No Mas vs. Murketing
Like the rest of the wannabe shirt kingpins with their noses against the window, we were a little salty at Rob Walker after his Times Magazine cover story, "The Brand Underground", devoted 6,000 words to Anything, Barking Irons, and The Hundreds, and exactly twelve words to No Mas. However, we still had to admit 'ol Walker had written one hell of a piece. And fuckin' A, t-shirts were on the cover of the got damn New York Times, and No Mas was up in there (kinda).
Perhaps in some part as a reparation for the error of his No Mas neglectin ways, Walker recently reached out to me to do a Q&A; for his web site murketing.com. The first installment went up Friday, the second goes up on Monday, and both of them prove once and for all that we at No Mas are not downtown "cool guys", but, in fact, pretentious nerds. The great Louis Skolnick pronounced in his seminal 1984 documentary, "All jocks think about is sports. All nerds think about is sex." Twenty-two years later, Skolnick may be suprised to discover that some nerds believe sports and sex deserve equally serious consideration.
As proof, we offer: The No Mas Q&A;: [Pt. 1] Cassius Clay, Appropriation, Sport, Free Speech, and the Law.
By the way, it turns out Walker is a very good dude--a long-suffering Houston boy weaned on Phi Slamma Jamma, Earl Campbell, Dickie Thon and the accursed '95 Rockets (who broke our little Starks and Mason loving hearts). In return for our Q&A;, we are hoping maybe Walker will someday write us a little something about the fall of Kevin Bass.
2 Comments:
interesting article, sorry you guys didn't get more words. however, i'd have liked to have seen a little more in the way of counterpoint. not dealing with the whole "selling out" paradox, but addressing the question of how hard it is for a clothing label based around in-jokes and esoterism can stay fresh when there is such a formula to its success. in other words, a company exists to make profit. and a company in today's climate is usually subservient to the brand image. so the question i wanted to see in the article was "how often do companies like No Mas tinker with a working formula?" this is why i like the artist series you guys put out. transitioning from fallen sports idols to upcoming artists. 'cause they're not as dissimilar as you'd think. they both have the hunger.
It's an interesting problem, and I very much appreciate your thoughts.
Overall, the trouble is for short articles or any situation with a short attention span (which is most situations), people want you to be able to sum up what you do in like one quick phrase. And even though we have never set out to be badjoks.com, we have gotten IDed to a certain extent as dealing with fallen sports heroes because our most publicized stuff has been about that. That's defnitely a vein I am always going to want to mine, but overall, what we're trying to do is just explore sports as we really experience and discuss it (the ood, the bad, and the ugly) because we feel that there are other people out there on our wavelength. So it definitely makes me happy to hear that you dig the artist series and aren't just like, "I don't get it. What did Big Papi do wrong?"
So basically we are just going to continue to do what we find interesting and hope that we find an audience that finds it interesting too. That will sometimes involve fallen athletes and sometimes not. But being confined to only do "Fallen Athlete" work forever would be boring really quickly, so I am making sure to try other avenues.
ci
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