American Idolatry

One good example of America abandoning her cultural traditions for monetary gain is in automotive design. At its inception as with most artistic things, functionality is coupled with design. The duality of functionality and visual appeal are strong sellers. They equate well in marketing. The best example of this can be in the now defunct vocation of commercial music. Music alone is not enough to stake an artistic claim. It needs a logo. It needs something compact and catchy to sell its message. The world is just too big for everyone to absorb everything. Usually the most successful at being sold are the ones with clever and effective marketing. All of these things used to be exercised at their fullest potential in American business, but that has changed. Marketing and advertising are all but lost arts. Their tried and true principles have been discarded like most American traditions at the expense of the vanity of our youth. To create a trend in mainstream America you need more than a duality. You need a trinity. Some help from the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost wouldn’t hurt. Music alone is not enough to influence millions of people, and America knew this in the l980’s. Commercial music used “the stage” to advance it cause. Drama, life exaggerated and acted out to the fullest, was an effective means to communicate music’s message. It not only conveyed its message through the music but also through a fashion representation and choreography. It was musical theater but in epic rock form. America loved this imagery and the feelings embodied in its realization drove the decade of the l980’s. Due largely to negative connotations of drug and alcohol use, the music of the 80’s was written off as meaningless. Symbolically Times Square in New York city was cleansed of its strip clubs and adult bookstores. In walked the Walt Disney Company, but under the surrogate leadership of another. Seattle Washington was having nothing to do with it. In a reaction to the Lion King, the Little Mermaid, and Aladdin unhappy youths began pouring their frustration into an alternative form of rock that became Grunge. Grunge did not have a politically correct fashion statement, and it didn’t want to. It meant to be anti mainstream and rebellious. Nothing really has been able to compare in scope to the success of disco and arena glam rock. It is because they had the trinity, a type of music, a fashion statement to represent it visually, and the dance moves. These three things are what create successful and long lasting commercial music. One only has to ask the “Material Girl” how a not-so-talented singer was able to become the success that Madonna still is today. Likewise Cyndi Lauper and Gwen Stefani have continued the trend. Hip Hop tried and succeeded in doing the same thing for a while until the messages in the music dried up. It seems “Pass the Courvoisier” didn’t have enough gang angst or political activism to sustain the test of time. The recent lineage of automotive design broadly represents the dilution and diffusion of mislead American culture. At its onset American car design encompassed both functionality and design. The demands of an automobile were clear. In the past decade these demands have been abandoned for monetary gain. The safety of the driver, although disguised by continuing safety tests, dramatically has been reduced by the dispelling of traditional design. Functionality gave way to superficial appeal. No better example of this can be the automotive taillight. If a functionality test were done to test what height, pattern, and luminosity most effectively alerted a rear driver to stop, it would not be the potpourri of Amityville designs found at the rear of most American-made cars. Functionality was deemed less important than visual appeal. The question should be asked what is more important, a pretty pattern of lights that look like E.T. or a stark signal that demands a driver stop before crashing into another driver. Automotive design in the U.S. is an uncontrolled, non-conceptual, ill attempt to sell cars. The majority of traditional designs that inspired America that became to be called “Americana” are all but gone. Why have these models been abandoned?