The Baffler

...The Baffler plays similar games with a press packet from the Quaker Oats company...

...The rising "information" industries—described here variously as "the Culture Trust," the "artisticocommercial complex," and the "spectaclist regime"—have captured and defined our collective culture...

...but it almost never discusses the pleasures and meanings this music's audience takes from it...

...Perhaps this is because a close scrutiny of these questions might puncture another of the Baffler's central beliefs: that there is a clear and useful distinction between independently-distributed punk rock (the best of which embodies "an aesthetic of genuine dissent" and is "the scream of torment that is this country's only mark of health") and corporate-distributed "alternative rock," which is fraudulent and co-opted...

...Here's hoping that issue number seven is an omen of better things to come...

...But the Baffler sees an insidious power in the cartoon: Thus the business of defining the public mind in our unhappy land: if this lifestyle didn't exist already, it will soon, complete with all the accessories Quaker has designated for it...

...but far from creating a "granola lifestyle," Quaker is clumsily laying its finger on trends that are at least two decades old...

...But as its advertisement correctly notes, the Baffler is also partly designed as an heir to the Masses...

...it's heartbreaking to see them employed in the service of such half-baked arguments...

...This is terrific, I thought—it may not go down in the annals with The Jungle, but "The Problem With Music" exposes an industry's follies and misdeeds with a witty, unpretentious anger rarely heard on the left these days...

...The Baffler gives these concerns their due, but it also goes further, into a vulgar structuralism that suggests that the Culture Trust actually dictates—not just exploits and amplifies—every facet of popular culture...

...The Baffler implicitly argues that we could address these questions more effectively if we paid more attention to the larger fabric of our culture—to the ways in which the mass media have shaped the public imagination...

...We might then read it as the product of a hypercynical, Menckensonian older brother—someone interested strictly in keeping us honest, in debunking our stupid and sentimental impulses...

...As it points out, if you want to understand who rulesAmerica you need to read not only National Review but also tomes like management consultant Tom Peters's The Pursuit of Wow...

...We do so sparingly, and we screen their material carefully before granting our permission...

...As Baffler editor-in-chief Tom Frank puts it in an essay called "Why Johnny Can't Dissent," When the twentieth century opened business was only one power among many, economically and culturally speaking...

...others have trumpeted "Edge Cities" (areas like the computer-industry corridor on Route 128 outside Boston) as the future of urban community...

...but there is a problem, a serious one, with the magazine's project as a whole...

...Some thinkers (including Newt Gingrich) have cheerily predicted that the Internet will render cities obsolete...

...When he says that major-label contracts are rigged to enrich everyone but the musicians, he gives us the math—a two-page balance sheet—that explains how...

...We have lost qualities and resources essential for imagining and defending a just society—patience, community networks, historical memory...

...There are several things wrong with this framework, but I want to focus on just one of them...

...elsewhere, as when it denounces the uses of nostalgia in consumer culture, it echoes Christopher Lasch...

...Despite all the praise, the Baffler has had distribution problems and isn't easy to find...

...the cartoonish postures may be what makes postpunk useful to the culture of advertising, but that doesn't mean that the music's more genuinely rebellious meanings have been absolutely bleached away...

...The magazine's strongest accomplishment is issue number seven, "The City in the Age of Information," published in late 1995...

...It's not hard to see why the Baffler has drawn so much attention—the complete package has a rare energy and wit...

...I wondered: why aren't there more public voices like this...

...Although several of the bands in question are self-consciously "political," the Baffler declares that the only messages they transmit to their large audiences are those of vacuous rebellion, "cartoonish postures of sullen angst or teen frustration...

...The Problem With Music" turned out to be as good as its reputation...

...It is to suggest that the Baffler's creators have chosen a too-easy method of understanding the "cooptation" of the music they love most...

...receiving all of our news through the filters of six or seven companies can't be healthy for democracy...

...After bringing these wretched cultural products before us, however, the Baffler employs them to buttress an odd mixture of uncompelling arguments about our political and social crisis...

...Now, anyone who hasn't swallowed Marcuse whole would see this packet as the pathetic result of a marketing manager's wasted afternoon...

...every item in Powers's sentence—from the art of Pearl Jam and Toni Morrison to contemporary environmentalist politics—is deeply imperfect and deserves our sharpest skepticism and criticism...

...But the Baffler's particular analyses of mass culture are generally too shrill and simplistic to be useful...

...When he discusses smug, obnoxious music industry personnel, he's talking about specific people, and he names them...

...While it might mistreat workers, break unions, bribe editors, and buy congressmen, its larger claims and authority were limited by an array of countervailing powers...

...When I finally stumbled onto a copy in early 1994, I turned straight to the much-celebrated essay "The Problem With Music," an eight-page rant against the rock industry by the guitarist and recording engineer Steve Albini...

...Driving across the George Washington Bridge into the Edge City of Fort Lee, N.J., one faces A Note to Our Subscribers Dissent occasionally allows other magazines and organizations to mail promotional letters to our subscribers...

...At a moment when business is consolidating its power in Washington, astonishingly few people are raising their voices in mistrust or anger...

...Tom Vanderbilt's essay on Edge Cities illustrates how well the Baffler at its best weaves together political and cultural criticism: [W]hat Edge City boils down to is not only an economic and cultural distancing from people of a different race and class, but a purposeful withdrawal from involvement in and responsibility for the greater politic of the city...

...This is silly...

...The packet purports to describe an emerging demographic group, "granolas," who are the central target market for Quaker Chewy Granola Bars...

...All this attention has placed a burden of high expectations on the eightyearold Baffler...

...This is certainly true...

...how to rebuild faith in egalitarianism and public institutions...

...It's been profiled and praised in dozens of places, including the New Yorker, the Nation, Lingua Franca, and the Toronto Star, which called it "the smartest and most exciting magazine in America...

...Several of issue number seven's essays are excellent...

...As its own promotional material humbly puts it, "The Baffler is turning out to be to the American 1990s what The American Mercury was to the 1920s or The Masses was to the teens...

...So the magazine sells indie rock, and several of its writers are members of indie rock bands...

...Regardless of its origins, this is the vocabulary the masters of Hip have decreed you will use, and they're not about to back down now...

...fiction (including the ongoing tale of the skilledbutanxious lifestyle consumer Gedney Market), and an advice column called "Semiotics Mailbag...

...We drift instead in a consumerist haze of "lifestyle choices" defined by the advertising industry and its handmaidens in the Culture Trust...

...In Edge City, the architecture perfectly embodies this principle of detachment...

...In 1993, the Baffler played a role in exposing the "Great Grunge Prank," in which gullible journalists from London and New York, dispatched to profile the socalled Seattle grunge scene, were duped into reporting that nonexistent slang terms—including "wack slacks," "cob nobbler," and "swingin' on the flippity-flop"—are the mark of the authentic 106 • DISSENT Magazines West Coast hipster...

...One of the magazine's favorite targets is cultural studies Pollyannas—academics who suggest that popular culture is the central engine of human liberation and political resistance...

...But you knew that already: for the last few years, the buzz surrounding the magazine has been difficult to miss...

...Quaker may be helping to commodify a subculture and render it banal...

...As tourism replaces manufacturing as the foundation of urban economies, downtowns are being reconceived as glibly commercialized "historic districts" along the lines of New York's South Street Seaport...

...The ferocity and clarity of the Baffler's prose are rare and valuable...

...Nor is it to suggest that institutions of the self-identified left should spend more energy creating or celebrating agitpop...

...The Culture Trust plays this sort of catch-up all the time...

...But upon close inspection it appears that the Baffler sustains this tone only by sidestepping or ignoring the questions that have put the rest of the left press in a worried and chastened mood: how to define and fight for racial and gender justice...

...Counterposing heroic independent punk rebels against demonically powerful major labels involves its own kind of posturing...

...Please raise your hand if you believe teenagers in Budapest today are calling each other "cob nobblers...

...Here the Baffler dissects contemporary elites' notions of public space and the city...

...Let's grant the Baffler's claim that the postpunk bands that have made the leap to major labels and mass popularity are uniformly "watery, derivative, and second-rate...

...The expensivelooking mailing we received undoubtedly cost a thousand times what the Baffler will run, and its words will undoubtedly have a thousand times the effectiveness...

...The Baffler is doing a good service by steering our attention toward the worst banalities and lies of contemporary advertising and business culture...

...Where the cultural studies Pollyannas attribute too much power to cultural consumers, the Baffler makes the opposite error: consumers hardly ever appear here, except as passive objects of the Culture Trust's designs, waiting to be taught to say "cob nobbler...

...The Bafflerites are not strictly debunkers, but people who believe in the possibility and urgency of rebuilding an effective radical politics—once the detritus of the advertising culture has been cleared away...

...The Baffler's account of all this is hilarious, but it ends with the following earnest prediction, which in its own way is as naive as anything written by the reporters in question: As anyone knows who has actually spent any time in indie rock or ever been to a show in Seattle, no one actually uses these expressions...

...we will be able to achieve no distance from business culture since we will no longer have a life, a history, a consciousness apart from it...

...It does not require a rosy sentimental view of any past period to recognize that today there are no such countervailing forces...

...One of the magazine's most attractive aspects is its tone of rage...

...Where most punk manifestos are moralistic and rhetorical, Albini is hilariously exact and concrete...

...Let's begin with the Baffler's portrait of its central villains—the handful of multinational corporations who make up the Culture Trust...

...Even the lamest expressions of corporate-level "alternative culture" do sometimes stir their audiences...

...It is in this respect that the Baffler's obsession with the Culture Trust begins to look like a gigantic evasive maneuver...

...The Baffler's various rhetorical excesses might be forgivable if the magazine were conceived squarely in the tradition of the American Mercury...

...As I read further, I saw that the Baffler's creators are obsessed by this very question...

...But you can be certain they will soon . . . although kids in Seattle may never actually say things like "Harsh Realm" and "Big Bag of Bloatation," their peers and their parents will, all over Europe and America...

...q 108 • DISSENT...

...There are plenty of valid reasons to be alarmed by the consolidation of the media industries...

...It includes a cartoon drawing of a happy granola couple and their allegedly typical lifestyle accessories: "environmentally sympathetic cosmetics," "mountain spring-fed water," "rag wool socks," and so on...

...As Frank argues, "Denunciation is becoming impossible...

...what kinds of responsibilities to entrust to the state...

...But if you would prefer not to receive such mail, please drop us a note at Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, Suite 1700, New York, N.Y, 10017...

...As Ann Powers wrote in the Village Voice last year, "[Difficult] to prove, but nonetheless traceable, is the path that leads from being a Pearl Jam fan to volunteering at a center for child abuse victims, or from frequenting the Body Shop to becoming an environmentalist, or from reading a Toni Morrison novel to organizing against racist poliSPRING • 1996 • 107 Magazines cies in your local school district" This is not to say that all's well with the world...

...Unfortunately, the Baffler is usually not at its best...

...At times, as when it says that SPRING • 1996 • 105 Magazines the culture industry "[teaches us] to be good citizens" and "[brings us] warmly into the consumer fold," the Baffler recalls the Frankfurt School...

...The Baffler has a story to tell about how we have reached this point...

...Fair enough...

...it's the only journal that captures the way I feel when I read the newspaper in the morning...

...but mass-culture skepticism on the left has its own traditions of overheated and incoherent claims, and at various times the Cassandras at the Baffler have endorsed too many of these...

...The magazine puts all of this forward in polemical essays, pranks (an investment profile of a firm called "Consolidated Deviance, Inc...

...Al this cynicism sits uneasily next to the Baffler's advertising—the full-page ads taken in every recent issue by independent and semi-independent record labels to promote postpunk luminaries like Pavement, Yo La Tengo, and Liz Phair...

...In advancing this argument the Baffler draws on several traditions of left-wing skepticism toward mass culture...

...straightaway the intimidating specter of defensible corporate space: the dull-metallic reflective armor of one tower sits atop on its own stacked parking garage, a fortress unto itself...

...One example among many: rap music's popularity and profitability were established on small independent labels for several years before major corporations began to invest in it...

...while nearby another building—resembling a vertical ice cube tray— looms like a violent and alien blemish on the landscape...