the image and the thing is important, and that importance is implicit in the inclusion of a debate to whether or not it is important. It should stimulate you to wake up and crack the mirrors of the fun house. There are plenty of stupid people in the world, and plenty of image-makers take them for their herd of sheep and cattle for various purposes. but that doesn't mean that the difference between image and reality is either lost or any less important in any context, at any time, ever, regardless of social conditions and their chickens, eggs, and incubators. Nobody is going to legislate the requirement for all mirrors to be manufactured concavely or convexly in order to assist a moron with his inability to tell the difference between real life and image.
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I'll repeat this here; the bigger picture is about Media (capital M) and models of sustainability through Advertising. VICE and SCION have zero ethical obligation to scene-purists of any genre.
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What are you talking about, now? Who said anything about anything? Is this an indie-rock MBA program?
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I find it hard to believe that vice and scion have no ethos
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apparently it's a writing workshop. so fuckin boring, I wanna stick a fork in my eye. I was only posting a relevant excerpt from a PM conversation addressing the broader ideas behind Klyam's essay. CARRY ON. zzzzzzzzz.
I find it hard to believe that vice and scion have no ethos
I said Ethical Obligation, not Ethos.