Starbucks: Selling Out the Counter-Culture? by Michael Hoover
"Hip capital" . . . "Rebel consumers" . . . "Conquest of cool" . . . "Bobos [bourgeois bohemians] in paradise!" Such are the terms used by social critics to ironically sum up the marketing of the counter- culture, a phenomenon that is commonly exemplified by the reduction of one-time "anti-establishment" anthems to a seemingly endless string of commercial soundtracks. While some observers decry the iconography of the "protest generation" falling into the hands of "the enemy" and bemoan the betrayal of another idol from their youth, others suggest that "the Sixties" was essentially an advertising gimmick and maintain that "boomers" are, and always were, hypocrites. Neither outrage nor cynicism, however, helps us understand the past or the present.
Consider the case of Starbucks, a pacesetter in trendy consumption eliciting both scorn and wonder, from Thomas Frank (on "the left") pointing to the peace symbols that once adorned the walls and windows of its coffee stores to David Brooks (on "the right") alluding to the difficulty of telling apart the "espresso-sipping artist" and the "cappuccino-gulping banker” that frequent every location. . . .
FULL TEXT: <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/hoover270705.html>
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org> * Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/mahmoud- ahmadinejads-face.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/chvez- congratulates-ahmadinejad.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/ 2005/06/iranian-working-class-rejects.html>