The rap on Vans: Pro and con

The latest addition to the history of hip-hop odes to products, sneakers in particular, is “Vans,” by Bay Area rap group The Wolfpack, or just The Pack. (Here’s the group’s MySpace page — the song starts playing as soon as you arrive, and it’s laced with profanity, so, you know, click with care.) It’s about how great Vans are, and how they’ve always been great, and how you should throw out your Nikes, and so on. But that’s not what’s interesting.

What’s interesting is that somebody called Drino Man has responded with an answer remix about how much he hates Vans. In fact his track is called “Fuck Vans.” Nikes and Jordans, among others, are declared “real sneakers,” and Vans are … well, I guess the title pretty much sums up where this guy is coming from. Here’s his Myspace page; the lyrics are quite obscene, so, you know, you’ve been warned.

I don’t think either song is particularly good, but that’s hardly the point, is it? I’m slightly interested in whether Vans will do anything with or about all of this (or whether they’ve orchestrated the whole thing somehow), and also in whether marketing guru types will pick up on it as another example of technology “empowering” consumers to “join the conversation.” Assuming, of course, that bickering about sneaker brands counts as a “conversation.”

I heard about this by way of The Weekly Drop. The Pack’s pro-Vans song is also discussed at ProHipHop.com.

Crown Jewelry

New Era/Gabriel Urist Chain: A cap manufacturer’s evolution into a fashionable brand.

While it may not seem obvious at first, there’s something almost inevitable about the creation of a $525 platinum baseball-cap pendant necklace. Although, to sell at that price, it can’t be just any necklace, and it can’t be based on just any baseball cap: it requires collaboration — something that both brands and artists have become increasingly interested in. Thus the Gabriel Urist New Era pendant necklace offers not so much a strange aberration as a small case study of how such projects can come about….

Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site by way of this no-registration-required link.

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Also worth reading in the NYT Mag this week: Michael Pollan’s lucid and well-informed overview of the pros and cons of Wal-Mart getting into the “organics” business.

Dirt Cheap Abundance


Photographs via Flickr by kate*

It’s just about impossible to pick one favorite image from this Flickr set from a store called Hudson’s Dirt Cheap. It’s by Kate “Obsessive Consumption” Bingaman.

It’s particularly interesting as a kind of counterpoint to the photographs that Andreas Gursky took at 99 Cents Only stores: Those have a feeling of spectacular, almost sickening abundance. I’ve seen some of them in person, and the monumental scale adds to the effect. There’s a bit of a different feel to this, but I think you’ll see the connection, and why these work as a counterpoint. I was interested to discover, in the course of trying to remember Gursky’s name, that 99 Cents Only, which is a chain, actually uses one of his images on its home page.