MURKETING

For real?

I was paging through Rolling Stone this morning, and lingered a bit over a where-are-they-now gimmick feature, on various hip hop figures. Among them: Willie D, who was with the Geto Boys when they had the landmark hit, “Mind Playing Tricks on Me.” The Geto Boys, you may recall, were eargly gangsta rappers, with extremely raw raps and a pretty convincing Fifth Ward thug attitude. Anyway, Willie D left the music business a few years ago, took a shot at being a boxer, and today “most of his business concerns revolve around real estate.”

So far, so dull. But here are the specifics: “In 2004, the MC turned entrepreneur made signifcant property investments in the oil-rich republic of Azerbaijan. ‘Azarbaijan ain’t like the USA,’ Willie D says of the country, where he now lives with his wife and children.”

Um, what?

He goes on to say that his new home “took some time getting used to,” for reasons relating to the food and that “you’ll get your ass killed if you talk about the government.” But: “With real estate, it’s all about getting in early.”

Well, I think it’s safe to say he’s gotten in early.

Anyway, some media organization needs to send a writer or a camera crew to Azerbaijan to hang with Willie D. Immediately.

Out

No Consumed column today; I was out. It’ll be back next week.

Potentially interesting books roundup

• Up Is Up But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974–1992, edited by Brandon Stosuy. (Village Voice writeup by Ed Halter.)
• Vintage T-Shirts, by Lisa Kidner and Sam Knee. (Josh Spear brief.)
• The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen. (Keen blog post.)

Then again, maybe they’re all terrible. But each is potentially interesting.

Commodification of headbutt continues …

It started early, and AFP reports that it’s not over:

After the French hit song, the jokes, videos games and adverts, there is now a new face to the most infamous headbutt of all time.

Italian defender Marco Materazzi is to publish a book containing 249 phrases he might have said to France captain Zinedine Zidane to invoke the now-retired midfielder’s wrath.

The book is called “What I really said to Zidane,” and Materazzi has been writing about it in a column on Italian sports newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport’s website.

Product of the Day: “Fire Bible”

From Pick-Me Products: “Open this authentic looking ‘bible’ and begin to share the scripture for the day as real flames are seen coming from your ‘bible.’ This full size book comes with a battery operate ignition system…. Only $44.95!”

Via Elsewares Blog.

The Nietzsche Family Circus

“The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote.” Here it is. Seconds of pleasure, I assure you.

[Via a blog called Happiness And Public Policy.]

RBK X S-JO

Reebok is a really strange brand. I honestly have no idea what its marketers are trying to do. They’ve associated Reebok with Jay-Z and 50 Cent, with Basquiat, with Nigo (sort of, via that whole Ice Cream thing), and from time to time with athletes.

And now? Scarlett Johansson!

“The actress has joined with the Canton, Mass., athletic giant to design and market an athletic-inspired sportswear and footwear line called “Scarlett [Hearts] Rbk,” says WWD.

Johansson’s line with Reebok will be a lifestyle collection inspired by activewear. Exact looks for the collection have not been made final, but both sides describe the pieces as “fashion forward” as well as retro; retro sneakers and cotton T-shirts will be featured.

“I like to do yoga and stretch out, so we will probably do a bunch of stuff for that,” Johansson told WWD. “Things you can wear to the yoga studio and then to coffee with your friends” — with the emphasis on the coffee part. “I like the idea of exercise and aerobics being glamorous: Olivia Newton John and women exercising in false eyelashes,” she added.

Oh. Okay.

Does your customer-service rep know who Barbie’s boyfriend is?

From an interesting Wall Street Journal story about locating “call centers” in other countries, but making sure the workers there are up on U.S. pop culture:

With more U.S. businesses opening call centers overseas, executives want reassurance that foreign employees will thrive under U.S. managers — and more importantly, get along with demanding U.S. customers. For these companies, cultural compatibility has become as important as labor availability and tax incentives….

A decade ago, big U.S. companies started hiring staff in low-wage countries like India to perform back-office work and clerical tasks. While India, with its highly educated, English-speaking work force, still attracts most of the call-center business, countries like the Philippines, Mexico, Canada and Ireland increasingly are destinations of choice for jobs that require customer contact, such as product support, hotel reservations and bill collection. For executives, matching a country with certain jobs has become a crucial task.

For some call-center companies, the perfect match means an in-depth knowledge of American popular culture. “I’m looking for people who already know that Barbie’s boyfriend is Ken,” [a call-center company exec] says….

Out

No column this week. Back next Sunday.

Archival Consumed: Sticky Success

[ Splenda ]

Sugar is one of those commodities that seem so commonplace that it is hard to imagine their absence. This was not always so: it was once a rare luxury, but a few hundred years of globalization and industrialization, plus some colonization and slavery, helped change that. Not that there weren’t always critics, of course. ”Sugar hath now succeeded honie,” the author of one quasi-medical book wrote in 1633, ”and is become of farre higher esteem, and is far more pleasing to the palat” — before questioning the view, not uncommon at the time, that sugar had medicinal properties and charging that it ”heateth the blood” and ”rotteth the teeth,” among other things. Several centuries on, of course, sugar is something that many people try to cut back on, or eliminate from their diets altogether. But sweetness is something few can do without, which means that there has been a vigorous market for sugar substitutes, from Sweet ‘N Low to Equal to, more recently, Splenda.
Read more

Archival Consumed: Chavs

In Elizabethan England, there were sumptuary laws to prevent members of the rabble from dressing above their station. This was never really effective, but to understand how truly futile it is these days for the upper classes to try keeping the masses in their sartorial place, you need to know what a chav is. ”Chav” — the champion buzzword of 2004 in Britain, according to one language maven there — refers to something between a subculture and a social class. Experts disagree about the slang term’s origins, but the unofficial definition sounds rather condescending or even cruel: a clueless suburbanite with appalling taste and a tendency toward track suits and loud jewelry. Still, as with ”redneck” in America, a term that is imposed as a marker of scorn can be embraced as a marker of pride; at the very least, a certain humor and irony lace many of the discussions about chavs on Web sites and in books like ”Chav! A User’s Guide to Britain’s New Ruling Class.” Read more