Posted on: Friday, July 23, 2004
Being in with the out crowd
By Greg Morago
Hartford (Conn.) Courant
Let's all play follow the leader. It's really quite simple — just do whatever everyone else is doing.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" is the movie of the moment. Let's all buy a ticket!
"Nip/Tuck" is the hot TV show. Sign us all up for cable!
Fantasia Barrino is on the top of the charts. Quick, get us to the record store!
Bill Clinton's "My Life" is the book du jour. We don't care how much it weighs, give us a couple more copies!
See? You do know how to play. Americans, obsessed with being out in front of trends, are more than adept at the game of immediate mass consumption of whatever new whim courses through society. Somewhere in the back of many closets is the Pet Rock we all had to have in 1975.
But what of those unfortunates who always seem to resist the trends, who are a few steps (OK, miles) behind the curve, who are either blissfully unaware of the hot new gizmo or defiantly breaking from the pack? Just who are these subversives?
They might, in fact, be the hottest new trend: the untrendy.
They are the people who have only just begun the Atkins Diet or the South Beach Diet. They are the ones who only recently picked up a Norah Jones album (the first one). They are the folks who didn't mind waiting until "The Sopranos" came out on DVD.
They are people like Rich Meyers, who only recently met "The DaVinci Code." Meyers, a wedding photographer from southern New Jersey, said he's behind on "literally everything" that causes a stir in pop culture. And he said he could not care less.
"A lot of times I find that if everyone is doing it, I probably wouldn't want to. Maybe it's a little rebellious streak."
That rebel attitude, that feisty unconcern where trends are concerned, might just be the next new thing, said pop-culture expert Bob Thompson.
"Not only is it OK to be behind, there's a sense that someone just now reading 'The DaVinci Code' is just so cool. You no longer have to be ashamed to be three months behind," said Thompson, a professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University. "The whole definition of cool is that you were away from what everyone else was doing, a little oblivious, that you could care less."
If Thompson is correct that untrendy is the new trend, imagine the cultural shift. Suddenly there will be no shame in mullets and Birkenstocks. Your "out" pashminas will be "in." No apologies necessary for just now reading a Harry Potter book or getting hooked on the so-over "Real World." Frye boot wearers of the world unite! Napoleon Dynamite for president!
"There are some people who will always be there the first day when things come out. Those people will always be important," Thompson said. "On the other hand, you have a lot of people who are consuming mass culture on their own terms. They're deciding how they'll do it."
And when they'll do it.
How did we get to the point where bucking the trend is trendy? Our very obsession with following the fads made us hypersensitive to being left out of the loop, Thompson suggests.
"In many ways, the identification of trends is the biggest trend out there," he said. "Twenty years ago, there were maybe zero people on the pop-culture beat. Nobody was doing anniversary stories on the invention of lawn chairs or Spam. But now there's an enormous industry of pop culture. Magazines are devoted to it; entire cable channels are devoted to it."
The reporting of trends before they ripen into full-fledged cultural phenomena also muddies the true trend experience.
"With media becoming so prevalent in the last 10 years, everyone is so much better informed and more sophisticated about what's going on in the world," said marketing consultant Tim Gaillard. "In the old days, fads weren't talked about; they just happened. It took a long time for fads and trends to happen."
That speed in reporting trends can work against the trend. "In some ways, the identification of a trend can be the kiss of death of a trend," Thompson said.
So the next time you see someone reading "The Lovely Bones" or extolling the virtues of Kelly Clarkson, think of them in admiring terms. They might be hipper than you think.
"But there are limits," Thompson added. "If your response to someone is 'Is that your final answer?' that's going too far. There are limits. The same is true for being 'voted off the island.' Don't even go there."
