Michele Wucker is the author of Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (Hill & Wang, 1999).

A review of Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, The Marketing of Culture by John Seabrook Alfred A. Knopf, $23, 215 pages

Nobrow: the Culture of Marketing, The Marketing of Culture

John Seabrook steps onto a Manhattan subway car, his expensive headphones playing Biggie Smallz' Ready to Die with rap lyrics that would turn your grandmother's hair blue. Flipping through the sports pages of his favorite tabloid, Seabrook mulls civic urban blankness, homelessness and inequality.

Then his attention span -- which could use a dose of Ritalin -- shifts to what's really on his mind: "Lowering my eyes to the Post again, I let the gangsta style play down into my whiteboy identity, thinking to myself Man, you are the illest."

Welcome to Nobrow, the hyper-American state of mind where commercial culture is a source of status that the old-time cultural elites are trying to co-opt.

A life of 'inconspicuous consumption'

Seabrook grew up in a WASPy family in southern New Jersey, where culture meant The New Yorker on the coffee table and the pursuit of the arts: painting, music, theater and literature. In his second book, he takes on the shift from the culture of his parents' world to today's pop culture -- his world.

Chatty and knowledgeable, Seabrook moves easily from tailored suits to T-shirts and jeans, Mozart to Nirvana, William Shawn to Tina Brown, town house to mega-store, Times Square to Canal Street to Soho. The frenetic atmosphere that characterizes its subject propels the book but ultimately makes it fall short. Seabrook has not quite crafted his argument into a coherent picture. He has started an important discussion but has not built it toward a conclusion.

But then again, as this book shows, "nobrow" is a fluid state that has not yet finished creating itself. Despite its flaws, this is a highly readable and insightful meditation on what the things we buy say about who we are, and about how that order is being transformed.

Seabrook's father, whose closets are filled with hand-tailored suits and rows of shoes appropriate to virtually any occasion, arches his eyebrows at his 30-something son's Chemical Brothers T-shirt. Later, Seabrook pays $200 for a T-shirt that is fancy precisely because it is so plain, plying an essential tenet of "nobrow" culture: inconspicuous consumption, anti-status as status.

Inside the Nobrow way

The term "nobrow" itself is a bit misleading. Seabrook is not really writing about what he claims: the area in between highbrow and lowbrow, where these distinctions no longer exist. In their efforts to co-opt middle-class offerings, outdo them and pretend they are not doing so, elite merchandisers are not ignoring class/cultural fault lines. They are hyper-conscious of the border -- exactly the opposite of what Seabrook argues.

In an etymological riff defining the "brow" system, Seabrook invokes H.L. Mencken and Van Wyck Brooks, making it clear that this book is written for a highbrow, intellectual audience. "Highbrow/lowbrow was the language by which culture was translated into status -- the pivot on which distinctions of taste became distinctions of caste," he writes.

Until recently, he argues, America's lack of a class-based social hierarchy had made it impossible to mix commercial and elite culture. "In the United States, people needed highbrow-lowbrow distinction to do the work that social hierarchy did in other countries. Any fat cat could buy a mansion, but not everyone could cultivate a passionate interest in Arnold Schonberg or John Cage," he writes.

For the old cultural arbiters, good meant valuable, as established by traditional standards. In "nobrow," the new cultural powers-that-be define what is good simply as what is popular. Publicists, Seabrook's "arbiters inelegantiae," wield power in the form of access to celebrities.

They -- not the intellectual elite -- hold passports to The Buzz, which is the nirvana of "nobrow."Buzz is the collective stream of unconsciousness, William James' ¿buzzing confusion,' objectified, a shapeless substance into which politics and gossip, art and pornography, virtue and money, the fame of heroes and the celebrity of murderers all bleed," he writes.

Seabrook is at his best in describing Tina Brown's efforts to co-opt The Buzz for The New Yorker, and at analyzing why her efforts were a qualified success at best. He is brutally honest, bravely (and I hope consciously) allowing himself to look vain, pandering and status-conscious. His candor makes his less desirable traits forgivable, and his observations all the more interesting.

The author as case study

Seabrook rides to a gig with the 15-year-old aspiring rock star Ben Kweller, who was briefly billed as the next Kurt Cobain, and his band Radish. In the van, Seabrook muses over the depth of the divide between his patrician parents and his generation, which grew up with Gilligan, Captain Kirk, and John, Paul, George and Ringo. "To people on my parents' side of that divide, pop culture was mass culture -- someone else's culture, external to their identity -- but for me, and to a much greater extent, for these boys, pop culture was folk culture: our culture," he writes.

At times, Seabrook overstates himself, as when he analyzes George Lucas' studies of Joseph Campbell, The Golden Bough, the Bible, and Beowulf for archetypes that he applied to Star Wars: "You could see Lucas as the first of the great content robber barons -- the first wholesale appropriator of world culture, which he sold back to the world as Star Wars." And what then, exactly, was Shakespeare doing? Or Jorge Luis Borges? Joseph Conrad?

This sort of stretch illustrates perfectly the way highbrow (high, archetypal analysis) meets lowbrow (Star Wars) and does not quite match. Much of Nobrow was originally published in The New Yorker, where Seabrook is now a staff writer. During the Tina Brown years, he was an active participant in its attempts to co-opt lowbrow to revive a flagging highbrow rag -- including its effort to borrow Buzz from Star Wars in exchange for the pretense that it would lend the movie class.

As the book ends, Seabrook stands in Times Square in the shadow of the brand-new, arrogant-looking New Yorker building, which symbolizes as much as anything the shift from the old highbrow days to the glitzy present. He muses,"I felt I had reached Nobrow, ground zero, the exact midpoint at which culture and marketing converged." Seabrook is his best example of his own argument.