vintage stuff

Last year, Fender Guitars unveiled the new Joe Strummer Signature Series ™, a pre-stressed replica of Strummer’s beloved guitar: a 1966 Fender Telecaster, which he played in the 101ers, the Clash, and with the Mescaleros from 1975 until his death in 2005. Here’s Strummer with his guitar:

Here are some screenshots of the replica from the website:

Some of the items available for customization:

A customized version:

Let’s just pause for a moment and appreciate the irony of that one. (For those of you with little knowledge of the Clash, let’s just say that they were pretty much the exact opposite of this guitar, ideologically speaking.)

According to Fender’s write-up, this guitar is cool because “All his life, [Strummer] vigorously championed individuality, self-expression and change-tenets often reflected in the constantly altered look of his favorite instrument – his Telecaster” and this guitar was built “to celebrate Strummer’s fierce sense of individuality.” Buy the thing and you can champion individuality and self-expression just like Joe! Well. . .just like Joe and the 1,499 other folks who buy the limited edition with the stickers.

But perhaps a more interesting question is this: does any of this affect what you can actually do with it? The kinds of songs you could write with it? The kinds of shows you could play? It probably wouldn’t, or at least no more so than any other Telecaster would by virtue of its technical specifications. But put it in the context of a room full of other musicians, who tend to hold strong ideas about the art/commerce relationship, and you may find yourself the proud owner of a Fender Stigma-caster, depending on the room and the musicians.

On the other hand, Strummer – an artist whose work often wrangled around the intersection of art and commerce  – was by many accounts a complex person who disdained orthodoxy in all its forms. He might have been tickled pink by the tensions and artistic possibilities inherent in such a symbolically loaded guitar. The Clash did, after all, write songs about their recording contracts. (Also, the surviving Strummers have to eat and how they manage their husband’s/father’s estate is no business of mine.)

What else can we unpack from this guitar? Pretty much the history of modernity. You start with “the guitar” – an instrument traditionally produced by artisans called luthiers. But this particular style of guitar – the Fender Telecaster – is the first commercially successful mass-produced solidbody electric guitar. (Henry Ford:Driving::Leo Fender:Rocking.) Introduced in 1950 as the Esquire,* renamed after slight design changes and then a lawsuit re: the name Broadcaster being property of Gretsch Instruments, assembled on a factory line from mass-produced interchangeable parts, sold in stores and catalogs, heard most often via media and broadcast for most music consumers, the 1966 Fender Telecaster is truly a Modern guitar.

But this particular model of the genus Telecaster is Late Modernity to its elusive core:  a simulacrum of a particular instrument that trades on symbols of authenticity. With its “road worn” look, its namesake’s reputation and artistic output, and the genre of music it evokes, it’s a composite replica of the idea of the guitar wielded by a working musician known to most of us as mass-mediated collective representation. It’s also worth remembering that the idea of “Joe Strummer” is itself an elusive symbol, one of a number of names and personas adopted by John Graham Mellor over the course of his lifetime, that has now taken on a life of its own.

Sure, there are more properly postmodern guitars out there, but they all belong to Sonic Youth.

* Technically speaking, the Esquire and the Broadcaster/Telecaster are different guitars – the former has one pickup and the latter two, and there are some refinements to the design – basically, the Telecaster is the “finished” product. But to the average eye – and especially so when they debuted, given their shared differences from 99% of the other guitars out there at the time –  they’re pretty much the same guitar. [Editor’s note: Potts can really geek out sometimes, as evidenced in this footnote.]

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Brady Potts is an entirely awesome sociologist specializing in soc of culture, co-editor of the book The Civic Life of American Religion, and the person we can always count on to geek out about “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and the Drive-By Truckers.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

For other examples of the commodification of sub- (counter?) cultures, see here and here.

Wheelchair use equated with terminal misery (click to enlarge):

Wheelchair use will keep you from EVER having fun. So implies this ad for Goodyear Tires from the August 2, 1937 issue of Life. Everyone looks depressed about the fact that the boy’s in a wheelchair, from the boy himself to his sister and even the dog. I’d be kind of depressed too if I were teetering on the edge of a porch [notice that Sis has one leg up on a step] without a guard rail. This image could be used in a discussion of how perceptions of persons with disabilities have changed over the years…and also how they have stayed the same [witness the stubborn popularity of “wheelchair-bound” as a descriptor for wheelchair users].

In this ad American Freedom Center at Valley Forge asks for donations to support the fight against terrorism:

Via Vintage Ads.

Vintage Ads posted these three ads–one for an electric refrigerator and two for Gold Dust Cleaner–that compare the product to a Black servant. 

The copy in the refrigerator ad reads: “And So Electricity Is Made The Willing Servant.”  The accompanying image includes three white women looking leisurely and a Black servant. 

Similarly, these two Gold Dust ads personify the product as Black twin babies. The motto is: “Let the GOLD DUST TWINS do your work.”
 

I think these are fascinating in that they draw our attention to whose work technology is designed to replace. Earlier on this blog we’ve talked about how ads have offered to replace women’s work with the market and with technology.  In these cases, the market and technology were needed to ease women’s workload (they certainly couldn’t expect their husbands to do it).  In this case, Black servants serve to take women one step further from “women’s work.”  Instead of replacing women themselves, the product replace the servants who replaced women, making the comparison of the product to Black servants completely sensical at the time.

Marc sent in a link to some sexist vintage ads found at Blog of Hilarity [note: I had an actual link to Blog of Hilarity, but commenter LillyB pointed out that when she clicked on it, she got warnings from her AntiVirus about the site; I just had the same thing happen, so I decided for safety’s sake to remove the link]. Some of them I’ll be adding to other posts, but I thought these deserved their own post.

This one, for Love’s Baby Soft, is so creepy I can hardly stand to look at it:

The shape of the bottles, the sexualization of young girls…ick. A teddy bear? Really? The text below the bottles:

Love’s Baby Soft is that irresistible, clean-baby smell, grown-up enough to be sexy. It’s soft-smelling. Pure and innocent. It may well be the sexist fragrance around.

Notice it’s not grown up…it’s grown up enough. Jean Kilbourne uses this, or a similar Love’s Baby Soft, ad in her documentary Killing Us Softly 3 when she discusses how young girls are sexualized and adult women are encouraged to infantilize themselves.

Here’s an ad for Kellogg’s PEP vitamins:

I know I always look super cute when I’m scrubbing the kitchen.

Finally, this Trix ad seems sort of creepy to me, and I’m not even sure why. Maybe it’s the way the girl is staring at the camera, or that her pupils seem fixed and dilated:

The text isn’t exceptionally interesting, but it does use the word “gay” in the original sense of “happy,” something a company would certainly not do today.

Thanks, Marc!

Andrew Sullivan suggests that this commercial for Pearl Cream that fetishizes (upper class) “Oriental” women is from the 1970s, but a commenter of his makes a good argument that it was on cable television in the ’80s and ’90s. Do you remember this commercial?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaD_fvehAaU[/youtube]

Before there were flight attendants, there were stewardesses.  Below a vintage commercial for airlines (found here thanks to AdFreak, see also this print ad):

While pressure on airlines to be less sexist means that we don’t see ads like this anymore, Stephen W. alerted us to the ongoing sexism in “general aviation,” that is private planes and jets owned by individuals and companies.

Airports have FBOs (or “fixed based operators”) which are, essentially, glorified gas stations for planes.  A private pilot can choose which airport and thus FBO, or which FBO at which airport, to patronize.  So FBOs will compete for customers.  Stephen pointed to one strategy: plying pilots, assumed to be men, with sex.

This website allows pilots to see what “FBO Girls” all over the country, the women working behind the counters at FBOs, look like.  Another website, FBO Hotties, allows pilots to submit their favorite girls.

Flower Aviation promises that you will be guided into your parking spot by “girls in short ‘skorts’ and tank tops.”

Here are some of the images from the website, notice that when you spend money on fuel, they reward you with red meat (and fresh baked chocolate chip cookies):

So, there you have it.  Private aviation, still very much a man’s world.

Other than the objectification, I think an interesting sociological question might be: Why have the airlines dropped overt sexist advertising, while general aviation has not? One possibility is that general aviation is, literally, less public and, thus, less vulnerable to public censor. Another may be that pilots are still overwhelmingly men, unlike the customers served by airlines, and so there may still be profit in sexism for general aviation, but not in commercial aviation. I’d welcome your thoughts as well.

This New York Times article discusses the cigarette industries co-optation of nascent feminism.  Hat tip to Jezebel, where Sadie writes:

In the early 20th century, smoking was regarded as unladylike. In the 1920[s], realizing they were missing out on millions of potential customers PR expert Edward Bernays encouraged the American Tobacco Company to play on women’s nascent sense of modern independence… and the smoking feminist was born!

Also in co-opting feminism: make-up, more make-up and, of course, botox; cars and bras; more cigarettes; cleaning products, eyeglasses, and pants; diamond rings; credit cards, cigarettes, and cars; easing kitchen duty; and fashion (I think).