[lbo-talk] Corporate Porn to Kids

[Curtiss Leung]

> 3. The product actually is destructive of childhood, and is
_intentionally
> and planned_ to be so.  The marketing strategy is to make late
adolescence
> seem like Nirvana, and to draw everybody, including 11-year-olds, into
> aspiring to it, which, of course, requires purchase of its
accoutrements and
> replication of its supposedly authentic attitudes.
> 
> 4. Rock 'n' roll is largely about freedom and individuality and
pleasure.
> MTV Spring Break is a means of behavioral programming.

Somewhere (in _Minima Moralia_ I think) Adorno writes disparagingly of
"sex taken as exercise."  I haven't seen the MTV Spring Break
programming
for some time (and can't get to the page through the proxy server here 
at work), but it seems to go even further: to make sexual appeal and
sexual
activity into a *prerequiste* to a certain style of consumerism.

Adolescence in the US is bad enough without having a normative policy
for 
teenage rebellion.

Yes, yes, Adorno is supposed to be a terrible bad guy and not to be 
taken seriously on popular culture because he didn't like jazz.  I think
he may have hit close to the bone than some can bear.

Curtiss, in an unusually foul mood