Corporate capital co-opted the counterculture’s rebellion as marketing almost instantly.

Evidence

Hollywood’s Che was but one instance of counterculture co-option. Even before publication, James Kunen’s satirical account of the Columbia uprising, The Strawberry Statement, had been purchased for the movies. The week after Nixon’s election, Columbia-CBS Records ran a full-page spread in college and underground papers that, unconsciously high camp, posed seven dudes hanging out in a dorm room-cum-jail cell, floor littered with picket signs. One guy discreetly rolls what looks like a joint; another grooves with a stereo headset. The image is captioned BUT THE MAN CAN’T BUST OUR MUSIC. (Yet, the LPs promoted were not rock but avant-garde—Varèse, Ives, Terry Riley, and Walter (later Wendy) Carlos’s Moog-driven Switched-On Bach. Columbia-CBS, which was reprimanded by the FBI for underwriting political terrorists, had not quite figured out its audience.) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1418

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s stated purpose: the mechanism by which a scene becomes a market — corporate co-option arriving within months of radical activism. Connects to the shelf literature on cultural stagnation and commodification. — connects to: Countercultural rebellion was co-opted as a selling tool by advertisers — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 549
• SEED: The absurd mismatch — an ad captioned ‘The Man Can’t Bust Our Music’ selling avant-garde classical albums while CBS was FBI-reprimanded for funding radicals — is a rich essay angle on corporate confusion as midwife of co-option.