DIY Nike Style

U Don’t Stop is also a basketball zine; an intimate evocation of the street level scene which surrounds and sustains the game. Inside issue #2 there’s a round up of the best public ball courts in Los Angeles, an interview with Munier, one of the few African-American comic writers, and a tribute to the great funk musician George Clinton. B-ball related poetry and comics are salted throughout. U Don’t Stop, like all zines, reads like a labor of love. One of the co-editors, Jimmy "Stank" Smith, sets the personal tone of the zine early with his hand scrawled introductory rant. In conventional scruffy zine style, with crossed off words kept in the text, he blasts out an impassioned plea for independent thought, ending his extemporaneous riff with the evocation: "Power." Indeed, it is a powerful testimonial of the irrepressible spirit of independent communication.

Well, maybe not. A little digging reveals that the two editors of U Don’t Stop, Jimmy "Stank" Smith and John "Doc" Jay, are, in fact, copy writer and creative director, respectively, for the advertising firm of Wieden & Kennedy, the folks who sold us sneakers to Gil Scott-Heron’s "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and coined the famous DIY cry: Just Do It! Sure enough, the small print at the bottom of U Don’t Stop reads ©1998 Nike Inc. This is DIY Nike style.

Co-opting alternative culture, of course, is nothing new. Nike, adroit at strip-mining black youth culture for years, is actually a latecomer to the commercial harvest of the whiter alternative scene that zines represent. For years Dirt was a zine produced by the employees of the "Alternative Marketing" division of Warner records. The clothing chain Urban Outfitters churned out Slant (including a "punk rock" issue). The Body Shop still prints up Full Voice, a zine lauding those who are "rebelling against a system that just won’t listen" and encouraging others to do the same. Chris Dodge, professional librarian and zine bibliographer, estimates that there are dozens of these faux fanzines floating around out there.

What do corporations expect to reap in return from their zines? Not direct sales. Filled with the typical zine fare of rants, comics, interviews with musicians, and poetry, U Don’t Stop—like most other astroturf zines—doesn’t openly sell its patron’s products. True, the street ball heroes of the zine’s comic strip are wearing Nikes, and they’ve subsequently appeared on billboards in major urban markets, but this is low key stuff. When I called Wieden & Kennedy’s Jimmy Smith and asked him why the Nike logo was conspicuously absent from U Don’t Stop he explained that, "The reason [the zine] is done without a swoosh is that kids are very sophisticated. It ain’t like back in the day when you could do a commercial that showed a hammer hitting a brain: Pounding Headache. You know, it’s gotta be something cool that they can get into." The goal is to create an association between the brand and "something cool they can get into," that is, a genuine grass-roots alternative culture. As David Rheins, former advertising director for SPIN Magazine, wrote in the trade journal Mediaweek, "It is not enough to merely package the right marketing message in a creative execution—it is necessary to deliver it in an environment that holds credibility with this audience." In more colloquial language Smith puts it this way: "If you’ve got them feeling you, you’ve won half the battle."

Advertisers, like zinesters, understand that commercial culture lacks authenticity. Built on instrumental market relationships—where people are considered a means to an end and not an end in themselves—capitalism is forever alienating the very individuals it relies upon to work, vote, and, in this case, buy. "Kids hate advertising," U Don’t Stop’s Smith explains, "If they hate advertising and you’re doing advertising, to me it sounds like you’ve got a little bit of a problem." Ironically, it’s alternative culture like zines that offer a solution, providing a primary expression of people’s lives and dreams: do-it-yourself authenticity. If properly packaged, the ideas, styles, and media of the underground provide material to renew and refresh the very culture they are created in opposition to. As Business Week reported in a special feature on new strategies in marketing, advertisers are now looking to "hide their corporate provenance." The report continues: "The idea is to fake an aura of colorful entrepreneurship as a way to connect with younger consumers who yearn for products that are hand-made, quirky, and authentic." An example Business Week offers of this fakery? No surprise: "mock ‘zines’."

Many progressives—and zinesters—like to think of The System as a gray, pleasure-stomping behemoth. It is that. The rabble have to be kept in line and the best way to do this in a society where the jackboot is frowned on is to impose a uniform set of values and norms. The system is also something else: it’s a consumer capitalist economy that depends on new ideas and new styles to open up new markets and sell more goods. "We track the movements among these progressive mind-sets," explains Janine Lopiano-Misdom and Joanne De Luca, co-founders of The Sputnik Mindtrends Report and authors of the recent Street Trends: How Today’s Alternative Cultures are Creating Tomorrow’s Mainstream Markets, "and interpret them into actionable opportunities for marketing, new product development, brand management and advertising." For the authors of Street Trends, anything and everything "progressive" becomes grist for the marketing mill, as chapter titles like "Positive Anarchy" and, you guessed it, "DIY: Do It Yourself," attest. In this environment, rebelling through culture means working as an unpaid intern for a market research firm.

But this sober realization needn’t lead to a miserable fit of the blues. The dance continues, and faced with the discovery and commercialization of their culture, zine writers move on, some even poaching styles from the culture that stole from them. Carrie McLaren, for example, named her zine Stay Free!, pirating the name from a product that once promised women’s liberation via the shining path of no-slide sanitary napkins. She’s also picked up design tips from the slick, commercial magazines that Nike et al. are so desperate to distance themselves from. As Carrie points out, using a personal computer for desk-top publishing means that it’s actually easier to make her publication look "professional" than it is to replicate the old amateur aesthetic of zines. Besides, she adds, making her zine look nice means that more people will read what she has to say. This is important, for while the look of zines may be changing their message is not.

"I’m an asshole" reads the ad copy over a picture of a self-satisfied man showing off his sport utility vehicle on the back cover of Stay Free! #15, "And I’ve got the vehicle to prove it. My expensive SUV." From fake ads to interviews with media critics to a satirical quiz on how to "Test Your Book’s Oprah Quotient" (Your protagonist is caught up in… A repressive political regime, -20 points; Problems at home, +50 points), Stay Free! mercilessly exposes, lampoons, and slaggs consumer culture from cover to cover. But in the spirit of DIY, the zine proposes something more: fighting the system. The tactic, however, that Stay Free! counsels is not retreat into some authentic subculture but moving out into the world, learning from the big boys, and employing the language and symbols that—for better or worse—constitute our lingua franca. Carrie and her friends, for example, staged a mock public salute to the Golden Marble children’s advertising awards being held in New York City. Dressed as Goldie the Weasel, they handed out comic books "celebrating" the most egregious abuses of corporate America in their quest for the hearts and dollars of young people. As Carrie writes in her—carefully typeset—opening editorial in issue #14, "to fight a good fight you must access the enemy’s power, and to see your own role in it, before deciding where to go from there."

Jean Railla, editor of the web-zine Crafty Lady, feels liberated by the direction that Stay Free! and her own—carefully crafted and digitally rendered—zine have gone, shifting emphasis away from preconceived style and toward what really matters: content and process. "It’s not shocking to me that corporations are putting out fake zines. It makes total sense given the state of advertising in this culture."

"It used to make me sick; it was all the more reason to retreat into the subculture," Jean explains, acknowledging that "this separatism really limited my scope and view of the world." "Now," she reflects, "I try to focus on saying what I want to say...and on the fact that girls out in the middle of Kansas still make zines for one another. The activity of making zines is what is really important—and all the marketing in the world cannot change that."

The left, like bohemia, has long held as an article of faith that certain stances, styles, and representations embody certain—progressive or conservative—politics. It’s time to lose that religion. Sure, I’m disgusted by Nike’s looting of my beloved zine culture, just as I shudder each time I hear "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" as an ad jingle. But I also feel a curious sense of relief. The easy expropriation of even the most rebellious culture should open our eyes to the fact that pat notions about the "politics of representation," "cultures of resistance," and "authenticity" are hopelessly outdated. In our free-wheeling, postmodern playhouse of a world: Image is Nothing. No, wait, that’s the ad copy for a Sprite commercial.                                       Z

Stephen Duncombe is the author of Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. He is an activist in New York City and teaches Media Studies at NYU’s Gallatin School.