Sharks, skulls and coke

[imomus]

The sneering skull snorts a huge line of coke into her broken nose then turns to you. "I'm going to kill you," she growls.

That's a reductio ad absurdum of the iconography I pick up from a single edition of sharky UK style magazine Dazed and Confused, a magazine which recycles fashion-punk attitude endlessly. Publisher: Jefferson Hack, ex-partner of Kate Moss, the model currently forced into a big public mea culpa over her coke habit. (Personally, I'm with Tracey Emin on the issue. Coke sucks.)

I call this "sharky style", and the West is full of it. It's how we picture ourselves. We have sharky cars, sharky watches, sharky bands, sharky sports stars, sharky buildings, sharky white teeth (even when sharky tobacco companies are selling us cigarettes that first yellow our teeth then leave us dead in the water, static in a cloud of blood). They're all fit, these sharks, in the Darwinian sense. They kill their competitors. They're likely to kill you too... unless you can make yourself look and act like them!

The reasons the sharky style attitude (sneers, skulls, coke, killing) is so prevalent in the West (and just how much further can it go? Style mags filled entirely with bloody-toothed sharks? What if sharks become extinct and look like losers?) are various:

1. It's cool to kill: Yeeh-hah! It's very hard, confronted by someone who's threatening to kill you, to assert that they're trivial or uncool or a loser, just as it's hard not to admire an actor waving a pistol in a Hollywood poster. A sneer, a threat or a pistol transforms a model or an actor instantly from a passive, plaintive object, vulnerable and desperate for our approval, to a powerful subject, indifferent to our cries for mercy, not only genetically superior to us (and therefore more fit to reproduce) but on the verge, here and now, of snuffing out our DNA with a single shot to the head.

2. Empowerment: A woman can never be a sexual object when she's about to kill you, even if she's naked. A working class or black youth never looks like a sad victim, ready for a visit from a social worker, if he's pointing a gun at your head. Violent imagery is empowerment, innit? Like those killer-girls in "Baise Moi!", women too can be rapist-murderers, and all's right with the world! Instant justice from the barrel of a gun! A level swimming pool for all sharks, regardless of race, colour, gender or creed!

Actors, models and musicians are, of course, all a bit gay and girly to be "just about to snuff out our DNA". But it's the nerd's revenge, isn't it? No wonder it takes its inspiration from punk; who could be more nerdy than Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious? I mean, they were more like minnows than sharks, weren't they? Yet one of them, sharked up by drugs, turned out to be a real killer.

3. Drugs as a metaphor for consumerism: That great long line of coke the skull is snorting... it's a metaphor for the addictiveness of the consumer end of capitalism, just as the skull is a metaphor for the murderousness of the producer end of capitalism. You're not supposed to enjoy consumer societies. That would lead to widespread epicureanism, to wholesomeness, to health. No, plethora is supposed to lead to addiction, to guilty pleasures, to sin, to death. At the production end, well, if you get in the way of the producers you'll be disposed of, your body dumped in a quarry in Columbia. One human life doesn't matter much, my friend. If you're at the consumption end, your duty is to get addicted to the product, to buy it reliably, and to die promptly, without placing too much strain on the social health network of your state (if it has one).

And meanwhile, your style sharkiness is just for show because it's a metaphor for the real sharks, the ones on the floor of the brokerage, the ones in business suits, the ones with the power for which "empowerment" is a mere metaphor, a bit of fancy dress. Yes, the middle-aged, balding men in suits are the real sharks. They don't look like sharks themselves, though. They look more like elderly pigs or walruses.

"Dazed and Confused has found innovative ways to present brands to a uniquely influential readership that demands to be addressed on its own terms," waffles the Dazed and Confused press-pack. "Dazed has translated the following blue chip brands for the style audience: Coca Cola, Nike, Evian, Converse, Motorola, Canon, Hilfiger, Tiger Beer, Topshop... to name only a few."

"Demands, translated". The "style subculture" who read Dazed speak a different language from the language of capitalism (or at least some heavily-accented dialect) and therefore "demand translation". Once translation occurs (largely a process in which dominant values become visual metaphors in the subculture, because the subculture doesn't tend to read much), the basic concepts of the mainstream culture can appear, quite unchallenged, in the subculture.

The thing that interests me is this: not all social systems model themselves on Darwinism, and not all style mags require everybody to look and act like a shark. In fact, it sometimes seems like only the Anglo-American model does these things. There is nothing inherent in systems of production that demands shark-like imagery, or "empowerment" through skulls, sharks, and snorting.

Yes, you guessed it, I'm about to tell you that Japanese magazines have peaceful nature imagery, and unashamedly feminine women (the women of the future!) and reassuring pictures of cakes and cafes instead of skulls, sneers, and coke. That Japanese capitalism seems to be a production system with less viciousness and vulgarity than any other. Well, not quite. I'm going to show you.

Comments

[besskeloid.livejournal.com]

who could be more nerdy than Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious? I mean, they were more like minnows than sharks, weren't they? Yet one of them, sharked up by drugs, turned out to be a real killer.

How real a killer, tho'? Apparently Sid was so smacked out that night that he was in no fit state to have stabbed anybody, let alone Nancy. It's most likely that the person who stole money from their room at the Chelsea was the culprit.

Bernard Manning

[(Anonymous)]

Did anyone watch "Extreme televison" on channel 4 last night?

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Is "sharky style" the same as "fashion goth"?

Btw, IMHO, cocaine killed the indie subculture, by sharking it up. The indie kids started doing coke, listening to thugged-out hip-hop, wearing aspirational designer sneakers and trucker hats and fuckloads of skulls on everything and affecting a sort of sneering macho irony.

[(Anonymous)]

You sure don't seem to read a lot of Japanese magazines, and not a lot of English ones either. The great majority of magazines are not Heroine chic fashion rags. And there are plenty of those in Japan, perhaps more than anywhere else. At lease in the nordic country the vast majority of magazines are full of those "unashamedly feminine women" to the point of choking. We definitely don't need more of them making people dress their daughters up as princesses and their sons as knights.

Not that they should necessarily be substituted by gun toting drug fiends.

[sarmoung.livejournal.com]

You could be with my mum rather than Tracey Emin. We were talking over the Kate Moss issue at lunch the other day and I can assure you that nobody has ever taken coke at any of my mum's parties and she wouldn't stand for it either. They might be a little more sedate than your standard EC2 event but you'd be home by midnight to feed the rabbit.

Can we take it from this piece means that you have severed all ties with Vice magazine?

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

> cocaine killed the indie subculture
Coke and E, possibly - both brought to the party by the dance music community. They gave 'indie' got a whole new lease of life at the turn of the 90s before going on to kill it a few years later.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

From the pictures it looks like you're comparing "Dazed & Confused" with the Japanese equivalent of "Woman's Weekly".

[besskeloid.livejournal.com]

'Screamadelica' was tripe then & it's tripe now.

[henryperri.livejournal.com]

Agreed. This wasn't one of his strongest arguments.

[dermfitz.livejournal.com]

"Japanese magazines" vs "Dazed and Confused"... It's a fair comparison if you have a weak point to make! Leave the man alone.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

Maybe, but influential (at the time) tripe.

Then you've got the all the Madchester and early Britpop bands (Blur, Pulp, Saint Etienne). All influential at the time as well, if horribly out of fashion now. Personally I prefer nineties Coke & Eccies music to nineties smack music.

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

This article (http://economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=953529), a review by the Economist magazine of a study on social status in monkeys and tendency towards cocaine addiction, seems to provide strong evidence against their usual libertarian policy on the de-regulation of "recreational" drugs. Either that or a useful datum for social darwinists.

I clearly remember having an argument with a bozo in a bar who took this article as irrefutable proof for his idea that it is possible to snort a bit of cocaine now and then and not get addicted. He was completely wasted at the time, making a show of ordering stupidly expenive shots of tequila. Ugh!

Why aren't we hearing more about the huge and growing crystal meth problem? Could it be a class thing?

[besskeloid.livejournal.com]

influential (at the time) tripe.

Influential on the Soup Dragons.

[(Anonymous)]

Is "sharky style" the same as "fashion goth"?

In a word: yes.

Derrida Jr. strikes again (and again and again and and again and again...)

[a-silence-song.livejournal.com]

momus, you rule. may I add you?

[turkishb.livejournal.com]

I have to agree with the others in noting that your pool of examples is, perhaps, a bit misleading. I do agree --to a certain extent-- that the aesthetic of couture magazines are different from Japan to America. Japan often does having "nature" present, calm neutral tones, and cheerful models.

But I'd suggest another lens in examing this difference (and excuse me for being Jungian) but what of the Woman/girl difference? I'm not using this in the qualitative sense I usually do (in terms of Mother/nonmother) but rather the sexual maturity of the subject.

In American chic the girls are Women. They are as vicious and mired as the Great Mother, but terrifying because they have usurped paternal power (guns, etc) while rendering themselves girlishly barren (as thin as Schiele's models!). This effects a sort of...the Great Mother is aborting you, you little shit. She could take your sperm, if they were fucking worthy of her.

On the other side you have these very passive "feminine" as you denoted girls in Japanese couture. These are Women who are girls. They are submissive to the paternal, and if you forced them they'd probably take your sperm. They are frivolous but not necessarily infertile.

The big cut here I'd say is the Gothic/Gothic Lolita thing. You've mentioned fashion Goth & your hatred for it -- and that Gothic Lolita is different. But you've left the difference unexamined. Isn't it relevant to talk about this "Lolita" which gives these two cultures (aesthetically often the same -- black, frills, formal) such an elemental difference in validity?

[(Anonymous)]

This morning in the paper there was an article on how a local black guy committed a crime. I've always been suspicious of blacks, and then along came this article to reinforce my beliefs.

White people, on the other hand, seem to be a racial grouping with less viciousness and vulgarity than any other.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Vice is a much more intelligent magazine than Dazed and Confused. They tackle this sort of thing head on with satire that picks at ideological knots. Take Hammerheads My Ass: Fuck Darwin! (http://viceland.com/issues/v12n7/htdocs/hammerheads.php) from the current edition, the Animals edition. It's tackling the shark/Darwinism rubbish head-on. The article goes:

"I’m not saying that Darwin was utterly wrong. I’m just saying that Darwin was only part of the story—like 50 percent of the picture.... With a hammerhead or a spoonbill or any kind of animal that seems to be an extreme example of what you can do with anatomy or morphology, the question isn’t, “What is the function of these structures?” It’s more like, “What were the mechanisms through which these structures came about, and how did these structures become an advantage?” ...let’s not ignore the sheer randomness that makes animals look so fucking weird. Sometimes they come in handy and sometimes they’re just a genetic fuck-up."

[turkishb.livejournal.com]

An interesting article, but I have a question about the experiment itself. It notes that the D2 is a product of dominance (and then the product feeds into addiction habits) but it doen't make any claim of where the dominance came from in the first place. If the D2 is a product, what is its input? Is that input perhaps what we'd term the "biologically deterministic" part of this equation?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Welcome!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But I think the Japanese feminine stereotype is not just the child image, there's also a strong strand of mother-worship in Japanese culture. Amateru the sun goddess is the mother of all mothers, and Japanese men are said to be spoiled by their mothers and then have a mother-complex attitude towards their wives (who traditionally control the domestic purse). It's called Mazacon (a Japanization of "mother complex"), and it co-exists with Lolicon, the Lolita complex.

In my (necessarily selective) picture strips a Western is demonstrating power by holding a scythe, a Japanese woman is demonstrating power by holding a ladle. Death power versus life power.

[henryperri.livejournal.com]

I, too, am surprised to see this article in the Economist. Usually it's liberals who make the argument that people (particularly the poor) are unable to make decisions themselves or control their own impulses (hence the need for government intervention in many facets of life). What this article fails to touch on is whether or not those who are "dominant" (i.e. successful people) are less likely to fall into deep addiction because they also tend to make better decisions, have more to lose, and have a greater social network of support.

[turkishb.livejournal.com]

This would be excellent if you demonstrated the ladle. Where are these domestic wives, these Mazaconian Women? I see only girls... :/

Have you read Hayao Kawai's work on the Japanese culture's position on women? http://www.daimon.ch/Kawai4.htm He offers a somewhat oppositional yet supplementary argument in his section "Bodies in the Dream Diary of Myôe." I'd be interested what your thoughts on that are.

I could paraphrase, but I worry I'd do it poorly.

Here's a good quote from a good examination of it:

One of Kawai's most surprising claims is that the Japanese ego is "feminine." (The Japanese Psyche p. 16). To Jungian ears this seems a hard saying. Can there be that much difference in humans because of cultural experience? Although many today would like to drop the gender tag on any psychic quality, much credence is still given to Erich Neumann's theory of the evolution of consciousness (The Origins and History of Consciousness. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954) in which the ego (center of consciousness) develops along the lines of the hero myth, and is represented by a male figure (essentially "masculine," whether in male or female).

http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=165&Itemid=40

Is that more of what you're getting at? :)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There are some interesting links here:

Alan McGee - Bobby Gillespie
Bobby Gillespie - Kate Moss
Kate Moss - Pete Docherty
Pete Docherty - Alan McGee

And of course there's the Kate Moss - Jefferson Hack link tying Dazed and Confused in with it all.

[turkishb.livejournal.com]

A few more good Kawai or Kawai related links:

http://www.daimon.ch/3856305440_2E.htm
http://www.geocities.co.jp/Berkeley/3508/torikaebaya.html
http://www.cgjungny.org/quadrant_past.html (review in Volume XXVII, No. 2, Summer 1997)