Chris Smith

USC Annenberg clinical professor Christopher Holmes Smith explored the emergence of a new type of American celebrity -- the hip-hop mogul -- in the Lear Center's Celebrity, Politics and Public Life project, and he's now exploring the limitations and possibilities of brands, advertising, celebrity advocacy and consumer philanthropy in our interdisciplinary faculty seminar BrandSpace.

With the wisdom of hindsight, future historians may identify "bling" as an essential protein source at the deficit-financed economic banquet we're now staggering away from. While the middle class binged on cheap credit--barely pausing to acknowledge catastrophic events like 9-11, Hurricane Katrina, and Abu Ghraib--hip-hop's mavens of extravagance provided the guilt-free soundtrack for the feast.

Coined exactly ten years ago by underground rapper BG and his colleagues in the New Orleans-based collective "Cash Money Millionaires," bling has become hip-hop's single greatest contribution to the mainstream American lexicon.

A few web crawls for the term turn up over 23 million hits on Google, 500-plus profiles on Facebook and more than 13,000 lots for sale on eBay. While most of the auction booty falls in the categories of jewelry, watches, and apparel, there is also a long tail of cell phones and PDAs, wedding and party paraphernalia, electronics, automotive details, toys, sporting goods, pet supplies, and random kitsch like "pimp cups" -- outsized chalices embedded with precious, semi-precious and costume gems from which to enjoy your alcoholic "crunk" of choice.

Johanna Blakley

In some ways we love being watched – or at least we love the results. Not only are Nielsen ratings essential to the entertainment and advertising industries, they also make for entertaining content. Who hasn’t perused within the last week at least one list of the highest grossing movies, the most downloaded songs, the most emailed articles? Most likely, you consumed that content in a place that’s selling ads – a newspaper, magazine or a web site – and so, ironically enough, the audience data that those outlets use in order to figure out what content they should provide to you ends up becoming part of the content mix that you consume.

What might this mean? Well, not only are we exhibitionists (consult your national TV listings), we are also voyeurs, greedily consuming and exchanging information about what we like. There’s entertainment value, certainly, in reading one of the “most emailed stories” that catches your fancy, but there’s also a certain delight in reading the top ten list itself – even if you have no interest in nine of those stories. Far from simple navel gazing, the drive to understand what our social group cares about is actually something worth knowing. It’s a survival instinct, no doubt, to understand what the club thinks is cool . . . especially if you’re a member of the out-group. Although we usually suggest it’s a guilty pleasure, I would argue that our seemingly insatiable interest in the pop culture zeitgeist is worth satisfying.

Of course, our mission at the Lear Center is to understand precisely this, how it is that entertainment and leisure, the stuff we do when it doesn’t matter what we’re doing, affects us in profound ways. As a media researcher, I want to make substantiated claims about how people are consuming popular culture and the significance of that activity. That means I have a ravenous appetite for any information about audiences that I can find – ratings, focus group data, social science experiments, survey results – but most of this research is proprietary and very expensive to purchase. This is miserable news for academics who want to try their hand at entertainment studies, but it certainly increases the pleasure of the hunt. Just like the marketers who commission most of this research, I too am trying to find the key to unlock the mind of the consumer, the voter, the TV watcher, the Web site visitor. Though I’m not trying to sell a product, I am there, hot on their trail, surveilling them to the best of my ability and trying to figure out what it all means.