May 7, 2005
freaked out about the iPod
After spending several hours in the Apple Store Soho a week ago and being bombarded with the classic dancing silhouettes from various ipod ad campaigns from all directions, I must disclose my discomfort with depictions of the body, race, the individual, and general ‘hipness’ these campaigns infuse into the sale of albeit charming products.
I was a visitor to Apple Soho the day after the New York Times reported that 50 iPods have been stolen on NYC subways this year due to owners being easily identifiable (the distinctive white earbuds). Luckily, iPod theft represents a smaller number than cell phone theft on the subway… This is also after realising that with over 10 million iPods sold in Feb 2005 every single person in this city, and then some, could wear the thin white sash as a badge of honour. There are great figures online for the success of the iPod, such as “1.79 iPods sold every minute in 2003” and 300 million downloads from the music store marking an extreme shift in technology and cultural distribution/consumption. In fact we now have fans making ads for Apple.
I could write an entire essay about this (and either should, or someone may have already done so). Please talk a moment to take another look at the U2 music-video-ad and the iPod Shuffle ad
featuring the song “Jerk It Out” by The Caesars.
The separation of body and song, or more specifically, body and voice in media are compelling sites for questioning representation altogether. In the iPod ads, the faceless, featureless dancing afro-wearing women or dread-locked “shadow’ male dancers– literally with their identities erased save for hair and jewellery as markers of race—gyrate to U2 and other primarily white pop music groups.
Somehow the ads eerily remind me of the Hollywood “dubbing” phenomenon. African American filmmaker, writer and director Julie Dash explored these issues in her 1983 film Illusions, in which an African American woman, passing for white, works in Hollywood alongside an African American woman who does not pass and dubs songs for white actresses in the film industry. In real life, this kind of ventriloquism was common: for example, Nina Mae McKinney, a black actress, appeared in the film Reckless (1935) only via voice: she was the singer who in fact dubbed Jean Harlow’s songs in the film. Etta Moten Barnett, a singer who appeared in the 1942 production of ‘Porgy and Bess, dubbed for Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers and other actresses. She is also the earnest black singer in the Busby Berkeley musical The Gold Diggers of 1933,’ (belting out “Remember My Forgotten Man,” the huge war spectacle and appeared in the film– but she was not even listed in the credits). Eleanor Roosevelt invited her to Washington and she was the first black woman to sing in the White House.
A strange inversion of this trend was the singing in Otto Preminger’s adaptation of the opera Carmen, Carmen Jones (1954). Marilyn Horne (white) was the singing voice for Dorothy Dandridge (African American) Harry Belafonte was also dubbed in this film. In this case, a white
opera singer works to affect a ‘jazzy’ African American vernacular singing style as the voice of an African American actress. Marilyn Horn also was the voice for a Asian actress in “Flower Drum Song.”
((Mick Hurbis-Cherrier, filmmaker and film scholar, Hunter College, and Jeff Smith, Black Faces, White Voices: The Politics Of Dubbing In Carmen Jones. The Velvet Light Trap 51 (2003) pp. 29-42))
There is something significant– and odd –at stake in this mix of gender, racial, and cultural dislocation / ventriloquism / eradication of features in favour of the silhouette together with the magical promise of solitary transcendence promoted by the funky, dancing, lonely figures marking meaning of the iPod. The advertising for this product seems to foreground assumptions about race, music, and popular culture, selling products to primarily privileged individuals while projecting the urban techno-dance-hipster as potentially a silhouette of color. I hope this stirs the discussion pot.
May 7th, 2005 at 9:11 pm
Mary, thanks for the thoughts on this. My gloss of the iPod publicity campaign – which I think I told Noah about at some point, beneath enormous iPod ad banners at 30th Street Station – is pretty much “buy an iPod, it’ll make you black.”
The joke of course is that every iPod shadow-model is literally black in color, whatever the race of the person happens to be. While there is a suggestion that an iPod will impart you with soul, the device isn’t supposed to make you into a specific black person. Hence, as you point out, the ads show only inviting silhouettes, erasing the individuality of the people appearing in them.
I would imagine that there are important differences between iPod ads and dubbed voices in 1930s and 1940s films, however. Those dubbings (if I understand correctly) were used in a way that erased racial identity as well as the performer’s individuality, making a singer into a “voice donor” for another person who got all the credit. The iPod ads, on the other hand, don’t try to entirely erase black models/actors; they just melt them into a positive, hip stereotype, which the consumer is then invited to participate in.
I guess in my hypothetical essay about iPod advertising, I’d want to note that an ad campaign’s foregrounding the body and racial/gender/cultural identity at all is a somewhat bold move for Apple Computer. This is a company that might just as easily use ads with banal abstraction (“Where do you want to go today?”) or with imagery of grinning, productive corporate drones, multi-racial and brainwashed. (Even then, IBM’s “Solutions for a Small Planet” ad campaign reached beyond these more trite computer-company standbys, and I’m sure there are other examples.) I’d also want to know how the ad campaign for the iPod differed from the one for the Sony Walkman and other similar products. Does modern advertising just tend to reshape and play with racial identity in all cases, or is Apple’s campaign special in some way?
May 7th, 2005 at 9:32 pm
The goal of these ads is not to de-emphasize individuality, but rather to emphasize the product. If you could see who was dancing, the ads would be rather me-too and forgettable. The silhouetting, on the other hands, makes these ads iconic, and turned iPod into the name brand MP3 player. This is largely by making the iPod itself iconic, with its recognizable white box and earbuds.
I don’t think race has anything to do with it. And if I may be so bold, I’d say that many of these dancers dance like white folk. Black was chosen because it contrasts well with the white iPod. The result is truly sharp and memorable visual design.
I also don’t think that erasing one’s individuality has anything to do with it. Apple advertising has always embraced individuality (remember ‘Think different’?) and the iPod ads that have started for the Shuffle have talked about the sanctity of your own playlist.
Indeed, when I see an iPod ad that shows 10 people dancing in 10 unique and special ways to the same song, I see people finding their own unique interpretation of the song -i.e. individuality. If anything, seeing the blacked out silhouettes enforces this sense, saying it’s all about the music, man.
May 7th, 2005 at 10:31 pm
Sorry, not buying in.
If one follows Apple’s post-Jobs-second-coming advertisements, and of course the advertisements from before Jobs being drummed out, the basic fact is that Apple Computer encourages design firms to go for stark, eye-catching and wide-spectrum ads that promote the inherent design/functionality of their products. Jobs has gone on the record multiple times about his reliance on design firms to increase the “uniqueness” of the promoted Apple Lifestyle, and he himself lives in a functionally minimal way that he has partially applied to the firm itself. (Hence his choice of chef for the cafeteria and involvement in color schemes and factory design).
For the ipod, we have ads with silhouette figures dancing with nicely animated white earbuds hanging down to the held ipods. Stark, intense, and eye-catching. Just like the “Switch” ad campaign, with the wide variety of folks standing in front of stark backgrounds talking about their experiences, edited for speed and intensity. Before that we had shots of dark and quiet city streets, with people walking by iMacs and the iMacs turning to regard them. We even had iMac ads devoid of humans altogether.
And what of the Apple “Think Different” campaign, with its unusual and interesting little-seen alternate-icon photographs of celebrities and world-changers, including a good amount of Black faces? Do you see evil there, too?
If you’re going to play the “design color = race” game, find a better target than Apple and their unique and interesting ad campaigns that span 30 years.
You can “stir the discussion” pot with something other than a misplaced stun grenade.
May 7th, 2005 at 11:29 pm
i knew touching a much loved company like Apple and a much loved product like the iPod was going to be unpopular.
But critical thinking still needs to be done.
Damion has a great observation about the visual contrast and the ‘markers of individuality.’ What about the u2 pod?
I do not believe that a discussion of race and advertising is a “stun grenade.” In fact, I think perhaps finding some counter examples would be beneficial to the arguments here, doing a comparative analysis as nick suggests; ie looking at SONY ads etc.
Apple is a business like any other, and in their campaigns, the designers work in particualar times, places, scenarios towards particular commercial results. Thinking critically about this process and the products of these processes is one of the things grandtextauto (I hope) is all about.
May 8th, 2005 at 1:11 am
Be not so quick to characterize this as a case of reaction against a beloved brand, especially in my case. I have never owned an iPod, iMac, iBook, or really any Apple products made since 1991. But I do watch their ads, and I do have historical books on the subject of the company.
In the United States, race is a grenade in the conversational salad; it totally derails a lot of minor subtle discussions in favor of sweeping ones. I don’t see where that would be different here.
In terms of counter examples, I gave you 20 years of them. Or did you want a photo album? I could probably whip one of those up.
The thesis of your paragraph strikes me the same as a pundit I recall in my youth on a talk show who declared quite insistently that the giving of chocolates on Valentine’s day was a subconscious implication of black sexual power by whites. It was great television. It stirred the discussion pot. It was not a great argument.
May 8th, 2005 at 4:08 am
I’ll have to join the people who think the sillhouetting in ads and solid-color design is simply Apple’s longstanding minimalist style of industrial design, not some sort of attempt to render people faceless. This is what they’ve done for years: stark outlines, simple shapes and figures, solid colors, a high-contrast figure/ground distinction, and so on.
The whole discussion about black people dubbing white people’s music and voices and vice-versa strikes me as odd as well, relying on a racialist assumption to even be coherent. Why should I assume that the color of someone’s skin is a prime determinant of how suitable they are to dub someone else’s voice? Are you going to tell me next that someone with green eyes shouldn’t dub a voice for someone with brown eyes? Skin-color may correlate with culture better than eye color does, but not perfectly, and indeed the correlation is weaker now than it has been in the past (a trend I hope continues, since I have no use for the pseudo-scientific fiction of “race”).
May 8th, 2005 at 6:32 am
I think that the dislocation of identity, illustrated in Mary’s examples, is basically an effort at “engineering” humans to cross cultural boundaries without tripping any alarms. Those examples involve race, but I this can apply to cultural divisions in general. I think that something similar occurs when millionaire athletes endorse products that they obviously do not need.
May 8th, 2005 at 1:04 pm
Mark, I think you’re misreading Mary’s post. In particular, I don’t think she shares this assumption you’re trying to pin on her, and I certainly don’t:
The whole discussion about black people dubbing white people’s music and voices and vice-versa strikes me as odd as well, relying on a racialist assumption to even be coherent. Why should I assume that the color of someone’s skin is a prime determinant of how suitable they are to dub someone else’s voice?
As I understand it, black singers/actors generally couldn’t get any other work in Hollywood in the 1930s or 1940s – the only performance roles that were open to them were ones that rendered them invisible and made them into prosthetic voices for white people.
Pointing out this historical situation doesn’t require you to denounce all sorts of interracial dubbing. Rather, it seems to mainly bemoan the very limited ways in which blacks could participate in the film industry. What’s incoherent or radicalist about saying that black performers shouldn’t have been limited to such roles?
May 8th, 2005 at 3:20 pm
There is a long-standing tradition of silhouette portraiture that eventually died out when photography came on the scene.
It was a technique easily done by everyone, and therefore was sort of a “people’s portrait”.
It was not considered a “faceless” rendering in the manner you imagine it, and there is in fact a famous one of George Washington which gives his living impression better than any portrait.
May 8th, 2005 at 3:36 pm
Nick,
As I understand it, black singers/actors generally couldn’t get any other work in Hollywood in the 1930s or 1940s – the only performance roles that were open to them were ones that rendered them invisible and made them into prosthetic voices for white people.
Pointing out this historical situation doesn’t require you to denounce all sorts of interracial dubbing. Rather, it seems to mainly bemoan the very limited ways in which blacks could participate in the film industry. What’s incoherent or radicalist about saying that black performers shouldn’t have been limited to such roles?
My reading of it as a more general attack on interracial dubbing (or blurring of racial boundaries in general) was because she also pointed out, with what seemed to me an air of disapproval, the reverse situation, where Marilyn Horne (white) dubbed songs for a black actress. Presumably a white woman wasn’t forced into this dubbing role because passing for black women was the only way white women could get jobs in Hollywood.
I may be misunderstanding, and perhaps Mary doesn’t see anything wrong with Ms. Horne dubbing for Ms. Dandridge, but it seemed she was implying there was. In particular, there seems to be the implication that Ms. Horne, by virtue of her skin color, was ill-suited to “affect a ‘jazzy’ African American vernacular singing style as the voice of an African American actress”.
May 8th, 2005 at 3:49 pm
To add something I forgot from that post, another observation would be that this sort of thing is not particularly unusual or problematic in Hollywood anyway. For example, Anthony Quinn, a Mexican-American actor, played the leading role in Zorba the Greek. Despite the fact that I’m Greek, I don’t find this particularly alienating or offensive. Had Greek dialog been part of the film, hiring a fluent Greek native speaker would make some sense so as to avoid annoying me, but again there would be no need for him to be ethnically Greek, merely fluent in the Greek language.
May 8th, 2005 at 4:44 pm
Jason D.’s comment reminds me of The Adventures of Prince Achmed, a 1926 film made entirely using silhouette cut-outs, which in fact stakes a claim to being the first full-length animated film. IIRC many of the characters in the film have specific ethnicity, although maybe this follows more from context than from the artwork.
May 9th, 2005 at 6:52 pm
What about the u2 pod?
As a former advertising major, this ad bugged the hell out of me, largely because it broke rhythm with the rest of the campaign. Instead of no-name bands, you had a megaband. Instead of several people dancing and finding their own rhythm, you had shots of the band, and to make matters worse, you could see Bono’s face.
You could tell that U2 only agreed to let them do the song for the campaign if the ad centered on them. From my point of view, it’s kind of a shame, although I think it certainly worked out for both the band and the iPod.
May 15th, 2005 at 3:48 am
Got to hand it to them though, the two latest ads (at least I think they’re new), Rollerskating and Technologic are just fucking awesome, among the best ads in recent memory, IMO. Daft Punk happens to be my favorite band.
May 26th, 2005 at 8:38 pm
Nice try, but it seems pretty cut-and-dry to me: White boys can’t dance.
PS: Since when is jewelry a marker of race?
April 17th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
I think you’re blowing this way out of proportion- they are just commercials that are trying to sell a product and -as we all know- they are doing a damn good job of it. What works, works and this works. It’s not a stab at blacks or whites or any other race.