Education is wasted on the young. The tweed wrapped frustrations of an art history teacher begging me to ‘look harder Saunders’ were little more than snigger-fodder to a fourteen year old fresh into long trousers. Wisdom, it seems, can take a good half century to percolate from the inner ear to the cerebrum before it makes any sense.
‘Look at the subject, her expression, look at the others and the position of their hands. What does this tell you?’ he would say peering through his half rimmed specs. Yes, this was way back in the day when we still had male teachers.
What Mr Bromeswell was trying to tell us, all those years ago, was that every painting, every image, every photo is steeped in meaning and messages…for those that are open to decoding them, that is. Some of them are strategic: the items chosen to lie ‘casually’ on the linen tablecloth in a Dutch interior, for example. But many of the messages are subliminal, subconscious signals that cry out for an informed observer. And with the world in its current state of what can be politely described as flux, we have never been bombarded with so many hidden messages queuing up for interpretation and analysis. Mr B must surely be screaming down from the heavens ‘look harder ffs!’
Politics
Let’s start with an easy one. Check out this picture of Sir Keir Starmer meeting Donald Trump. Now, try if you can to wipe your brain completely clean of politics and look at the image as if it were a photograph of two random uncles meeting at a wedding. Oh yes, those dark rims do nothing to obscure the sheer terror that emanates from Uncle K’s eyes. And as for Uncle Don, well his disregard for Uncle K is palpable to the point of cringe. Sure, I selected this image, but I challenge anyone to find another picture that switches these roles. Because there isn’t one.
Disney
Disney is clearly trying to tell us something. Perhaps it’s feeling contrite about having created a billion cute but hideously entitled princesses out of our daughters. Whatever its reasoning, its attempt to correct matters with a ham-fisted dollop of DEI has made it look ridiculous and desperate. To cast a non-white in the role of Snow White was a decision, and a huge investment, that must have taken months if not years. The result was a $170 million loss at the box office and public ridicule. Compare that to the $190 million profits from the 1936 version (accounting for inflation).
Pop Music
Take a few minutes to really look into the face of one of our all time biggest pop idols. Forget about the decades of nipping and tucking, look into Madonna’s eyes and what do you see? Her skin maybe stretched to tearing point like budget clingfilm and her hair and lips over-augmented to compensate for time’s wicked revenge, but it’s the eyes that cannot lie. Some of the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen. Sad about ageing, perhaps, but it must surely be that she knows, subconsciously, that pop music is on the same trajectory as she is. And while we’re on the subject of decline, take at close look at Britney, the girl that once fizzed with bright pink vitality now confused, broken and empty. Blame it on drugs and the ageing process if you must, but we are not looking at faces that are proud of their legacy. These are the faces of idols that know the game is up.
As Robbie Williams admits, he would work for months in order to come up with a catchy, anthemic chorus. Today, you can create one at the press of a button. So is pop music dead? Well, formulaic pop music is yes. But the good news is that we’re already seeing the response to AI created music beginning to emerge with bands such as Angine de Poitrine experimenting with microtonal math-rock and unpredictable rhythms that go to show that humans are still very much in charge. Check them out here. Predictable they are not.
Hollywood
Oh dear, oh dear. It couldn’t be more explicit if it tried. Like pop music, Hollywood knows that its heyday lies long behind it. It had an amazing run, made itself stratospherically wealthy, then flaunted its riches back at us only to become even richer as a result. That’s quite some business model. But you can only live off your legacy for so long: Hollywood knows that it is dying and it’s reaching out to tell us that in a most peculiar way. The current Ozempic craze is Hollywood, literally and manifestly, diminishing itself before our very eyes. Drunk on a cocktail of guilt and narcissism, our stars are physically shrinking for us, as if on a kind of hunger strike against their own excesses. So tell me, who is Hollywood’s golden couple right now, the one that we all wish we could be?
Precisely.
The Car Industry
We all know that the Germans are the best engineers in the world. Their car industry has given birth to some of the the fastest, most efficient and aspirational products mankind has ever produced. And now, after eighty years climbing to the top of the world it has decided to dismantle it all piece by piece. As my geopolitical contemporary, Peter Zeihan says: if you’ve always fancied a state of the art BMW, buy one now because they won’t be making them much longer. As part of its strategy of intentional self-sabotage Germany has also decommissioned all its nuclear plants, much like Miliband filling in our gas wells with concrete I guess.
But don’t be fooled by the reassuringly snarly grin on the face of a luxury BMW eDrive machine. It is nothing but a grimace that hides the truth. The truth is that almost 60% of that sexy beast’s power plant was made in China. They deny it of course referencing a barrage of foreign sources and parts suppliers, but that’s the nub of it. Germany hasn’t just opened its gates to a Trojan horse, it has transplanted the damn thing into its very heart.
The same is true of Jaguar. Too many column inches have been written on Jaguar’s do-or-die gamble, so I’ll keep it short: Its 00 concept is openly and brazenly ground zero. It has abandoned its loyal, grey haired and tan gloved fan base in favour of a customer of dubious orientation and origin. At precisely the time, incidentally, that our ageing boomer army will be at its most populous ever. Go figure.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are shamelessly building gorgeous, indistinguishable clones of BMW X5s, G-Wagens, Lamborghinis, Range Rovers, Mini Coopers, Rolls Royces and even classic Corvettes. They are obviously taking the piss.
Let me spell it out. As the West abandons its cultural heritage, the Chinese are on hand to mop it up and regurgitate it for their own amusement.
Thank you Mr Bromeswell. Our destiny could not be any clearer.
Howard Saunders is a writer, speaker and the Retail Futurist
howard@22and5.com
@retailfuturist