Commodify Your Discontent
For the benefit of a French TV crew, various cacophonists displayed our solidarity with other anticonsumerist, culture-jamming groups such as Adbusters and the Billboard Liberation Front. We did so by dressing in drag, playing "Ca Plane Pour Moi," Maurice Chevalier tunes, and the punk anthem "French People Suck" before heading off to the local Kmart to distribute pink (Pepto-Abysmal), orange (pudding), and puke-colored (canned pasta and beef) consumer items that were shorn of their packaging, thus presenting themselves boldly and honestly as the weirdly textured substances that they were, in baggies, with labels declaring that they could be had for free.
We also helped small children take their first steps on the path of disillusionment and enlightenment by pasting stickers saying "This item is free" on whatever their grubby little hands were clutching. The stickers had an actual Kmart logo on them, so the kids squealed with joy while we made for the exit, leaving the parents to deal with the checkout line.
Since this was a serious event, the pillowfighting, goosing, and snail-eating were kept to a minimum, while important philosophical statements were made without giggles. Such as:
"The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one's own destruction, has become a 'biological' need."
--Herbert Marcuse
Jeez, he makes it sound like a bad thing. Anyway, afterward the guys went to Denny's to eat the kind of food that's bad for you, while the gals went home either to diet or "diet." All of us were proud to be Americans that night.
