A Look Back At The 00s: ‘Glo-fi’ And The Sadness Of The Advertised Man
19 January 2010
“…the salesman, once an unpredicted, unpredictable bolt from the blue of a life on the road, has been trapped behind a glass screen and reduced to padding along in an endlessly repetitive existence of cruel, unparalleled drudgery; i.e. ‘reality’. He can’t be ‘real’, though, because advertisers have trapped him in an ossified, glass-cage version of ‘reality’ that’s pre-recorded and set to loop hundreds of times a day, victimising these salt-of-the-earth types who work at Tesco, B&Q or Kwik Fit, or are excited to extol the benefits of a new chocolate bar or paste for sensitive teeth. They are robotic representations of our retired traveling salesman, and, through the way they ruin and mock their own claims on authenticity and reality by parrot-patter repetition, they bear an eerie resemblance to those wannabe-authentic, ‘social commentary’ guitar bands foisted upon us by a hopelessly cumbersome and unresponsive major label machine.”
A Look Back At The 00s: ‘Glo-fi’ And The Sadness Of The Advertised Man
