I find myself fascinated by the concept of personal branding, particularly in the way that the generations currently aged 15-30 use it in daily life. The term 'personal branding' entered the marketing lexicon a good 30 years ago, but has recently taken on significant clout in the dual worlds of celebrity personal branding and the use of social media networking and marketing as a form of personal branding. Many businesspeople do in fact build their brand online by positioning themselves as 'experts' in a field through carefully aimed personal and professional blogs, social media profiles, topical tweets and more. Their name becomes inseparable from their body of work, and any new project they launch has the power and momentum of their personal brand behind it.
Amanda and I are working through our top 100 songs of the past decade (2000-2009) at the moment, and will be sharing them with you in the near future. This will absolutely be an attempt to build the brand of our blog - through experiencing the songs we choose to brand ourselves with, you will both identify with us ("oh, yeah, I LOVE that song, they have really great taste") and learn to respect us as credible experts ("wow, that song is amazing, I can't believe I've never heard it before, they sure have great taste and I'm lucky they let me read about it"). Win-win, right? In all earnestness, these songs are chosen with the intent to share our favorite tunes with you, but they will also be incorporated into our brand, our image, and so by affiliating ourselves with these songs we can create certain associations and gain credibility. It's not as manipulative as it sounds. If anything, it's unavoidable because of the makeup of the generation to which we (and the majority of our readers) belong.
I believe that there is an unprecedented level of pop culture saturation surrounding persons aged 15-30, with some mild splash effect beyond that. The sheer amount of information and media at our fingertips is staggering, sometimes to the point of being intimidating. Like an actor in that new TV series? Look him up on IMDB, see a couple of films that he's in via Netflix, memorize that director that he loves to work with, and two weeks later you're casually dropping Chiwetel Ejiofor's awesome name in conversation at a party and mentioning his chemistry with director Spike Lee and writer Michael Genet, each of whom he's worked with on two projects (one overlapping), and how you've heard rumors that the three have a new project featuring Mia Wasikowski from Alice In Wonderland (not true... yet). With this amount of information easily available, there comes a burden to be knowledgeable in any area that is a significant part of your personal brand. If you loved Radiohead's The Bends and OK Computer albums, people will look at you askance when you share that you've never actually listened to Kid A or Amnesiac.
The breadth of information and media available also places a stigma on those who simply buy into an existing brand, especially if that brand is seen as sell-out or corporate. Your clothing style had better not just be off the rack from American Eagle and Abercrombie, or even 100% hipster-certified from Urban Outfitters. Vintage stores and boutiques are essential to creating your personal look, if fashion is one of the areas in which you brand yourself. Butt-ugly but ironic is revered over handsome and generic. This phenomenon stretches even farther when it comes to music. The Clear Channel radio conglomerate runs virtually all of the pop, rock and rap music stations in every major American media marketplace. If you fall into this age group and simply take your cues from what "the man" and his market researchers place on the radio, you're regarded as a mindless drone suckling at the teats of the corporate cash cow.
Opportunities to create and share your personal brand are everywhere. My Nalgene waterbottle (a brand I've now associated myself with) is covered with stickers. There is an ACLU Supporter badge, a Threadless tee-shirts sticker, Barack Obama's "Yes We Did" decal, a "Play Ultimate" design and more. These aren't all 'brands' that sell you products, but they do all have conceptual associations that are now part of the personal brand I am projecting. Social networking sites offer you the chance to brand yourself further, especially in regards to pop culture. When Facebook blew up, before the photo albums and events became indispensable and the 'news feed' cloned Twitter's format, it offered you one space to discuss your 'interests' as a general concept and an additional one space each for the three major media types: 'favorite books,' 'favorite movies,' and 'favorite music.' There was still a news feed back then, but this was before you even had a 'status' to update or links to post. The news feed was literally a catch-all of changes that your friends made to their personal profile. The cute guy in your Biology class just updated his favorite movies and he added Love Actually. *Swoon*. Your friend from high school went to a big state university that just now got Facebook, so she finally friended you and apparently she is also in love with that hot new Arcade Fire album, Funeral. Quick, post on her wall about it!
We literally spent time updating our profiles as a way of modifying the personal brand that we were projecting to our peers through our taste in pop culture consumption and our interests, and we read about it every time someone else did the same. That is what Facebook was focused on when it made it big among America's liberal elite college students and began its ascent past MySpace into internet superstardom. They tapped into our subconscious desire to project a 'cool' personal brand, even if we didn't know what exactly we were doing, and we in turn spent our time and energy using their network. I think it truly says something about the extent to which we use pop culture to brand ourselves that we responded better to Facebook (a simple profile form with the aforementioned 'favorite media' focus) than we did to MySpace, which arguably offered far more freedom in terms of personal design of your profile page. You could brand yourself more uniquely on MySpace, but apparently not in the ways we cared about. Disclaimer: I am oversimplifying the Facebook vs. MySpace battle by only discussing it in one category - obviously there were also design elements, elitist status and constantly adapting functions at play, among many other factors.
This train of thought will be continued (and expanded into the realm of interpersonal relationships) in the upcoming part two, but until then I will leave you with two things. First, a pair of dueling quotes selected out of two books/movies from the past decade that deal heavily in matters of pop culture, romance and personal branding. These will inform some of my investigations in the sequel to this post. Second, an attempt to brand myself through music. I won't share with you anything from or since the year 2000 in an effort to save that for our upcoming Top 100 feature. Instead, I've compiled the 20 songs I'd like to brand myself with (and share with you) that were recorded and released prior to the year 2000. This post will receive the first ten (chronologically - I will not attempt to rank these) and the sequel post will contain the latter ten. Enjoy.
Rachel Hansen (500 Days of Summer)
The song that re-defined everything about songwriting and inspired the youth of the era to create a wildly successful namesake magazine.
The band whose sound likely had the most direct influence over the past decade of indie music recorded a clanging beauty with perfect pacing and delicious lyrics about sadomasochism.
The classic rock juggernauts wrote a perfectly timed war protest song that captures everything about the urgent and beautiful terror of the American psyche in the midst of the Vietnam War.
I don't know how many psychedelic drugs it takes to see the dark side of the moon, but Pink Floyd captured some authentic moments of beauty in their eternal quest.
The man who created every indie trope from the 70's aside from punk shows that he damn well could have written that book, too. He veered the opposite way (towards Brian Eno) later in the decade with standout album Low, but he followed his early-70's Ziggy Stardust persona with this pseudo-materialistic gem that milks an absurdly simple riff the Ramones and Buzzcocks spent years trying to replicate.
Bowie got his sticky fingers all over Iggy midway through the decade and, sequestering him away from the Stooges and his various drug issues, in a single year co-wrote and produced The Idiot and Lust for Life, a pair of career-defining albums. From the latter, "The Passenger" is a man's poetic view of a city through the glass, as well as an excellent metaphor for a drug trip.
The quintessential song of the British Punk revolution, The Clash's inclusion of reggae rhythms and riffs lent their take on punk a variability lacking in the straight-ahead cock-rock of the Ramones. Bitter, political lyrics topped off with a ridiculously combustible chorus.
The opening track from Daydream Nation, this blog's quasi-namesake album, and the source for our tagline, "Looking for a ride to your secret location." After a minute and a half of build-up, the riffs take off and lead into an unflinchingly classic indie single, showing that you could use guitar distortion to sketch a fractured take on traditional beauty.
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The single most influential "Alternative" band of all time, The Pixies wrote their perfect album with Doolittle and "Here Comes Your Man" was their proof that creating catchy music is practically effortless. The hook and bridge are as sticky as bubblegum-pop, giving an album of jaggedly perfect riffs and snarling vocals a sweet, grounded center.
The band that defined shoegaze (sorry, Slowdive, my apologies, Ride) created an album of flawless ebb-and-flow out of evanescent, gauzy vocals over washed-out guitars. When you start Loveless, you can't do anything but let it play through, and you'd never think to start it anywhere but opener "Only Shallow," with an inviting squeal of urgency in its siren-like refrain.
To Be Continued...
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