and now for some insults

So I keep getting these crappy emails from ADvice marketing. (They send me CDs, some of them quite good ones, but they want me to send back forms filled out with questions like "Does the Bloc Party rock your world? How many times a day do you play it at your place of work?". So yes, free CDs are nice, but being a marketing aid doesn't make it worth it, it just makes me hate VICE) ) So- there have clearly been enough people who caught up in VICE that it's crossed over the credibility boundry. Like Altamont or whatever that festival was where Mick Jagger shot a black man, or no, a black man may have tried to shoot Mick Jagger and was stabbed by the Hells Angels. Either way, Mick Jagger is horrible and anything good that may have come from the hippie movement was destroyed with Altamont. It was the 'nail in coffin'. The hippies had become fashion and once it was the in thing for people you had a bunch of assholes who just wanted to do drugs and rape women who actually started to believe that they were hippies too. And they were actually because being a hippie had become a fashion statement of 'fitting in'. So Advice can be the Altamont of whatever Vice may have done to sort of liberate people who were flooded with media representations of themselves provided by the same fuckers who get Mick Jagger to be the half time show at the Superbowl.

That should sort of make sense. Someone wanted the bar to start doing these Advice parties and part of me thought "oh great I can be part of that cool world of people with good fashion sense who live in New York" but then actually I just thought that they wanted some free marketing. So I said no. They drop off magazines at the bar now, and that's pretty good because the magazine is still interesting. It's lazy, smart and blunt so it can be pretty funny. The sad thing though is that Vice is 'geared to 18-25 year olds'. Just like NewAd media claims to be. So because of that companies can buy you through your loyalty to VICE. In the last email I got there was a link to this:

http://www.viceland.com/kokanee/

Go look at it. All those really very nice smart people doing their best to try and be like the VICE Dos section while actually being in a 'rad person' party ad for Kokanee. It makes me want to cry. But in the end with Vice buying and selling youth culture it gives people another opportunity to find something else. It's sad to see the juggranaut fall though becuase I think I might be too old now to know what that new thing will be so all I'm left with is horrible horrible adVICE.

Vice wanted to have a Franz Ferdinand CD release party at the bar too, but all they did was send us one advance CD of Franz Ferdinand a bunch of Franz Ferdinand stickers and little indie rocker stupid fucking buttons, that are only stupid because now a major label is using them to sell more Fraz Ferdinand shit. Ah fuck. I'm sure it makes sense. It's frustrating to see marketing at work and it makes me like things less. Like the South Park where the kids are into Pokemon, but actually it's a Japanese plot to take over the world. The parents eventually figure out that the only way to make the kids not like Pokemon is to like it themselves. I don't know what deal vice worked out and what they're getting paid for doing this, but they are ruining my love of Pokemon and I find it very sad becuase I kind of wanted to love the people with the little buttons who listened to Fraz Ferdinand, but now I can see the end is near and that there is nothing left to it but the fashion of fitting in. Well, maybe the end is not too near. I think it will be about a year or two before the 'indie scene' realises that they've become hippies. Maybe Franz Ferdinand can play a festival where security is provided by Advice who have collected enough personal information about everyone to know who might a threat, and during the show some kid will gladly decide to do an ad for Kokanee while Gavin Mcinnis from Vice gets a blow job from an 18 year old A and R intern for Sony. Oh, maybe that already happened.