idle gaze 064: selling subversion

Why we feel nostalgic for the vulgar, bizarro advertising of the noughties.

This essay was originally published in Dirt back in February. Even though it centres around a complex, bittersweet reminiscence of the past, I felt it warranted a cross-post in idle gaze too, because the piece also reveals something insightful about our current zeitgeist.

When we talk about the nineties and noughties, there’s plenty of head-shaking and eyebrow-raising at the absurd marketing and inappropriate lad culture of the era. But it equally seems to trigger a yearning for a simpler time, when there was such a thing as a ‘capital m’ Monoculture, when we all felt excited when brands offered a sense of edgy subversion that could shock and spellbind an entire generation.

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Selling subversion

Why we feel nostalgic for the vulgar, bizarro advertising of the noughties.

When most people think of the late 90s and early 2000s, they usually think of things like Blockbuster, LimeWire and that cool ‘S’ everyone used to doodle everywhere. And while it was an era full of sensible, laidback optimism, I like to remind everyone it was also a decade filled with utterly absurd and surreal advertising.

For example, what brand in their right mind today would portray their consumers with bloodshot-eyes and bulging veins? Or feature a man sitting on a couch, trousers undone, sniffing underwear? This is exactly what Sony did when they advertised the Playstation 2, in a set of notoriously edgy ads from the early 2000s.

Other iconic relics from this absolutely feral era of PS2 marketing include the girl with Playstation-branded ecstasy pills on her tongue and an ad for Wipeout—a racing game exclusively available on the console—featuring a pair of heroin-chic models lying down with bloody noses.

These print ads have today gained cult-like y2k artifact status. “Playstation ads used to be so cunty what happened” someone online recently lamented. And it’s true, the Sony marketing department at the dawn of the new millennium was truly serving cunt.

These ads represent everything that was objectively fun and cool about this period; the edgy counterculture aesthetics, the cyber-futuristic fonts and soft neon colorways. But they also represent everything that was shockingly inappropriate and annoying about the era as well; all the revved-up testosterone and stubborn rejection of anything earnest.

Going through the films, music and art from that time, that restlessness is palpable. Rebels everywhere, without a cause. Thom Yorke captured it best on Radiohead’s 1995 track, "The Bends," where he whines; 

“I'm just lying in a bar with my drip feed on. Talking to my girlfriend waiting for something to happen, I wish it was the sixties, I wish I could be happy, I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen”.

Films like Office Space and The Matrix funneled this pervading disillusionment with modern society onto the silver screen, featuring white-collar protagonists finding ways to escape the mundaneness of their 9-5 cubicles. In 1999’s Fight Club, its anti-hero Tyler Durden offers the now iconic war cry for disillusioned Xennials: “We have no great war. No great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.”

The Playstation 2’s tagline at the time was: "Different Place. Different Rules". The noughties were indeed a different place, with different rules. The advertising of the time was a far cry from the saccharine-sweet, purpose-drenched morality of modern marketing. This was a time when Levi’s hired indie auteurs Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze to direct smutty spaghetti western skits and heartstopping operating theater musicals. I marvel at the freedom bestowed upon the creative directors back then; given total authority to spend marketing dollars on sowing fear, confusion and disgust far and wide across towering billboards and prime-time television breaks.

The TV spots for the PS2 were equally strange and surreal. David Lynch directed a couple of promos; 60-second fever dreams with extremely tenuous links to the gaming console (did Lynch even know what product he was advertising?) One featured a young man walking down a dark, confusing corridor, his arms and head detaching, eventually confronting a speaking duck and its entourage.

The provocative advertising of the time distinctly reflects this great depression that lurked behind the shiny veneer of the late 90s, pre-global economic crisis vacuum; a moment in time plagued by a collective sense of ennui. If a brand wanted to capture people’s attention and sell them something, all they had to do was swoop in and acknowledge the absurdity of it all, offering a nihilistic sense of surreal escapism from the soulless hamster wheel of capitalism. An opportunity to break free from the shackles of mediocre middle-class comforts.

And that’s exactly what some of the seemingly most innocuous brands in the world set out to do. This was the era of darkly comedic Skittles ads featuring absurd characters stuck in corporate hell. My favorite is the darkly tragic tale of ‘Touch’, where Tim shows his colleague Joel that everything he touches turns to Skittles. The anguish in Tim’s eyes when he recalls the man on the bus whose hand he shook, who will never see his family again, is heartbreaking.

Sometimes it does feel upsetting that consumer culture has lost this brash energy. “Can a historian tell me why as a society we got less cunt”, a recently trending TikTok from musician Cray observed, as she exhibits the sheer cuntiness of her bubblegum pink Motorola razor flip phone and emerald green Xbox 4 from 2004, in contrast to her modern, sleek and dull iPhone.

Today, we want so much of what we watch, buy and consume to feel serene, an antidote to the hyper-stimulation of modern life. But in 2004, when I was barely a teenager, I remember the collective, voracious appetite for the garish and subversive. I remember watching late-night TV, flicking through magazines and sitting eagerly at the cinema before the trailers started, waiting for an advert to shock me, jolt me awake. It was equal parts exciting and terrifying, and for better, or for worse, nothing in advertising today comes close to triggering that same sensation.