Blagger of the century
It has just struck me that Simon Cowell's fortune is based, fundamentally, on two business coups:
1) Selling the Americans the right to organise a talent contest for themselves
and
2) Selling the Americans the right to organise a talent contest for themselves, again.
Obviously I am fully aware of the importance of intangible goods, the role of the British creative & media sector, etc etc - we've discussed them several times in the past. But you can see why someone like James Dyson gets wound up about this, can't you?
Well the fabled "British invasion" was huge in the US bcz -- among other things -- it gave them permission to take their own pop music seriously. (Partly bcz the Beatles weren't bad at playing it; partly bcz of a kind of delay effect, so that US kids re-heard the sound they'd liked but half-forgotten five years before, and liked it all over again, but in a five years more grown-up way).
ReplyDeleteAnyway, there's nothing more American than culture-as-talent-competition, but it's very declasse as culture -- until this English guy comes along and takes it venomously seriously...
Dan - whereas Dyson invented a plastic wheelbarrow, and a slightly improved hoover that sold at enormous prices because it was pretty and well-marketed. Respect to the man, but he's at leas as close to David Oglivy as he is to James Watt.
ReplyDeleteBelle - I thought that one was at least partly because, being foreign, the Beatles (and the Stones) transcended race concerns, whereas the mass US audience was wary about white rock-and-rollers because their music was a bit black and that really wouldn't do.
People I know who've met Simon Cowell tell me that the 'tough exterior with a heart of gold' isn't actually an act for the cameras. It's pretty much how he is. Which I suppose ties into the discussion on the lib-dem post about the often genuine charm of the PSB.
ReplyDeleteYes, I was going to do a footnote about how "Dyson" products have a hell of a lot of branding associated with them, and that I bet this was the result of a lot of hard work by professionals, and indeed that the distinctive design identity of Dyson products might not entirely have been produced by happy accidents of form-follows-function engineering. But I got sidetracked.
ReplyDeletejohn b: well, yes and no -- the payola-at-the-hop scandals were as much as anything about the fact that white teens were discovered dancing en masse to black music, so the colour line had already been crossed somewhat; the brit-invasion permission-giving was somewhat allowing the same teens, now older, not to recalibrate their youthful tracks-crossing enthusiam as an adolescent anomaly to be grown out of...
ReplyDeletebut yes, the massive scaling up of audience-size also included many more timid explorers now shopping around a little more daringly: britness as a kind of intellectual security blanket for what would have been considered slumming, cultural or racial or whatever
and of course lots of white american pop fans went so far -- adoring white brits playing the music -- and no further: the security blanket operating as a fire curtain
You can buy a better hoover than a Dyson for about half the price. Course the thing isn't terribly pretty...
ReplyDeleteJohn B
ReplyDeleteHad exactly this conversation last weekend about Dyson. A slightly improved hand dryer and an expensive hoover. It's innovation, but only just. Certainly not enough to be the UK's self appointed spokesman on the subject.
Apparently Dyson-style hand dryers are bog-standard in Japan, but no one there had the idea to call them revolutionary.
ReplyDeleteThe Beatles were markets as cute and clean. The rockabillies were white bu Jerry Lee Lewis was not a role model.
ReplyDeleteI thought this guy was the UK's self appointed spokesman on innovation
ReplyDeletehttp://www.marcusgibson.com/ccharging.htm
I don't know, I'm still working on sseing Prince Andrew's POV, and that's a Monday to Friday job, or worse.
ReplyDeleteDid you not8ice a load of comments have disappeared? I lost a recent update o a blog post. I think when Google/Blogger started doing funny things and went down for a bit they had to roll back a day or two. Nice of Google to keep the users informed.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's really fucking annoying. I was hoping they'd come back but they haven't.
ReplyDelete"...he's at leas as close to David Oglivy as he is to James Watt."
ReplyDeleteWatt, of course, didn't invent the steam engine; just a slightly improved version of it.
A better example would have been Newton, who, in addition to his mucking around with philosophy, prisms, etc, achieved immortality by inventing the cat flap.
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