Haig's, GQ
This sort of shite.
I was first told about Haig's whiskey by my history teacher at high-school. He explained his Granddad simply refused to buy the stuff. His Granddad had fought in the First World War, and had witnessed the reckless tactics of Field Marshall Douglas Haig - the man who had ordered soldiers to walk, en masse, directly into the line of enemy fire, a tactic most infamously used during the Battle of the Somme. Douglas Haig's father was the head of the very distillery and company which produced and sold Haig's whiskey. I don't know anything about Haig's marketing strategy but I've seen the company name pop up a fair bit of late, in social media posts by people I know and then in this GQ video. What worries me the most about this sort of stuff is, primarily, the picture it paints of aspiration. Of two white celebrities dressed in designer clothes, discussing gentlemen etiquette, sipping on luxury drinks and together, trying to dream up the most self-consuming ways to spend their money. As Bob Dylan would have had it, it's media put together for people who don't have the time to undertake a serious investigation of what's going on in the world. It's media to encourage people that earning money is great, and that if you work hard, earn more and buy some of the shit adorned and consumed by Beckham, you could be even greater. Don't bother about anyone else, the state of the NHS, the state of the streets, or what the government is doing in the middle-east - just concentrate on buying more shit for yourself, you'll be okay.
But with all this, comes a layer of social sanitisation. This crisply edited footage for a men's lifestyle magazine emits practically everything that a man's life in Britain (as listed above) involves. And this sanitisation creates a free-for-all in morality. Haig's whiskey? Fuck it, if they'll pay to sponsor us, who cares what happened in WW1 - most people probably don't know about any of that anyway. I think this is what made Russell Brand's speech at the "GQ Awards" conference a couple of years back so brilliant. Brand pointed to the fact that Hugo Boss (sponsoring the evening) used to provide army clothing for the Nazis, after ridiculing Boris Johnson's speech - which made light of genocide in Syria. Brand's speech made a simple point: why the fuck should "Entertainment" be an arena of moral free-for-all, open for any cunt rich enough to pay to have his name hung in lights?
In one sense, the Haig's whiskey problem is unavoidable. You'd be hard pressed to find a corporation (and maybe even an organisation) out there which doesn't have at least a small corner of its history stained in blood. But it does show the profit-motive in its naked form: utterly disinterested in any thing other than financial power. And perhaps a media which is informed by democratic mechanisms, would produce a much more diverse and culturally enriching set of aspirational images - rather than the manipulative promotion of self-obsessed, hedonistic living hammered out on a weekly basis by the likes of GQ.
I was first told about Haig's whiskey by my history teacher at high-school. He explained his Granddad simply refused to buy the stuff. His Granddad had fought in the First World War, and had witnessed the reckless tactics of Field Marshall Douglas Haig - the man who had ordered soldiers to walk, en masse, directly into the line of enemy fire, a tactic most infamously used during the Battle of the Somme. Douglas Haig's father was the head of the very distillery and company which produced and sold Haig's whiskey. I don't know anything about Haig's marketing strategy but I've seen the company name pop up a fair bit of late, in social media posts by people I know and then in this GQ video. What worries me the most about this sort of stuff is, primarily, the picture it paints of aspiration. Of two white celebrities dressed in designer clothes, discussing gentlemen etiquette, sipping on luxury drinks and together, trying to dream up the most self-consuming ways to spend their money. As Bob Dylan would have had it, it's media put together for people who don't have the time to undertake a serious investigation of what's going on in the world. It's media to encourage people that earning money is great, and that if you work hard, earn more and buy some of the shit adorned and consumed by Beckham, you could be even greater. Don't bother about anyone else, the state of the NHS, the state of the streets, or what the government is doing in the middle-east - just concentrate on buying more shit for yourself, you'll be okay.
But with all this, comes a layer of social sanitisation. This crisply edited footage for a men's lifestyle magazine emits practically everything that a man's life in Britain (as listed above) involves. And this sanitisation creates a free-for-all in morality. Haig's whiskey? Fuck it, if they'll pay to sponsor us, who cares what happened in WW1 - most people probably don't know about any of that anyway. I think this is what made Russell Brand's speech at the "GQ Awards" conference a couple of years back so brilliant. Brand pointed to the fact that Hugo Boss (sponsoring the evening) used to provide army clothing for the Nazis, after ridiculing Boris Johnson's speech - which made light of genocide in Syria. Brand's speech made a simple point: why the fuck should "Entertainment" be an arena of moral free-for-all, open for any cunt rich enough to pay to have his name hung in lights?
In one sense, the Haig's whiskey problem is unavoidable. You'd be hard pressed to find a corporation (and maybe even an organisation) out there which doesn't have at least a small corner of its history stained in blood. But it does show the profit-motive in its naked form: utterly disinterested in any thing other than financial power. And perhaps a media which is informed by democratic mechanisms, would produce a much more diverse and culturally enriching set of aspirational images - rather than the manipulative promotion of self-obsessed, hedonistic living hammered out on a weekly basis by the likes of GQ.
Comments
Post a Comment