From Marvin Gaye to The Clash: How Levi’s Ads Manufactured Masculinity & Recycled Rock History...
The recent passing of Nick Kamen is a poignant reminder of a liminal moment in rock history when the mainstream turned its back on the futuristic sensibility of synth-pop and looked instead towards something altogether more nostalgic. Nick Kamen was of course the model who stripped down to his boxer shorts in the now infamous Levi Strauss commercial ‘Laundrette’ from 1985. It was an ad that caused sales of the jeans to skyrocket, generating an increase of over 400%. However, Kamen first came to public attention on the front cover of the legendary British magazine The Face, in an alpine-sport-themed issue from January 1984.
The Face was a style title launched by Nick Logan in 1981 that helped define the look of 80s pop culture in the UK and revolutionized men’s consumer magazine publishing. Without The Face, there would have been no Q, Loaded, or FHM. Using music as bait, it pioneered the formula for the male lifestyle title by positioning rock alongside film, fashion, and cultural commentary. Academics Frank Mort and Sean Nixon have written extensively on how the magazine addressed the ‘new man’ as a community for the first time. Specifically, they suggest The Face encouraged men to ‘live out their masculinity’ in a way that was much more self-conscious and reflexive, pioneering changes we have seen to gender roles in the 21st Century. Both also contend that the Levi’s advert starring Kamen was a product of this ‘deep-rooted shift’ in the way men were beginning to think about themselves.
‘Laundrette’ is significant therefore because it was the first time a mainstream audience got to see a masculine style code previously confined to a London-centric, metropolitan style elite. Certainly, it offered provincial British men with more fluid, less singular, representations of masculinity than were on offer to preceding generations. As Sean Nixon suggests:
The display of these bodies was presented to the viewer in ways that were highly distinctive. Cuts to the arms, chest, face, bottom and thighs, together with a focus on the unbuttoning of the jeans… undermined more conventional significations of power and aggression associated with displayed masculine bodies. (Sean Nixon, Hard Looks)
It is telling that Nick Kamen came to the attention of Madonna, going on to have a pop career of some note. His debut single ‘Each Time You Break My Heart’ (co-written with Madonna) made the top-ten in the UK, while his self-penned release ‘I Promised Myself’ topped the charts across Europe in 1990. However, it was arguably the choice of soundtrack for his ‘Laundrette’ advert, Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’, that would have the biggest impact on pop culture in the ensuing years.
Between 1985 and 1993 Levi Strauss delivered sixteen thematically coherent commercials that put eight reissues in the UK Top 20 Singles Chart. These included three number one hits with Ben E King’s ‘Stand by Me’, Steve Miller Band’s ‘The Joker’, and The Clash’s ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’. In addition, Sam Cook’s ‘What A Wonderful World’ and Percy Sledge’s ‘When A Man Loves a Woman’ peaked just shy of the top spot. However, this did not happen in a vacuum and was a product of a wider shift in the way audiences were beginning to think about pop music after Live Aid. The mid-1980s saw a revival of interest in the stars from earlier eras including Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Queen, and Elton John, which was documented extensively on the pages of the newly launched Q magazine. The period was also marked by the first million-selling compact disc alongside the birth of the ‘classic album’ as a marketing strategy for back-catalogue.
In short, the Levi campaign helped both reflect and shape a moment of retrospection in British pop. What was even more fascinating, however, was the emerging relationship between gender and rock heritage. Wedding the objectification of music history to the commoditization of masculinity, Levi’s adverts presented complex and sometimes contradictory codes of authenticity. The spectacle of masculinity presented was clearly a theatrical performance, something to be accomplished and accompanied. However, the musical codes often reinforced quite old-fashioned ideas about originality and male privilege. Set against this was the newly emerging rock canon, with its emphasis on white men playing the blues. However, the songs selected for Levi’s campaign often fetishized black music in its original form, particularly from older less well-known artists like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Muddy Waters, and BB King.
Inevitably the songs used in Levi’s adverts were eventually compiled for release on CD. Listening to them together, they certainly encapsulate a distinct aesthetic, at odds with the prevailing climate of acid house and Stock Aitken Waterman that dominated the singles chart at the time. Instead, the values of the Levi brand are defined by a discrete hybrid of vintage soul and r&b, augmented with a few garage-rock reworkings of the classic blues sounds. The curation of this taste code reinforced not only traditional notions of musical authenticity but also some very heteronormative codes of masculinity. These blue-collar scripts were in many ways completely at odds with the homoerotic sensibilities of the bodies on display in the adverts.
Enveloping this contradiction was the Americana invoked by the mise en scene of the adverts, with its strategically deployed retro ephemera that included period laundromats, record players, greyhound buses, and pick-up trucks. The effect was a simulacrum of fifties ‘ness’, no less manufactured than Andy Warhol’s silkscreens of soup cans and Hollywood actors. Indeed, Warhol was a great patron of the Levi brand and even produced bespoke artwork for their 1984 ‘501 Blues’ campaign. Another slick celebrity endorsement of the era came from Bruce Springsteen, who wore Levi’s on the cover of Born in The USA. Much like the Boss’s album, the panache with which Levi’s adverts reconfigured patriotic iconography was a self-conscious parody of the values those items embodied.
Indeed, the period detail used in Levi’s adverts was not accidental. When Bartle Bogle Hegarty took over the European account in 1982, their research uncovered a youth trend fascinated with America of the past. A subculture with a particular emphasis on clothing, music, and automobiles, it was a rarefied continuation of the nostalgia embodied in Grease and Happy Days. Consequently, 1950s Americana became a cultural touchstone for Bartle Bogle Hegarty’s work, even if the music used in the adverts was at times a little anachronistic.
Dinah Washington’s version of ‘Mad About The Boy’ used in ‘The Swimmer’, was a great example of a musical non sequitur. Originally written by English playwright Noel Coward in 1932, Washington’s 1961 version is in a musical style that was nostalgic even at the time. Likewise, The Clash’s ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’, which first appeared on the London band’s 1982 album Combat Rock, pushed the envelope of retrospection into the much more recent past. The space between these two markers was filled with a bricolage of pop culture references, to everything from James Dean and Elvis Presley to cult films like Easy Rider and The Swimmer. In a way, the adverts pioneered how we consume rock n roll in the 21st Century, through the distorted lens of digital downloads and on-demand streaming. However, the highly stylized representation of Americana can also be attributed to the distinctly British sensibility of Bartle Bogle Hegarty
When Levi Strauss first contacted the London agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) in 1982 to handle their European account it was certainly a bold move. BBH had been in existence for less than a year, with only a handful of clients and eleven staff. By contrast, Levi’s was a multinational brand that had been around since 1853. The problem was simple. Though Levi’s had been a badge of cool in the 1960s, by the early 1980s it was seen as conservative and its market share was decreasing. According to product tests, the jeans had become less connected with rock n roll and more associated with Ronald Raegan and sandal-wearing tourists. BBH’s job was to change that.
Looking at the advert ‘501 Blues’ produced in 1984 for the American market, it is easy to see the challenge. An original jingle, composed in a twelve-bar blues style, does little to lift the visuals, which are dominated by hokey farm vehicles and dad-bod dancing. Although the campaign made a star of Bruce Willis, BBH's first ad for the company was very different. Drawing upon the kind of conceptualism John Hegarty picked up working at the Saatchi and Saatchi in the 1970s, the first poster did not depict jeans but rather a black sheep going against the herd, with the tagline ‘when the world zigs, zag’. In applying high Art thinking to a mass media product, BBH aligned themselves with a postmodern sensibility that marked out much British popular culture from the Fifties onwards
In music, from the Beatles to Roxy Music, the Sixties and Seventies spawned a generation of stars who saw no distinction between traditional ideas about high and low culture. Influenced by Pop Art and The Independent Group, the creative spirit of Britishness infused rock n roll with a tongue-in-cheek sense of mischief and fun. BBH followed in these footsteps. Nowhere was this more manifest than in ‘Laundrette’. First broadcast in the UK on Boxing Day 1985, the commercial was created as part of a £4 million European-wide campaign to relaunch the red-tab, button fly jeans. The adverts were aimed at men in the 16 to 24 market and broadcast strategically between shows like ‘The Tube’ and ‘Brookside’. However, it was the re-presentation of American cultural iconography for a UK audience that was central to its uniquely British sensibility.
The role of the UK as the ‘representer’ of American culture in the 20th Century is a popular concept in popular music history. It gives British versions of mainstream products an ironic sensibility that, for many commentators, has become synonymous with camp. This was particularly evident in the British versions of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, with pretty boy stars like Billy Fury and Cliff Richard. However, in ‘Laundrette’ this aesthetic was not only about masculinity, but also the meticulous attention to detail. As novelist Christopher Isherwood famously wrote, ‘you can’t camp about something you’re not serious about’ (The World In The Evening). From the American G.I waiting outside to the bobbysoxer girls watching, the exquisite camerawork and editing of ‘Laundrette’ captivated audiences, as it fastidiously tracked the mellifluous opening bars of Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’.
At its peak, BBH’s success with ‘Laundrette’ created a pop phenomenon that repositioned advertising at the cutting edge of youth culture. It pioneered how pop music would be used in film, television, and advertising, not as an afterthought or embellishment, but as a character in its own right and integral to the creative process. Contemporary productions like ‘The Crown’, ‘Deutschland 83’, and ‘It’s A Sin’ all use music in a way that is informed by BBH. The success was also a barometer of a wider shift towards a culture of nostalgia in pop music during that period. Indeed, songs from the Levi’s ads were not the only big hitters during this period.
Jackie Wilson’s ‘Reet Petite’, The Hollies’ ‘He Ain't Heavy He’s My Brother’, and Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ all bounced back in late-Eighties/early-Nineties. As did ‘nostalgia pop’ cover versions, like Bruce Willis’s ‘Under The Boardwalk’, Phil Collins’ ‘A Groovy Kind of Love’ and Jason Donovan ‘Sealed With a Kiss’, not to mention Cher’s reworking of Betty Everitt’s ‘The Shoop Shoop Song’. At its height, 1989 even provided novelty DJ act Jive Bunny with three number one hits, with a slew of mash-up megamixes that included samples from Glenn Miller, Bill Haley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Del Shannon, and Chubby Checker. However, it all started with ‘Laundrette’...
Here we take a look at how the sixteen adverts produced by BBH for Levi between 1985 and 1993 changed the way audiences thought not only about masculinity and advertising, but also musical authenticity and heritage...
Read full article at Far Out Magazine...
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