This one's for Scott: the marketing firm Lucien James has released a report on the use of brandnames in Top 40 music, particularly hip-hop. Titled "American Brandstand," the summary is filled with striking tidbits -- Of the 111 songs in the Billboard Top 20, 43 had brands in the lyrics -- and some perceptive analysis of the economic and social purposes such name-dropping serves in American culture. Plus it contains the following insight, the academic tone of which is just endlessly amusing: "Similarly, when 50 Cent talks about taking a woman he has just met back to the Ramada Inn, it's fairly clear that the focus of their evening is going to be different from the evening he would have evoked if he'd taken her to, say, the Four Seasons." Ah, yes indeed.
Posted by mesh at December 29, 2003 03:01 PM | TrackBackWhat a fascinating article. I had never thought about the relationship between branding and hip-hop, even though branding is all over hip-hop in a way that it's really not in any other kind of pop or rock music. This was an interesting explanation of that I thought:
Hip-hop is the perfect medium to register the relevance of contemporary brands. Hip-hop and rap have always been about the here-and-now, rather than rock and pop songs, which typically focus on eternal themes of love and loss.
Posted by: scott cunningham at December 30, 2003 04:39 PMMesh: Totally unrelated, but I don't have your email address. Interesting analysis of Royal Tenenbaums that I thought you might enjoy.
http://www.barlowfarms.com/index.html?cm_id=1866780
Posted by: scott cunningham at December 31, 2003 04:19 PM