Wings

We all like to be defined but what we wear. In many situations we don't care about the quality of the product, or even if we like what we are purchasing, we are simply buying a brand. Slowly we are becoming slaves to consumption as we will purchase the brand product over the no-name one despite the fact that there are no differences. It won't matter if there is a price differences in most cases simply because we want the comfort of having that brand.

Naomi Klein talks about this in her book, No Logo, which talks about consumerism and how companies know that we but brands and logos, not products. Because of this, that is exactly what companies started selling. I notices ads all the time but rarely do I put value on them, mostly because i'm ignorant of their value. For instance, i've never really cared what brand of shoes im wearing. When ever I walk into a show store I simply walk up and the isle until something catches my eye and then i purchase it. Since we were discussing No Logo in my Lit. Theory class I decided to pay more attention to the brands as i got new shoes the other week. For the longest time I thought I had been walking around in K-Swiss shoes. This time however I found the exact same that I had gotten 2 years ago and that were no burned out. They were Adidas. It then hit me that I haven't work K-Swiss since sophomore year of high school.

People's attention to what shoes they wear can come up often. I was particularly drawn to Mackelmore's song Wings, a song about a young boy buying a pair of Air Maxes. The song addresses consumerism today in a new creative way. The song opens positive with Mackelmore telling a story of how he believed the hype that Nike was spilling about the "Air bubble" in the heel allowing you to jump higher. The story then evolves to Mackelmore being at school and how it didn't matter if he couldn't play basketball as long as he had the shoes that the pros had. This transference of targets for sales shows how corrupted our society has become. Nike used to target athletes, now though, it doesn't matter, kids want the shoes just to have the logo on the tongue.

Mackelmore, then starts to question his world after his friend Carlos' brother was murdered and his Jordan IV's were stolen. Mackelmore then realized that he had hoped the shoes would make him great and he would never need to work for it. Making the shoes the source of being a good player not hard work and determination. The irony here being that Nike's tag line, "Just do it" didn't kick in because the Nike symbol and promises made Mackelmore lazy. Mackelmore again says in the song that after growing older he's stare in the mirror and think about how Phil Knight (co-founder of Nike) had tricked everyone with his advertisement and product promises that gave the shoes a false worth.
 Mackelmore addresses blind consumerism in his closing line,

" They started out, with what I wear to school
That first day, like these are what make you cool
And this pair, this would be my parachute
So much more than just a pair of shoes
Nah, this is what I am
What I wore, this is the source of my youth
This dream that they sold to you
For a hundred dollars and some change
Consumption is in the veins
And now I see it’s just another pair of shoes."

Here Mackelmore states that the shoes at first were just about what made him cool. Slowly he became dependent on it. Mackelmore realizes the folly in paying a hundred dollars for a pair of shoes when they are no different then any other shoe out there, it doesn't matter if they were made by Nike, K-swiss, or Adidas.