Frank - The conquest of cool: business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism

PRAISE FOR
the conquest of cool

An invaluable argument for anyone who has ever scoffed at hand-me-down counterculture from the 60s.... A spirited and exhaustive analysis of the eras advertising.... Conquest not only puts a cork in graying ex-hippies who like to recall their VW-bus trips as transgressive, but further serves to inoculate audiences to the hip capitalism thats everywhereincluding these pagestoday.

Brad Wieners, Wired Magazine

Seeking the origins of the countercultural critique, Frank finds them not on the campus or in the commune but in the business management books and ad agency creative departments of the 1950s.... Indeed, by Franks own account, the books title is a bit of a misnomer. Business didnt conquer the counterculture. It invented it.

Debra Goldman, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Tom Frank is perhaps the most unfashionable man ever to appear in Details. Hes not only old-fashioned, hes anti-fashion, with a place in his heart for that ultimate social faux pas, leftist politics.

Roger Trilling, Details

Frank is a leading Gen-X cynic. His favorite target: how corporate America forces conformity on the masses.

Newsweek, 100 Americans for the Next Century

[Thomas Frank is] perhaps the most provocative young cultural critic of the moment.... After reading Frank, in fact, youll have a hard time using words like revolution or rebel ever again, at least without quotation marks.

Gerald Marzorati, New York Times Book Review

Frank makes an ironclad case not only that the advertising industry cunningly turned the countercultural rhetoric of revolution into a rallying cry to buy more stuff, but that the process itself actually predated any actual counterculture to exploit.

Geoff Pevere, Toronto Globe and Mail

This is a powerful and important argument. Unlike many practitioners of cultural studies, whose celebrations of consumer sovereignty merely mimic advertising mythology, Frank acknowledges the centrality of corporate strategies in shaping our dominant values.... The Conquest of Cool helps us understand why, throughout the last third of the twentieth century, Americans have increasingly confused gentility with conformity, irony with protest, and an extended middle finger with a populist manifesto. Frank deftly shows the myriad ways that advertising has redefined radicalism by conflating it with in-your-face consumerism.... His voice is an exciting addition to the soporific public discourse of the late twentieth century.

T. J. Jackson Lears, In These Times

In accessible, muscular prose, Frank traces agencies revolt against inflated 50s jargon and creation of aggressively hip spots that simultaneously mocked consumer cultures empty promises and sold consumption-as-rebellion.... This book is frequently brilliant, an indispensable survival guide for any modern consumer.

Publishers Weekly, starred review

A wide-ranging, and often hilarious, overview of ads that attempted to adopt the language, pose or style of the youth and counterculture movements.

Michiko Kakutani, International Herald Tribune

A lucid history of how long-haired, bell-bottomed admen replaced rule-laden repetition and simple selling propositions with clever, unpredictable approaches.

Abe Peck, Chicago Tribune

Frank argues persuasively that the counterculture has been co-opted by business forces, who use putatively countercultural ideas and images to sell their products and accelerate consumption.

Scott Stossel, Boston Phoenix Literary Supplement

Franks study of 1960s advertising is first-rate.

Philip Gold, Washington Times

The marriage of counterculture and capitalism is hardly a new subject, but Frank does provide a refreshingly unsentimental look at it.... The Conquest of Cool is blessedly free of academic throat-clearing and professional jargon. There isnt a dull page in the book.

Alexander Star, Slate

An indispensable book that is so retro its the closest thing our culture has seen lately to hip.... With The Conquest of Cool, Frankbrilliant, excoriating and wickedly funnyassumes the mantle of the preeminent cultural critic of his generation. Not bad, considering hes only... what? Thirty-something.

Tom Grimes, Houston Chronicle Books

A refreshingly spirited book.... After reading The Conquest of Cool, its hard not to conclude that the folks who brought you Mr. Clean and the Marlboro Man helped bring the Cultural Revolution too.

Brain Murray, Weekly Standard

Brilliant, polemically charged.... By eschewing the bogus populism of business elites to focus on their moral and symbolic power, Frank makes an important contribution to the cultural history of the 1960s. He also provides a needed (if not altogether original) corrective to cultural studies mavens who see subversion in every market-researched pater of the bourgeoisie.

Eugene McCarraher, Commonweal

An important, highly readable and provocative examination of 1960s advertising trends, that reveals more about how mass marketing shaped North American society than any other book in recent memory.

Ron Foley MacDonald, Daily News

Thomas Frank argues convincingly in The Conquest of Cool, the advertising community was a willing, even eager co-conspirator in the eruption of hip consumerism.... The bohemian cultural style started as the native language of the alienated and became the dominant force in mass society. This book explains how that happened, and why.

Stuart Levitan, ISTHMUS

Chicagos favorite wonky killjoy is Tom Frank, the curmudgeonly editor of The Baffler. Hes great in his self-appointed role as cultural iconoclast.

Chicago Magazine, Best Chicago

Thomas Franks The Conquest of Cool is a forceful and convincing demonstration of the cunning of commercialism. Advertisers knew what was hip before hippie entrepreneurs, and this story, told here with verve and lucidity, is well worth the attention of all serious readers.

Todd Gitlin, author of The Twilight of Common Dreams

Thomas Frank has written a history of advertising in the last half of the twentieth century so accurate and insightful that it can even illuminate events for the people who participated in them. The Conquest of Cool is the remarkable debut of a cultural critic whose work can look forward to reading for many years to come.

Earl Shorris, author of A Nation of Salesmen

thomas frank

the conquest of cool

BUSINESS CULTURE, COUNTERCULTURE, AND THE RISE OF HIP CONSUMERISM

the university of chicago press
chicago and london

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
1997 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1997
Paperback edition 1998
Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN: 0-226-25991-9 (cloth)
ISBN: 0-226-26012-7 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-226-92463-2 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Frank, Thomas C.
The Conquest of cool: business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism / Thomas Frank.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-226-25991-9 (alk. paper)
1. Marketing United States History 20th century. 2. Advertising United States History 20th century. 3. Advertising and youth United States History 20th century. 4. Nineteen sixties. 5. Consumer behavior United States History 20th century. 6. United States Social conditions 19601980. 7. United States Social conditions 1980