On being fake

I've been thinking for a while about that fake band that ESPN's ad agency invented for the World Cup draw. You know, the Group of Death. For what it's worth, I wasn't the only one who thought it sucked. Richard Whittall was even like, word, this sort of marketing is ass.

"Oh, but using an intelligent approach means we won't reach the lowest common denominator," says the marketing man. But perhaps you don't want the LCD, because you can't market high-end products to the LCD, and the LCD is unlikely to like soccer no matter how Heavy Metal your "marketing concept" is. Just a thought, really.

But what I really want to get to is a statement one of the ad agency guys left in my comments explaining why they went ahead with the fake band:

It was created off a brief to do something (hopefully) fun, interesting and authentic to the sport/event around The Draw.

I hope I'm not the only one who finds it odd that Wieden+Kennedy's idea of creating something "authentic" was a fake hair-metal band. Back in the day, hair-metal was the 80's equivalent of the Backstreet Boys or Daughtry, particularly derivative acts like Poison, Firehouse, or Slaughter. So to me if you're going for something "authentic," hair metal is probably a bad place to start. I mean, even the Dead Schembechlers had the sense to use punk rock as their jumping off point.

Perhaps in marketing land, this sort of disconnect comes with the territory. Either most people don't notice it, or the marketers imagine we don't notice. I'd argue that both situations happen more than occasionally. Maybe they hoped a fake band in a genre where bands were already fake for the most part would double back on itself and somehow become authentic. It sounds absurd on it's face, doesn't it?

On the other hand, who is "Fake Sigi" to criticize a fake band? He's fake, right, he even says he's fake! He doesn't even do "Fake Sigi" stuff anymore, he's just faking an already fake persona!

So after a while of thinking about why exactly the Group of Death (hopefully never to be seen again, by the way) sucked and why Fake Sigi seems to work regardless, I stumbled upon Chuck Klosterman's essay "The Passion of the Garth" from his latest book, Eating the Dinosaur. Let me say up front that I have mixed feelings on Klosterman. I love his review of Chinese Democracy, and he's obviously more talented than myself as a lyricist. But then why do I feel dead inside and overly marketed to after I spend a lot of time reading his stuff?

Anyway, in The Passion of the Garth, Klosterman is talking about authenticity in music, in particular, what happened when Garth Brooks attempted to become Chris Gaines. He leads off with five points about authenticity in music, this one in particular:

The most telling moment for any celebrity is when he or she attempts to be inauthentic on purpose, and particularly when that attempt fails.

Klosterman continues:

If you want to adopt an unnatural persona, that persona needs to be an extension of the person you secretly feel like. You have to be "authentically pretending". You have to be the only person who could have become the character you embody. This is why Ziggy Stardust never seemed like a Halloween costume. It's also why Chris Gaines felt like marketing, even if that hadn't been the intention. He was crazy, but he wasn't singularly crazy. He wasn't crazy enough.
. . .
In the life of Chris Gaines was done exclusively for other people, which is why no one noticed.

Much like Chris Gaines, the Group of Death is an amalgamation of signifiers that are supposed to appeal to a certain audience without any kind of authentic vision behind it. Anyone can be "The Group of Death," and this is in large part why it fails.

In regards to Fake Sigi, the fakeness is disclosed up front, and there's clearly a person behind the curtain who's "authentically pretending". At least, that's how I like to imagine the perception of this site. A couple people have accused me of "hiding," but guess what guys, this is art, pretentious fucking art. And to take what Klosterman's saying about music and apply it to the soccer blogosphere, we're all acting to a certain extent. It's why some sites leave you dead inside after you read them, some sites don't, and everyone knows which sites are which. And it's why fake interviews like this, well - with apologies to the Gaffer, who's just got his hustle on - are not all that good.

-FS