Jazz Sells: Music, Marketing, and Meaning

Mark Laver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317699781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Jazz Sells: Music, Marketing, and Meaning examines the issues of jazz, consumption, and capitalism through advertising. On television, on the Internet, in radio, and in print, advertising is a critically important medium for the mass dissemination of music and musical meaning. This book is a study of the use of the jazz genre as a musical signifier in promotional efforts, exploring how the relationship between brand, jazz music, and jazz discourses come together to create meaning for the product and the consumer. At the same time, it examines how jazz offers an invaluable lens through which to examine the complex and often contradictory culture of consumption upon which capitalism is predicated.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315779546-1

Most jazz isn’t really about jazz, at least not in terms of how it is actually consumed.

Krin Gabbard, “Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema” (Gabbard, 1996)

This book may never have been written if I hadn’t gone grocery shopping at just the right time. On a brisk autumn night, sometime in November of 2006, I left my apartment on Bathurst Street in Toronto to buy a carton of 1 percent milk from Steven’s grocery store. To get to the dairy section at the back of the store, I always walked through the well stocked junk food aisle (a much more interesting route than the adjacent condensed soup aisle). While I rarely ever bought anything, I would always let my eyes rove idly over the gleaming chocolate bar wrappers and potato chip bags on the one side, pop bottles on the other, reminiscing about my misspent, Coca-Cola and Dorito-fueled youth; simpler times when I worried less about grown-up concerns such as milk fat percentage. On this particular evening, my eye was drawn to an unusually shiny bottle in the pop fridge. The caramel-colored foil wrapper screamed “Jazz” in large, italicized letters, with the familiar red, white, and blue Pepsi logo underneath.

As a jazz saxophonist, I was intrigued, and more than a little bemused. I grabbed two bottles, one for myself and one for my roommate—a jazz bassist with a similar sense of humor—and went back home, having forgotten all about the milk. Neither of us was able to get through more than a few sips of our bottles, repulsed by the overwhelmingly sweet, “Caramel Cream” flavor. Despite barely making it through the bottlenecks, the drink provided us with many days’ worth of fodder for conversation. How could the music to which we had dedicated so much of our lives be distilled into a soft drink? What on earth did diet cola have to do with jazz? And, above all, why did it taste so bad?

After my Pepsi Jazz encounter, I started noticing jazz-based advertising and branding everywhere: in Canada, I found a “Jazz” hair salon in Toronto; a “Jazz” printing and photocopying shop in Vancouver; and of course Air Canada Jazz, an airline specializing in regional travel. My favorite product (conceptually at least; at the time of writing, I haven’t yet worked up the nerve to taste it) is “Potato Jazz,” an instant, microwavable potato product by Edmonton, Alberta-based “The Little Potato Company.”¹

But the phenomenon is not uniquely Canadian. In Greece, I found a brand of women’s shoes called “Jazz.” From New Zealand, I heard about a variety of apple called “Jazz.” International computer giant IBM has developed a software integration system called “Jazz.” I searched on YouTube (still a relative novelty in 2007) and found a variety of advertisements for jazz products, including a cologne by French fashion house Yves St. Laurent called “Live Jazz,” as well as the television spot for “Diet Pepsi Jazz.” I soon discovered that I wasn’t alone in my interest in the bizarre panoply of things called “Jazz.” Through a friend, I found a Tumblr page operated by BBC radio producer Russell Finch called “things called jazz that are not jazz.” ²

Finch’s list included several products that I had heard of, in addition to a number of others with an exceedingly tenuous connection to jazz music: the Keeler “Jazz” in-ear diagnostic thermometer, a “Jazz” blood glucose monitoring system (featuring Bluetooth wireless capability), an aerosol spray pump called “Jazz,” a keypad auto-lock by American lockmaker Schlage called “Jazz,” and a 90-meter “Jazz” “super yacht” by German shipbuilder Bluhm+Voss. As I found more and more of these products and thought about them further, my attitude gradually changed from bemusement to curiosity, and my questions became more nuanced: rather than incredulously asking, “what on earth do cola, potatoes, and super-yachts have to do with jazz?”, I began to wonder, “what is it about jazz that has made it appealing to advertisers and marketers as an advertising and branding tool in these contexts, and for these products?”

Jazz Sells works towards answering that question. Of course, given the extraordinary diversity of “jazz” products, there is no single answer. If jazz can simultaneously be a seasoned potato, a diet cola, an in-ear thermometer, and a super yacht, if it can cost anywhere from US$1 to £300 million, its core meaning is exceptionally elusive, if it has any singular core meaning at all. Indeed, if we expand our scope to consider brands that are connected to jazz in other ways—brands that use jazz soundtracks in advertising, or brands linked to jazz via festival, concert, or artist sponsorships—the waters become incredibly muddy. The astonishing diversity of brands and commodities that have been articulated to jazz speaks both to its remarkable semiotic fluidity as a cultural touchstone, and to the creativity of the various marketers and advertisers who have imagined such a bewildering array of things that jazz could potentially mean, tenuous though many of those articulations may be.

Every branding and advertising context uses jazz in a slightly different way, working to draw out a different set of musical or (more often) sociocultural themes from the music to best suit the product. Hence, rather than seeking to draw out a single, overarching theme—working to expose the singular essence of jazz’s utility as an advertising tool, and concomitantly, its cultural significance—each chapter in this book moves principally along three related trajectories, linked by a central concept.

In each chapter, I elucidate the key themes that are at play in a given example of an articulation of jazz and commodities through advertising or branding. Second, I situate these themes historically, examining how jazz advertising is predicated on jazz discourses that have emerged from a variety of sectors (chiefly musicians, critics and, somewhat tautologically, advertisers and marketers themselves), over the span of the 20th and 21st centuries. Third, I consider the ways in which jazz and advertising have interacted not only to promote individual commodities, but to contribute to the continued intellectual and emotional entrenchment of the meta-concept of consumption in global capitalism. Under-girding these three trajectories, therefore, is the deeply vexed—and seldom discussed—issue of jazz’s circulation in a capitalist society and the culture of consumption. While each chapter retains its own particular focus and comes to its own conclusions, these respective conclusions act to illuminate this central issue from different perspectives.

Mass Production, Mass Mediation, and the Emergence of the Consumer-Citizen

Before we narrow our focus to jazz, it is worth using the introductory space of this first chapter to situate our discussion in a broader discourse, to step back and consider the wider relationship between music, advertising, consumption, and capitalism. The term capitalism refers in essence to the investment of money (or capital) for the express purpose of making a profit (Fulcher 2004: 2). Historians generally agree that the practice of capitalism has existed for thousands of years, emerging alongside the advent of mercantilism in the earliest Mesopotamian city-states. As a pervasive social and economic system, however, capitalism did not take firm hold in Europe and North America until the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the industrialized manufacturing process became increasingly streamlined, the overhead costs associated with manufacturing steadily decreased, and the industrial sector became increasingly profitable for capital investors. Industries steadily grew with investment, demanding an ever-larger labor force, until ultimately manufacturing jobs gradually eclipsed agrarian work as the dominant mode of labor for most individuals.

Capitalism in North America evolved dramatically with the advent of Taylorist management strategy and Fordist mass production in the early 20th century. Frederick Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, addressed one of the emergent concerns of the new industrial order: inefficient labor. While efficiently operated factories dramatically reduced manufacturing costs, the industrial technologies were expensive to operate, and inefficient labor became a frustrating and costly problem for capitalist factory owners. Among other things, Taylor called for more carefully regulated working days, and for the labor process to be divided into numerous small, easily repeatable tasks so as to minimize the time and skill required of each individual worker. Taylor’s management advice was intended both to maximize efficiency during the working day, and to minimize the overnight “shut-down time,” during which machines sat idle and unprofitable. Ford’s assembly lines, which debuted in Detroit a mere two years after Taylor’s book, were the first factories to actualize Taylor’s ideas to the utmost. With Taylorist management wedded to an efficient, mechanized system of assembly, the Ford Motor Company was able to produce an unparalleled number of units of their first car, the Model T, at a cost that made the automobile affordable to an unprecedented percentage of the American populace (Lee 1993: 75).

The dramatic increase in the scale of production during the late 19th and early 20th centuries demanded a reciprocal increase in the scale of consumption so as to absorb the sudden proliferation of products on the market. In order to facilitate expanding consumption, manufacturers—once again following Henry Ford’s lead—began to increase the wages for their laborers so that a factory employee would theoretically be able to purchase the product that he (or less often she) had helped to make. Ceaseless consumption thus became a crucial element of the capitalist system, a vitally important means of sustaining the economics of mass production. Higher wages alone were insufficient motivation, however, to persuade laborers to part with their earnings as readily and liberally as mass production required. Indeed, in his 1905 treatise, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (reprinted by Routledge, 2011), Max Weber recognized that human beings need compelling moral imperatives and cultural narratives—not merely economic ones—in order to be persuaded to buy into capitalist ideology.

This “spirit of capitalism,” as Weber termed it, was largely provided by advertisers. Advertising was key in prompting the necessary switch from an agrarian ethic of ascetic thrift and self-sacrifice—an ethic that had predominated both in the North American and Western European working and middle classes, and among the myriad cultural and ethnic groups that emigrated to those regions through the 19th and 20th centuries—to an industrial one of self-fulfillment and instant gratification through ceaseless consumption. Advertisers were the storytellers of modern capitalism, providing the all-important narrative underpinning to an otherwise abstract economic system. Advertising brought capitalism into the home by telling stories where the consumer was always the protagonist, and where consumption was the invariable solution to every social conundrum. These stories promoted consumption as a key component of early 20th century expressive culture.

Advertisers recognized their vital importance to promoting the new ideology of consumption early on. In the terminology of Louis Althusser’s 1969 essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards and Investigation),” advertising acted to “interpellate” subjects within the ideology of consumption, an ideology that is central to “reproducing the conditions of [capitalist] production.” In other words, advertisements “reminded” audiences that they were consumers, as if this were not a new social category that had developed fairly rapidly to sustain mass production (Althusser 1971: 127). The implication was that audiences had “always already” known that they were consumers but had either forgotten or somehow not noticed. In Althusser’s view, advertising is one of many “Ideological State Apparatuses” (or ISAs) that perform a similar function in capitalism, including religion, the law, the polity, trade unions, the family, culture (including music, art, etc.), and education (Althusser 1971: 143). Collectively, these ISAs restructure not only the mechanical infrastructure of production, but also the epistemology—the patterns of thought and knowledge—of individuals. All of these ISAs work together to inculcate capitalist ideology in individuals, to the extent that our thoughts, our imaginations, even the terms in which we constitute and identify ourselves as subjects, are conditioned by capitalism and consumption. As Althusser explains,

[T]he reproduction of labor power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class “in words.”

(Althusser 1971: 132–33)

One of the primary consequences of the newly streamlined processes of mass production was a glut of virtually identical products—soap, medicinal tonics, breakfast cereals—sold under different brand names. Producers quickly realized that they could no longer distinguish their product from the pack by simply enumerating its merits. Instead, they began to experiment with psychological approaches, playing to the fears and anxieties that they perceived in the marketplace. These strategies occurred primarily along two somewhat contradictory trajectories: the assertion of individual personality and of community belonging. North American culture was increasingly characterized by sameness: nearly every American and Canadian (especially in urban locations) now had access to the same food products, the same fashions, the same magazines, the same radio programming. Even within those various categories, there was considerable redundancy, as different manufacturers produced a multiplicity of virtually identical commodities under different brand names. Advertisers therefore needed to distinguish their products by shifting the challenge of and the anxiety about homogeneity to consumers.

Throughout the early part of the 20th century, advertisements began to imply that individual distinction could be achieved by consuming certain brands over their cognates within the same commodity category. As Timothy Taylor writes, “Cultivating one’s personality was a way to stand out from the crowd, the mass, and this could be accomplished through consumption, purchasing goods that could be used to define oneself” (Taylor 2003: 10). Consequently, much of the contemporary advertising discourse focused on the “personality” of products. Taylor points to William H. Ensign’s comments in 1928:

National Advertisers find that radio… carries their names or the names of their products into millions of homes in a way which is not only conducive to good wil...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Pimps, Rebels, and Volkswagens
• 3 Autoeroticism: Sex, Cars, and Jazz
• 4 The New Sound of Cola
• 5 “The Bank of Music”
• 6 Conclusion
• Index