ny times publishes words of idiot

Yesterday in the Times was this AWFUL piece on how Starbucks is selling CDs, books, and a "lifestyle" to its millions of coffee-drinkers. What astounds me is that this works, because the logic is seemingly self-defeating: coffee shops have been playing jazz for decades, so why is Starbucks going to succeed in moving a new Herbie Hancock CD where others have failed?

Now, there is only one answer, one which this (ridiculous) article does not provide, but which I can easily give you: *not* that Starbucks has pioneered a new logic of selling culture to the educated, $90,000-a-year crowd which they were incapable of finding elsewhere, but rather that Starbucks has turned into a CONVENIENCE STORE. Like a 7-11 on route 9, where you can buy Travis Tritt's greatest hits along with a Big Gulp, Starbucks is making laziness (one might say: the opposite of even middle-brow culture) the rule of the day.

That is to say, there is a perverse irony that the "aesthetic" that Starbucks sells is, to my thinking, already that of mainstream bourgeois pretension. The Ray Charles CD was actually an inspired product, because that is something most people "know" but don't own-- having been Pepsi's image in the 90s-- but the other examples in the article are actually kind of trashy: Mitch Albom is an Oprah author (Oprah representing the pinnacle of mainstream bourgeois pretension), and "Akeelah and the Bee" was a clear take-off on the sleeper documentary hit "Spellbound". Which is to say, what Starbucks is selling people is what they already know they want: but locating it under one roof.

Another shit-move by the article is not to discuss how Starbucks GOT its cultural currency from association with Barnes and Noble bookstores. Barnes and Noble actually includes the coffee house WITHIN the logic of the bookstore-culture, so that Starbucks selling books and CDs along with coffee is already pre-determined by Barnes and Noble selling Stabucks coffee along with its books.

So, I have compared Starbucks to a one-stop, selling people what they already know they want. But what really gets me is that these "educated" customers who make "$90,000 a year on average" are SO BAD at being snooty, espresso-drinking multiculturalists. To wit, when Starbucks recently started selling the Frank Sinatra classic “In the Wee Small Hours,” sales of that CD went up twentyfold. What moron arrives at the age of 50 (say), with a huge disposable income, a suburban home, an Audi, and a lifestyle involving $5 lattes, harbors a secret desire to listen to Frank Sinatra but is unable to fulfill this wish because Frank Sinatra CDs are SO HARD TO FIND? And so, when they pop up at a Starbucks, he/she thinks "at last! I've been looking for this forever!"

Or even stupider: that someone does not even KNOW that they like Frank Sinatra (maybe the most popular pop musician of the last century) until they hear it at Starbucks. This, more sadly, is probably the case.

“If I hear a CD playing [in Starbucks], I generally like it,” Bette Gottfried, back in the Ardsley store, said. “It’s who I am — baby boomer, upper middle class, a little hippyish, rockish.”

Starbucks stores don’t carry “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the Beatles album everyone’s mother could name; they carry “Revolver,” a critical darling without the same overplayed name recognition.

Let's look at that fact that most people would probably be happy just owning a "Greatest Hits" of any particular artist. What is being (unironically) put forward here is that THE BEATLES and FRANK SINATRA are CULT ARTISTS. What is sad is that this obviously WORKS. People clearly buy a Frank Sinatra album or a Beatles album and go home feeling like they are possibly a bit slyer, more cultured than their neighbors. A bit jazzier. A bit more "critically astute".

Starbucks is so much better at selling these things to its customers than I would be, as I would adopt an ironic/meta/condescending attitude towards the buyers. The (evil) genius of Starbucks is not to say, "Oh, hey you should have this Frank Sinatra album, because you are sophisticated and it is essential to that pose." But RATHER, to say to SUV-driving, sweatpants-wearing, Robin-Williams-movie-renting middle-executive SLOBS, with total ingenuousness, "Hey, fellow coffee-drinker...yeah...this music *is* good...what is it?... oh man, Frank Sinatra...yeah, I love the old guy, "old blue eyes"... I have "Duets" and it is really great...oh, you have the CD here in the store...yeah, just throw it on the bill, b/c I'm paying with a credit card anyways...oh, it's his EARLY stuff...oh man, this is so cool."

See, being ironic and spiteful, I would try and capitalize on people's innate pretensiousness from MY perspective of what that means. Starbucks is so successful because it recognizes that, to the clueless idiot, what is really "new" and "culturally sophisticated" is just a variation that has been completely played out elsewhere for everyone but them.