ABSTRACT
A chapter that begins with two song lyrics1 cannot help but invoke the spectre of Stephen Brown (1995, 1998), who has argued for years that the arts offer the most revealing insights into marketing and consumer culture. Building a chapter around this Brownian insight (which can only be described as Belkian) makes me feel strangely impelled to act upon some deep, deep impulse (which can only be described as Dichterian) to reclaim, rework and refashion it into a form that is far more original, far more audacious, far more revelatory and uniquely, unequivocally mine and only mine while masking the dread awareness that it will forever remain derivative, treading along a well-worn, already blazed path. Yes, that is a damn long sentence. But sometimes a sentence is not just a sentence. Sometimes, it is a raging war machine fuelled by deep-seated anxieties of influence (Brown 1999, damn not again!!!!) whose rhetorical weapons are ostentatious displays of loquaciousness (a tactic that can only be described as Sherryesque though it sorely lacks Holbrookian eloquence) launched against Patriarchy’s Symbolic Order in vain hope of winning a desperate struggle to vanquish the dominating discourses of all those who have spoken before through an endless assault of portentous erudition that fills the existential voids, penetrates the depths of all masculine insecurities, and imposes an all-encompassing discursive hegemony (an undertaking that can only be described as Thompsonian though I’ll never admit that deeply repressed fact).
