Vice used blue-collar chic and anti-sellout irony to pursue corporate funding

Evidence

While Terry Richardson provided Vice with the feel of amateur porn, the editors also leaned into “white trash” aesthetics. Blue-collar chic offered another way to shock wholesome liberals. Rapper Eminem had defended himself well as a white rapper by elucidating his working-class origin story in the hit film 8 Mile. In parallel, Vice embraced Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, trucker caps, and other symbols of the lower-middle-class lifestyle as tools to reinforce its anti-intellectual “mindless fun” ethos. At the same time, McInnes also dismissed the nineties ideals against selling out as “juvenile and naïve,” explaining that capitalism was inseparable from their content. “When you see [a guide to anal sex] in a glossy magazine with ads, it changes the joke,” he told the New York Press in 2002. For McInnes and his team, corporate funding wasn’t just a business goal—it was integral to the humor. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 73

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: tracking how ‘selling out’ flipped from a moral failure to the entire point — the arc from nineties indie anti-corporatism to Vice openly courting advertisers.
• XREF: Connects to the death-of-the-sellout mechanism Marx will argue is central to omnivore monoculture.