Politix stink. They make me sick. I’ve learned my lesson and I’ll never go near them again.
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Politix may be the most interesting Moonlight Tobacco product, but the entire Moonlight line (as pictured in the glossy, full-color insert that’s been in the Reader and other alternative papers lately) has been clearly designed with this obfuscation in mind. First, Moonlight cigarettes make exemplary use of the latest device in the culture of evasion, the advertising strategy that the New York Times calls “stealth parentage.” Who manufactures Moonlight cigarettes? The ads don’t mention R.J. Reynolds (although the packages do): they imply, rather, that the cigarettes are made by friendly Dirk and his partner Diane, who are “working overtime for you.” Similar stealth strategies have appeared in many sectors of the consumer economy over the last few years: items with peculiar brand names that loudly proclaim themselves to be the products of tiny, home-grown operations but are in fact the usual conglomerate through-put. The tactic has been used in the music industry for a long time, with each of the culture giants spawning or, better yet, acquiring a fake independent label just as soon as the “alternative” craze began to seem reliably exploitable. It probably reached its apogee in the beer business, where pressure from microbreweries has forced the majors to spin off all sorts of mysterious (but still flavorless) subbrands like Ice House and Red Dog, products of the friendly “Plank Road Brewery,” which just happens to have the same address as the Miller Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Stealth marketing is even found in such unlikely corners of the economy as greeting cards (Hallmark’s “Shoebox” line) and automobiles (GM’s Saturn). The genius of stealth is not that it tricks people or that it hijacks hip, but that it helps to render the ugly details of production increasingly remote and invisible: these are products that appear from nowhere and are said to be made by fictional characters. There’s not a multinational corporation in sight.
The corporate masterminds behind Moonlight Tobacco have taken this transient marketing fad quite a few steps further, developing from it an entire aesthetic of fake. For example, inventive packaging, rather than contents (the tobacco stuff), is what distinguishes Moonlight from other RJR lines. “I believe that there is an opportunity to let people be a little more expressive with their smokes,” Dirk Herrman says. “There are very few products that people carry with them, you know, pull out of their pocket 20 times a day.” This is not an innovation in itself: cigarettes have long been sold almost entirely by image. What is remarkably strange is the precise image that is for sale here. What Moonlight offers is not a fun-loving couple or a suave sophisticate but, again, that curious fancy at the heart of the consumer daydream: ironic detachment from the realities of social existence, pure and total. There’s Politix for the smoker who wants to snicker at the idea of political transformation, and there’s City for those who prefer old-fashioned notions of social life as ironic fodder. A long, slim brand called Metro, Moonlight’s answer to Virginia Slims, offers women what must be the ultimate ironic frisson of imminent death, its packages depicting a society dame of some long-past era stepping insouciantly in front of a locomotive. (You’re not afraid of danger–you’ve come a long way, baby!) Cities, politics, and cool death are now lifestyle signifiers as distant and as dreamy as the cowboys of Marlboro and the castles of Kent: things so far removed from everyday life that they have meaning only as smoke, a statement you pull out of your pocket 20 times a day.
The genius of Nike’s campaign is its brazenness. It anticipates what is obviously going to be a widespread negative reaction–My God, this is the most hypocritical load of shit I’ve ever seen! What was Gil Scott-Heron thinking?–and stuffs it down your throat. They’re saying “The revolution will not be televised”–on television! They’re claiming to speak for “truth” and some kind of Platonic basketball form–and they’re doing it to sell shoes! They’re talking about “revolution”–and they’re a multibillion dollar corporation, a shameless exploiter of quasi-slave labor in Indonesia! But forget it: there it is on television, and there you are, staring like a moron. The Nike-athlete is Ubermensch, he is supercompetitor; he can kick your ass now like he did on the elementary school playground, and he and his corporate pals own your puny “revolution.” The effect is stunning.
