Art-I-Ficial. X-Ray Spex. 1978. EMI

 Evidence of the triumph of mass advertising as unifying, commercial tool drawing the attention of local, national, and global cultures can be found in the success of social media. It’s difficult, if not altogether impossible, to communicate across these interactive platforms without acknowledging the influence of commercial advertising. That influence is present not only in the syntax of the texts we compose, but also in the layout of our photos, particularly when accompanied by text. If you’ve ever posted online, then you know that internalized feeling of instinctively understanding the shockingly narrow parameters of the acceptable, the permissible, of online content. Consequently, you may also have the banal poster’s knowledge of wanting to test the boundaries of those constraints, a popular impulse practiced sometimes amusingly, sometimes over indulgently. When fronting the now iconic punk band X-Ray Spex, the legendary vocalist Poly Styrene sounded not only as though she were testing boundaries, but attacking them. The ferocity of her delivery underscores the irony of Art-I-Ficial’s lyric so devastatingly that it can shrink the walls of any room the record is played in. The fantasies portrayed by advertising—of domesticity and travel, of sexuality and instant access—are intended to arouse the illusion of a life motivated by desire, which, unlike need, is transitory and therefore unique. The music of X-Ray Spex is so powerful that it collapses walls of confinement; it breaks apart the cliches of advertising fantasies by transforming its language of the sales catalog into an unsparing auto-critique, a sort of toilet wall graffiti dialectic. Art-I-Ficial retains its cultural value because in 1978 it archly deconstructed the manipulative tactics that the advertising world used to create fictitious realities, then populated those dream worlds with consumers who claimed to be bored with autonomy. Almost a decade later, descendants of that consumer class mockingly created the slogan “The Big Lie,” and are currently at work diligently transforming public life in the States into a vast theater—with lasting, real world consequences—of oppressive GOP values produced by a former TV game show host. “I wanna be Instamic, I wanna be a frozen pea, I wanna be dehydrated,” Poly Styrene sings, inveighing against the artificialities of Instagram, reality TV, political rhetoric. Today, that aspirational conceit has been dissolved of its irony by a culture that embraces it as ambition.

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