Today is Black Friday to most Americans – also known as International Buy Nothing Day to fans of the magazine Adbusters and consumption-criticals everywhere. If you haven’t been paying attention Black Friday is not the highest volume e-commerce day of the year anymore and hasn’t been for a hot minute. That honor goes to a newer Chinese tradition called Singles Day, celebrated on 11-11, where single adults who are not close with their extended families buy gifts for themselves.
Depending on your perspective this sea change in relative buying habits is either foreboding or encouraging but it does show the growing status of the Chinese population as consumers rather than pure producers. Regardless Black Friday is a huge deal in the United States – both for its importance in keeping the economy alive and the news stories about dangerous stampedes and physical altercations over the final shelf stock of any must-have markdown.
The original naming almost certainly was meant to use “black” in a negative context but merchants have been trying to rebrand it as the day the profit margin transitions from red (operating at a loss) to black (earning a profit) ink. I’ve never liked the holiday because I started paying attention to my family’s finances relatively young.
I knew we didn’t have much money and I was distressed to see my parents spending more than they could afford on what was mostly disposable plastic junk. By extension I started to view the entire Holiday Season as a kind of binge-purge approach to spending for Americans at large. Not long after some school friends began showing me Adbusters which used slick graphic design and other advertising techniques to critique rather than condone consumer culture.
Buy Nothing Day was created in Canada in 1992 but it wasn’t until 1997 that the International was tacked on and the date was set to overlap Black Friday. Before that it had been observed on a seemingly random day sometime in Autumn. Looking at the timeline I almost certainly saw the Adbusters issue where the first International Buy Nothing Day was announced and have made an effort, with varying levels of success, to observe it ever since.
That effort has been almost purely symbolic. I can’t realistically survive without buying things – I live an hour from the closest large city on a tract of land covered with different species of pine. I’m set for wood and water but in terms of life sustaining calories there’s nothing much I can get my hands on. My cats sometimes leave for weeks at a time so they can but I’m much larger and useless at hunting.
Eventually I can see myself clearing a few acres of forest to get serious about subsistence agriculture but as for now I view myself as a kind of steward. There are already way more acres of clear cut farmland than old growth forest in this nation and the world. The infrastructure to bring food goods vast distances it incredibly unsustainable but for now it’s here. It makes more sense to me to just use what already exists and leave the trees to do their important work converting carbon dioxide back to oxygen.
In the event of catastrophic economic collapse that would probably change.
In this piece I won’t be talking about consumption in terms of buying physical objects but instead the content consumption of the things intended to make us want to: commercial logos and well executed advertising campaigns. Of course it’s entirely possible to enjoy these things on an aesthetic level without having any intention of throwing money at the thing they are promoting. For someone like me who still identifies as anti-consumerist the questions become thornier when these campaigns are either directed at specific youth culture movements, or the corporations start “altruistically” supporting artists within those movements.
I have every intention of celebrating Buy Nothing Day today but ironically WordPress just sent me an e-mail about Black Friday discounts on various paid subscription plans. Along with giving me access to various widgets that would make this page more user friendly and easier to navigate these plans would give me the option to remove advertisements entirely or keep them in place but monetize my traffic. I won’t be getting one but the pros and cons of doing so, in the larger context of this piece, feel especially poignant.
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In 1998 when I started my year at San Francisco State University the school was at the center of a music scene that specifically centered its population of Japanese exchange students. Moving from least specific to most specific it was an indie rock/pop phenomenon heavily inspired by the twee pop variety that was often referred to as J-pop – a bit of a misnomer as we weren’t talking about mainstream Japanese pop and idol groups but more underground artists like Pizzicato 5 and Cornelius along with local groups with Japanese members like The Fairways and The Aislers Set.
Michale Eberhard from the group Wussom*Pow! was booking shows in a space called The Depot in the student union that became the de facto center as a lot of the fans were underaged and East Bay all ages venues like 924 Gilman weren’t the best cultural fit. A small local label called Paris Caramel had just released both Wussom*Pow!’s first seven inch and a single from Japanese singer-songwriter Rocket or Chiritori who made a special trip to San Francisco to play a release party at the school.
J-Pop itself was fairly new as a descriptive term and the authoritative Japanese magazine on indie rock Beikoku Ongaku, or “American Music”, had only started publishing five years earlier in 1993. A big thing I remember about the crowd was that everybody wore brightly colored plastic Casio G-Shock watches and the smaller feminine marketed Baby G. I really wanted one in a way I had never before wanted a specific branded fashion accessory but they were way outside of my spending range.
It wasn’t gender neutral by any means – the Japanese students coming around to the shows were almost exclusively girls. I had a few Japanese boys in my classes but their interests seemed to be more centered on Hip-Hop and mainstream American fashion. I invited my friend Tetsunori (not the artist Tetsunori Tawaraya) from a Calculus study group to some of the shows but he didn’t seem interested.
Levi’s Silvertab had a big advertising campaign that year featuring rotoscope style geometric cartoon drawings of young hipsters in a fusion of indie rock and Hip-Hop street style reminiscent of the British band Portishead. They were hitting the streets hard – posters covered every available surface, especially around the school, and a full color Backpage ad graced every edition of the alternative weeklies on both sides of the Bay.
I always talked to a girl named Kanako in my Printmaking Class – she wasn’t into the same music scene and went for a slightly butch rocker look: short spiky hair, a Marilyn piercing, small gauges and a wallet chain. One day I was reading a music column while we were waiting for the instructor and she appreciatively stared at that week’s picture of plaid shirts, bucket hats and tribal tattoos:
“Oh, so cool!”
Her remark confused me. I really liked the visual style of the ads too but cool? I thought it was baked into the DNA of any alternative style that advertisements couldn’t be cool. I hadn’t really gotten into it but the grunge and pop-punk music favored by my Junior High and High School peers was fiercely anti-consumerist, the message was ubiquitous in mainstream Rom-Coms like Reality Bites and my more sophisticated friends passed around issues of the aforementioned magazine Adbusters.
I thought the memo had automatically gone out to all the members of my generation regardless of national origin. Corporate logos on clothing were ok as long as it was vintage dead stock from a Thrift Store and niche footwear brands like Doc Martens and TUK were ok but expressing genuine enthusiasm for anything a big name brand was marketing at us in real time was as outré as wearing your backpack on both straps.
I asked Kanako again in case I had misread her tone or it was a nuanced, linguistic lost-in-translation thing: no, she had meant the advertisement was actually cool and didn’t seem to understand why I thought it couldn’t be. In a larger youth trend adjacent context you could say her attitude was actually ahead of the curve in relation to mine but something in me goes through that same moment of culture shock every time I re-encounter it in the wild.
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In 2011 my sister and her husband were house sitting in Panama and convinced me to come down to visit. I saw many interesting things in the country including street cats with distinctively long noses roaming the capital and an isolated population of poison dart frogs marked with neon green smiley faces. When I went to a kind of indoor swap meet I noticed immediately that every clothing stall had variations on the same thing – Monster Energy and Zumba Fitness labels printed on every imaginable piece of active wear in a dizzying array of colors.
It didn’t hit me all at once – I used my money on this trip for vintage bottles an old German diver retrieved from the swamps around Bocas Town, mix tapes of merengue and Cumbias and some stylish yards of Japanese printed calicos the women of Kuna Yala use as wrap skirts. I bought printed bandanas where pairs of skeletons excitedly demonstrated an encyclopedic knowledge of possible sex positions as gifts for friends.
The Monster logo was like a bit of a tv jingle that had managed to slip into an ear undetected and had suddenly sprouted twin arms with aerosol Monster Cans to start bombing my brain. It was following the electrical signals like a NYC Subway and getting up heavy in both hemispheres to plaster the image onto my subconscious and desire centers. Where was I? I had one last Balboa, a locally minted coin, and the best place to spend it was an electronic horsie ride by my airport departure gate.
Monster Energy had its feet up on my executive function desk. I had dressed as a cowboy for this moment and had a clunky cassette deck queued up with Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters Don’t Fence Me In. I was a bit heavier than the small children the horse ride was intended for so every forward buck caused it to break inertia and jolt forward with me. As we approached the end of the song, and my boarding time, the power cord was finally pulled from the outlet by this progress and the horse immediately abandoned any further mockeries of life.
I don’t want to make a huge thing out of this or anything but I’m pretty sure… as I was boarding my plane… that nobody clapped or anything. Just a tiny glimpse into how legends are born. I fell asleep until it was time to go through US CUSTOMS and they took all my freaky, sneaky fruits away. No fruit part of the chocolate. No temporary tribal tattoo juice.
I suddenly couldn’t stop thinking about those wicked looking Monster garments – I’m sure I could have afforded a coral and turquoise half shirt or some electric lime bike shorts with the logo embroidered in cobalt blue. Why didn’t I buy any? Why would I have wanted to? The questions circled one another in my mind like newly adopted dogs searching for hierarchy in what was clearly a different kind of pack.
Not long after my sister and her husband were back in the states and he was picking my brain on what stocks I thought would be a good idea to invest in. My immediate thought was Monster Energy and he pulled up a price history chart – at that point it was still one of many beverages sold by Hansen’s Juice but that company was publicly traded and had seen recent, near exponential growth in its share price.
Hansen first launched Monster Energy in 2002. I had been seeing the drink’s growing share of the shelf space in wall coolers and had even got into the habit of drinking it while finishing up my degree at SDSU. This choice was purely a practical one – out of the three options Monster was the most effective for staying alert in class only because the jarring neon green themed flavor would snap me to attention with every sip.
After what I saw in Panama I knew the beverage was on its way up. If I had bought stock then and held onto it I’m sure I would have made money but that area isn’t really my mosh pit. I did try to invest in Zumba but the only available stock was for a shovelware company called Majesco Entertainment that licensed the Zumba games on the motion controlled Wii and other platforms.
I did actually buy a few shares in Majesco, then trading under the moronic symbol COOL, and watched it thrash around for a year or two before selling at a small loss. Zumba Fitness is more of a populist, physical participation themed brand – if I had seriously wanted to invest in Zumba my best option would have been to become a licensed instructor and start a class.
Anyway all of this is neither here nor there. I’m not here to talk about the rising and falling fortunes of corporations and the most effective methods to harness this wind for personal profit. The thing I want to talk about is a funhouse mirror version of Monster Energy’s steady uptick in market share: the ascendancy of the Monster logo itself as a semi-ironic counterculture sigil and fashion icon.
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2011 – The Monster logo had still been fermenting in the back of my consciousness but, unlike the situation in Panama, physical manifestations were harder to get one’s hands on in the United States. It’s possible that I was just in the wrong spaces and shirts would have been everywhere at rural truck stops or motocross events but my gut tells me the issue was more about time than space. Early 2012 was the event horizon for the Monster logo reaching the same kind of space as the peace sign, smiley face and “cool” S before it.
Of course influence between corporations and subcultures doesn’t only move in one direction. The designers of the scratch mark logo and distinctive lettering were clearly drawing from the aesthetics of ‘90s and early aughts Nu-Metal. The revival for this style of music and fashion wasn’t in full swing yet but the prescient use of the imagery left Monster poised in an advantageous position for when it would really kick off.
I was at a small Thrift Store in North Beverly Hills staffed exclusively by sarcastic and derisive older Orthodox Jewish women. I don’t know if I caught a little extra because their Jew-dar picked me up as a fellow tribe member but every single one of my requests and purchases was met with a few drops of venom. Hoping to find a replacement for my very recently departed Library of Congress Tape Player for the Blind I asked them if they carried electronics:
“No, you know who’s got that kind of stuff? Goodwill! They’ve got a whole room of that crap!”
Unfazed I went over to flip through the shirts and undergarments when it caught my eye. A black ribbed “wifebeater” undershirt with a neon green iron-on transfer of the Monster logo centered on the chest. It was marked down to a dollar so I grabbed it and brought it to the cash register. The woman rolled her eyes:
“Oh yeah, the Monstah shirt! I guess somebody had to buy it!”
Somebody did indeed. I started wearing it everywhere I went and it always seemed to get a big reaction out of people in one way or another. I went to a party at a trendy midcentury A-Frame in Glassell Park that was called The Cabin by George. It was the period of time when Sean Bowie, now recording as Yves Tumor, was making music with Andy from Snow Wite. When I walked into the party they were hanging out on the porch and Sean saw the shirt and tried to buy it from me.
It’s a pet peeve of mine when people treat me like I must have stumbled across some rare, sought out gem by accident because I couldn’t possibly understand or appreciate an object’s value. Bowie started low but when I said I wasn’t interested they quickly raised their offer to twenty bucks. It felt ridiculous – we were both grownups and knew exactly what twenty dollars was and wasn’t.
The point was you could find a twenty dollar bill anywhere but it wasn’t particularly easy to find a shirt with the Monster Energy logo on it. Not in early 2012 anyway. I want to be clear – I’m not trying to say I was some kind of prophet because of what I saw in Panama or make myself out to be the Typhoid Mary of thinking the Monster logo was cool. I want to first acknowledge the tremendous job the team at McLean Design pulled off with it and at the same time qualify that I don’t feel like I was particularly unique for reacting to it with desire: it was generational.
It was also almost certainly linked to the emergence of internet based “microgenres” that had kicked off the previous year with Seapunk. Bowie, then releasing music as Teams, had played a role in curating the specific set of tastes central to that movement so while I’m lightly chiding them for trying to literally buy the shirt off my back at the same time I must give credit to the role they’d played in aligning community-wide aesthetics around thinking it was cool in the first place.
It wasn’t just the Monster logo – at the beginning of the tweens corporate logos of every kind were a major trend in both street and high fashion. Generally they were used with neither the blessing nor knowledge of the brands they were purportedly “advertising” and a popular look was to completely saturate a garment with a whole bunch of them in the style of a sponsored race car driver’s jumpsuit.
Speaking very broadly it coincided with a kind of “rave revival” in underground music where things like ball chains, stylized auto detailing flames, tribal tattoos and low resolution digital patterns were also common touchstones. In a lot of ways it wasn’t super different from the look of the Levi’s Silvertab campaign from the beginning of this piece except to say it was more of an “everything bagel” with flavor notes from hippy, goth, rockabilly and pretty much every other subculture while also having a little over an additional decade of trends to pull from.
Every specific logo carried its own set of associations. For Monster Energy I’d say this would be monster trucks, extreme sports, “bro” culture and the nü-metal I’ve already touched on. No doubt some of these things were on the minds of Jacob and David from Extreme Animals when they printed the design on a series of shirts that same year. I don’t want to pretend I can speak for them though – it meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
I saw religious pamphlets about how the three lines of the stylized M were secretly Hebrew symbols for the number 6 and the Monster in the drink’s name was “The Beast” – Satan himself. I saw a decal on a truck’s back window where those same marks were cleverly transformed into the three crosses of Mount Calvary. I’m sure for many it was nothing more than a cool looking logo on a drink they loved.
Speaking purely for myself there were plenty of mental gymnastics I had to pull off to both embrace the logo and appease my inner anti-consumerist. The fact that Monster Energy themselves hadn’t given me the garment allowed me to pretend that instead of advertising I was “appropriating”. Nonetheless nobody who looked at my chest and saw the logo would have known the difference and at least once it must have encouraged a thirsty or low energy person to reach for a Monster the next time they were in the market for a beverage.
When I put my Monster shirt on and jazzed it up with a neon green zebra print silk shirt, layered lace bottom biking shirts in black and neon green, matching socks and finally a white blazer I had decorated the back of with a holographic Shrek picture I had cut into four slices and sewn into the pattern of the Black Flag logo I felt cool. Others thought so too – a group of cops in Chicago sacrificed a portion of their disinterested authority by asking me if I’d be kind enough to pose with them for a photo shoot.
My sentiments from my conversation with Kanako around fourteen years earlier hadn’t simply disappeared. I was pretending like I had a magic wand that could use different kinds of irony and the specific context within underground culture as a whole to transform the picture on my chest into something cool. At the same time I retained the core value that advertising and corporate logos were not and could never be “cool”.
How did that work you ask? That’s the neat part – it didn’t. Like the name of Metallica’s emotional documentary I was Some Kind of Monster. To be specific I was a hypocrite – The Hypo-creature from the Black Lagoon. Don’t let my freaky exoskeletal cartilage features or webbed fingers throw you off. I hide beneath the water’s oily surface because, in my heart of hearts, I’ve recognized myself as a poseur and feel shame when other’s gaze upon me.
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I want to finish this piece by exploring a slightly different concept that has been growing within and leaving its stamp on our underground: the corporation as patron of the arts. All kinds of brands have been putting their money where their marketing is and holding art contests for cash and connections, sponsoring concerts or entire music festivals as well as art institutions or exhibits, performative contributions for politically charged causes and the list goes on and on.
It’s impossible to have a single opinion about all of this sort of thing when specific instances can present as near opposites. Stenciling a logo for a bank on the wall marking an exhibit’s starting point is miles away from a promotion I saw at Subway Restaurants in Chicago between 1999 and 2001. The name of this promotion was “Starving Artist Contest” and the posters digitally altered one of Modigliani’s self portraits to place hearty looking photorealistic reproductions of popular footlong subs in his hands.
It was the one on North Avenue in Chicago and I was only in the lot for a minute. My friends and I had gotten pulled over leaving the projects and everyone in the car swallowed our drugs. We convinced the cops that 1) we had not copped yet and 2) the fact that none of us had any money wasn’t inconsistent with that. The story was we were hoping to promise the guys in the project stairwell that we were good for it and if they fronted us product we would most certainly return with cash.
That got the cops off our backs. The next step was to pull into the Subway lot so that we could all try to gag ourselves until the drugs came back up. We figured it was Saint Patrick’s Day and we would merely blend in with the other people trying to induce vomiting to rid the body of dangerous alcohol levels all over the city.
I couldn’t gag at all due to the sword swallower training I’d started so I turned my attention to the poster instead. Modigliani seemed like an odd choice – was the designer aware that he had suffered from hunger, even periods of full-on starvation, that doubtlessly caused complications when he started dealing with tuberculosis? Was the message that he may have fared better had he thought to trade some of his works for long and overstuffed sandwiches that could be completed with the perfect mix of meats, cheeses, vegetables, sauces and spices tailored specifically for his tastes?
No need for the pale and sallow creatures that filled his canvases and ensured his fame. The contest was loosely based on such an idea. They wanted amateur artists to create works within several mediums that featured and paid tribute to the Subway sandwich. The three levels of prizes were $50, $75 and $100 gift cards redeemable for food so that the most talented might eat enough to raise their energies and ensure long term survival.
If my tone wasn’t obvious I consider this kind of patronage distasteful. Inclusion of corporate product compromises what might have been fine art and brings it down to the echelons of commercial art. The only way around this is, in it’s simplest form, Andy Warhol’s Campbell Tomato Soup Cans. By not asking permission, changing the ways the cans might display and leaning into his reputation as an untrustworthy showman and provocateur who spoke in riddles and outright lies he demoted corporate imagery to the role of “readymades” and thereby preserved his fine artist credentials.
A few years later there started to be a trend for beverage companies to support some of our shows, events, festivals and other happenings. I wrote about this already in a piece called Vitamin Rat where you can read an earlier, less thought out version of many of these thoughts.
Brooklyn 2007 : Vitamin Rat
Not to say it isn’t worth a click but if you don’t feel like doing that now it boils down to 1) I’m fine with them providing things for us to drink free of charge 2) I would prefer not to hold the can and look like I’m having fun for the camera and 3) If I am enjoying myself and become so distracted I don’t notice such a picture being taken I will not demand swift erasure but I will dwell on it and think badly toward the situation for at least a day or two.
Actually the piece is really about drunkenly wearing a dead rat until Twig Harper throws it into Vitamin Water coolers but we contain multitudes so both that and this are different parts of me.
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I want to spend time on the Tylenol Ouch! campaign before making my way to Liquid Death for the big conclusion. Tylenol set their eyes on the Post-Fort Thunder Greater New England arts ecosystem. Maybe not just there but that’s where I saw the most of it. Japanese influenced artist’s vinyl toys were having a moment and Ron Regé Jr. collaborated with both Tylenol and Kid Robot to produce a limited run of The Ouch! Twins.
They were small sculptures of red headed children in his distinctive style that came in metal tins suggesting early twentieth century farm living. The children have poor clothing, a variety of marks on their faces and soulful sad eyes. Tylenol is not invoked directly anywhere on the toys themselves but the theme of pain is present and can lead to thoughts on the analgesic of choice for treating it.
Was Ron satisfied with a small trade off for a big opportunity to work in a new medium and expose his work to the toy space? Would I have been? These questions are hard to answer so instead I will look at another instance where Tylenol appears in the work of a New England underground cartoonist.
Brian Chippendale is best known as the “hit things” half of noise-rock duo Lightning Bolt but is also known for being among the original architects of the Fort Thunder artist’s collective and drawing densely filled pages of often wordless comics that move from panel to panel under a unique system styled after the crawling movements of a snake.
I forget the year and title of this particular comic but I believe it involved pirates on a boat. A captain character complains of headache so another character offers TYLENOL™️ in an explosion of aplomb. The captain spits at the deck in disgust:
“Tylenol? Never touch the shit! It gives me the ague! Might anybody have some aspergum?“
I’m sure my memory is failing me and I’m butchering his perfectly selected words but I hope that I’ve captured the gist in both content and energy. I was particularly impressed by this unequivocal statement when so many of his peers were accepting the Tylenol money in exchange for a little help.
It seems like nearly everybody could have used a little help right then but there’s a question that always troubles me with these kinds of arrangements. What does this “free help” actually cost? It seems like we may never know and I’ve never even gotten this type of offer to begin with but regardless of that it keeps me up at night.
The last I saw of this particular campaign was a free recording included in copies of Vice Magazine by mellow folk and electronic artist White Magic. The packaging included the word OUCH! on the back where you’d usually see the name of the label. I guess it was the label. I listened to it but can’t remember if she sang about pain in any form and kind of wonder if they’d asked her to.
It wasn’t the kind of music that could give people headaches.
[Author’s Note: I’ve misremembered and it was a CD-EP including both White Magic and American Analog Set with the on-brand title Songs of Hurt and Healing]
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A few months ago I found myself doing a research project. I was going off a couple of comments on an old street art piece that referred to a yoga sex cult with fancy computers that might have been squatting an old San Diego theater. After a whole lot of chasing false leads I hit up an old friend who broke the whole thing open.
The spot I was looking for was a legitimately rented collective artist’s workspace and computer lab at Sixth and Broadway called The Loft. The space stuck around from ‘93 to ‘99 and the cult kept their fingers in a lot of pies but mutually advantageous cooperation was possible without joining whole cloth – for a time at least. I got set up with Rex Edhlund: an artist about a generation ahead of me who was the “get shit done” guy for the good years.
He’s been very helpful in the pieces I’ve written so far on the place and I still need to type up our more recent “brass tacks” talk about how the cult first came, the building sold and an assortment of other fascinating details. I’ll get to it but let’s not let it bog us down now – more important is that I started following him on Facebook.
He posted some pictures of a customized car event and I was impressed by the airbrush hood work at the beginning of this section. I used to have a white Caballero (GMC El Camino) and I’d been planning on getting the cover art from the original Castlevania game done in a similar style. Thankfully I didn’t because it died on me not long after.
I looked closer at the severed heads and axe wielding Barbarian when I realized that instead of a helmet his entire head had been replaced by a can of Liquid Death. For those unfamiliar it is a younger springwater company that uses aluminum cans instead of plastic bottles to reduce environmental impact – their marketing uses lots of Heavy Metal and skull imagery.
I commented about how something that seemed cool now seemed less cool because it was intended to advertise a certain beverage. Rex replied that such is not the case and, it must be acknowledged, received two likes for doing so. I hadn’t managed even a single react.
I started to wonder if my dogmatic but inconsistent taboo about never allowing marketing to be viewed as “cool” was either generational, something Edhlund had matured past or most troubling of all strictly a “me” problem. My attitude really does fall apart the moment you begin to view it with a critical eye.
I had wanted to paint the cover of a Nintendo game published by Konami on my own car and while neither company would have requested or funded this art piece they both still sell products including games, gyms and casino machines. How could it be said that I wouldn’t be “marketing” for them? Clearly I would.
I toured the US and spent a lot of time in the Los Angeles night life with a Monster Energy logo on my chest. Let’s ignore my bullshit magical thinking about why this “didn’t count” for now and just view the two drinks head to head. Monster is full of artificial colors and flavors and is known for getting young children into consuming large amounts of sugars and using the stimulant caffeine earlier than usual. Both cans are made of aluminum but it stands to reason that Monster’s canning operation is likely less environmentally enlightened than whatever Liquid Death is working with.
What began as a natural fruit juice company where a father and three sons brought whole unsweetened juices to film lots in the 1930s bears little resemblance to this origin today.
Liquid Death sells pure natural spring water. I’m not sure if they do a better job at not depleting entire springs and watersheds than the big name CG-ROXANE but my first instinct would be yes. Switching the plastic bottle for aluminum is about how much more efficient and environmentally friendly recycling the metal is compared to the plastic. An added benefit is that the beer can style design may help bar and festival patrons stay hydrated while drinking alcohol.
In the comparison between the two Liquid Death clearly comes out on top but my biggest concerns have little to do with that. What actually bothers me the most is the way that the artist was required to incorporate the product into the final art piece. It’s entirely possible that the airbrusher in question does not consider himself a fine artist and to make me sound even more inconsistent I would not feel the same way if he were hired to paint eye-catching promotional images on the personal vehicle of an up and coming independent beverage marketer.
I know I’m almost certainly in the wrong while Edhlund is more on point but I can’t help myself. It still feels less cool and less genuine than it would if the drink wasn’t part of the painting. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over this or when the next time will be I find myself spinning complex fictions to justify rocking the latest logo I’ve fallen in love with but for now neither of these things seem to matter.
For better or worse it’s who I am.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 