Tom & Alissa

From today’s Brewing Culture email:

Starbucks Culture
“There’s the faintest whiff of discriminating good taste around everything Starbucks sells, a range of products designed, on some level, to flatter the buyer’s self regard,” writes Susan Dominus in The New York Times (10/21/06). Indeed, as noted by Timothy Jones, who puts together those Starbucks compilations CDs that sell so well: “We do our best with a new artist when there’s sort of an NPR buzz going on around them.” Like the Decemberists or Madeleine Peyroux, for instance. It’s a pretty neat hipster trick; the more mainstream Starbucks becomes, the more robust its ability to project a certain countercultural cred that appeals to wealthy, hippy-dippy, baby boomers. Novelist Jonathan Lethem compares the illusion to Apple’s: “It’s the faint affect of a counterculture shackled to the most ordinary, slightly upscale product.” Jonathan calls this a “faux alternative” aesthetic.

I think this trend has gotten more pronounced in the last couple of years. Mass-marketed good taste? Better than mass marketed bad taste, I guess (read: MacDonald’s Culture).