The sexiest man in Jamaica

The title of this post is apropos of nothing, except it's severely stuck in my head. I think my brain had been starving for music featuring a man yelling something happily, confidently, and aggressively after a steady KEXP work diet of lyrics about missing old highschool sweethearts and being somehow emotionally delicate. That sort of thing seems to have taken over indie as well as pop these days. Speaking of which: look! Nickelback got twice as many Juno nominations as the Arcade Fire. Let that sink in for a moment. Sometimes there are no words. Only dry heaves.

Yesterday I covered the Canadian Auto Summit. The theme of the Canadian Auto Summit was “It Really Is About the Car.” I shit you not. Redundancy has been turned into an MBA course, apparently. Advertising was only mentioned in dismissive terms so for the purposes of my magazine it was a waste of a dining subsidy to send me there. And admittedly I spent a lot of time thinking about boys and wondering how many people in the auditorium were flying the dragon. I did pay some attention, though, and all I can say is the new Camaro concept looks really sexy, and I’m glad I’m not an American with a manufacturing job.

Because redundancy, in its metaphorical sense, figured large in the agenda. It was set up as a question and answer period between some Globe journalists and a bunch of car type big wigs, and of course, especially in the case of the GM man, the journalists wanted to know how many jobs were going to be lost to outsourcing or imports, or gained from low property prices and increasing technological acumen among Canadian workers . . . the president of Toyota Motor got fêted for having created a couple of thousand jobs in Canada . . . all Strong Canadian Dollar this, Exploiting Asian Markets that . . .

You know how it’s easy to laugh at Western Communists because you usually know that they’re figuring themselves dressed in a Party uniform and directing the grunt workers of the Revolutionary Paradise and not lifting anything heavy themselves? That’s one thing I thought about these capitalist barons, last night, even as they chilled my blood talking about the massive migration of jobs that’ll probably end up causing environmental catastrophe in China and social crisis – well, maybe not here, but definitely in the United States. They know, or should know, their own jobs are likely enough to be made redundant eventually – they run the same sort of employment risks as the people whose lives they were messing around with. I know the REAL risks are nothing like the same because of their offshore accounts and property investments and all. But the world they promote is just a straight dog-eat-dog one, with no nationalistic alignments except for whichever ones would be effective in terms of marketing to a national population.

Because it seems lthey know we, as consumers, cling on to such quaint old-fashioned ideas, about a corporation and its country of provenance having much in common. A couple of days ago I wrote for work about the marketing impact of the cartoon chaos in the Middle East. What’s happening is a little hilarious. A lot of the European companies doing business there were in a rush to exploit the hole left by the boycott of all things Danish. The best example was Carrefour, a French retailer, which withdrew all the Danish products from its shelves and posted notes in their place expressing solidarity with the Islamic population. Then, of course, a series of French papers re-published the cartoons.

People, fuck. They don't make any sense.