Sunday, November 23, 2008
Quick, A+E, Music, "Stop the Presses"
Brand new day
On Sunday, Nov. 23, Guns N’ Roses releases its new album...
By Kevin Forest Moreau
On Sunday, Nov. 23, Guns N’ Roses releases its new album, “Chinese Democracy.” To call it “long-awaited” is an understatement. The group hasn’t released an album of new material since “Use Your Illusion I” and “II” in 1991 (1993’s “The Spaghetti Incident?” was a covers album). But given the 17-year gap, the notion that the public is holding its collective breath for “Chinese Democracy” is a little presumptuous. Large swaths of the band’s target audience weren’t even born in 1991, and GN’R hasn’t been important outside of classic-rock radio for almost as long.
You could say that this incarnation of the group—of which only frontman Axl Rose is an original member—doesn’t have much business calling itself Guns N’ Roses. It’s clear that GN’R is no longer a band but a “brand”—what Wikipedia refers to as “a collection of images and ideas representing an economic producer.” That brand has been tarnished in the last decade and a half, and like the Batman, James Bond and “Star Trek” film franchises, it needs reinvention to remain relevant. “Chinese Democracy,” then, is GN’R’s “Batman Begins” or “Casino Royale”: the product that will determine whether the brand is a viable source of new output, or simply a relic of another time.
Another brand that could use a facelift is that of the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. A couple of weeks ago, the family of the civil rights icon staked its claim to thousands or even millions of dollars in licensing fees from T-shirts and other merchandise using King’s likeness alongside that of President-elect Barack Obama. “Some of this is probably putting food on people’s plates,” Isaac Newton Farris Jr., head of the nonprofit King Center, said. “We’re not trying to stop anybody from legitimately supporting themselves, but we cannot allow our brand to be abused.”
The irony is so thick you can cut it with a knife. At a time when their father’s dream has been achieved in the most powerful way imaginable, his children are doing their best to dilute the very thing they claim to be safeguarding so fiercely: his brand.
The Kings are arguably within their rights to protect their father’s words and likeness, which they regard as their intellectual property (this is a matter of some debate). And to be fair, Farris has proposed a grace period through the end of the year. But legally justified or not, going after street vendors—many of them black—certainly looks bad, especially for an institution dedicated to King’s ideals. And this isn’t the first time the Kings family’s zeal for a piece of the action has landed them an indictment in the court of public opinion. Earlier this year, The Rev. Bernice King and Martin Luther King III sued their brother Dexter (who promptly counter-sued) in a case involving alleged mishandling of family and King Center funds.
And in 2001, the Kings famously sold the rights to their father's “I Have a Dream” speech to Cingular and the French telecommunications company Alcatel. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Cynthia Tucker wrote that year: “If the King children were seeking money to support their father’s work, the commercials would be a little easier to take. … But the money that Cingular and Alcatel are paying to use King’s image will not go to teach schoolchildren how to resolve their conflicts without guns, or to promote coalitions between Latinos and African-Americans, or to raise the wages of hard-working men and women barely making ends meet. The money will go into the greedy, grasping hands of King’s children.”
Through their actions over the last few years, the King children have repositioned their father’s brand so that his image conjures associations not of equality, freedom and tolerance, but of internecine squabbles and cease-and-desist orders.
With Obama’s election, the King family is missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to capitalize on the brand they claim by birthright, to draw a direct link between Dr. King’s accomplishments and the election of America’s first black president. Instead, they’re squandering the opportunity by trying to capitalize in the most literal sense.
When a brand’s awareness reaches such a saturation point that consumers respond to the brand itself, rather than the products the brand is meant to sell—like tech-savvy geeks devoted to anything stamped with the Apple logo—marketing types call that “brand loyalty.” The King family is exhibiting its own version of this. It’s the King brand, and not what that brand stands for, that’s paramount.
A generation or two past its heyday, Axl Rose is attempting to resuscitate the Guns N’ Roses brand by releasing music that will hopefully remind fans of why they loved the band in the first place. If the Kings care at all about protecting their father’s legacy and not just their bank accounts, they’ll take that lesson to heart.
SP