As if to acknowledge that Chuck Schuldiner died of AIDS on Valentine’s Day, the official merchandisers for Death have introduced a new line of Death merchandise featuring pink and kittens.
Longtime observers note that this is a case of a brand paying too much attention to a niche audience, namely Redditors, who are hipsters and therefore contrarians, and contrarians like doing whatever does not work in order to prove how important and independent of reality they are.
After all, “cool” in the antihero sense has always meant a detachment from reality and an impassive staredown of the consequences, like 1950s rock-n-roll hoodlums wearing leather jackets, smoking cigarettes, wearing sunglasses at night, and otherwise rejecting any type of normal behavior.
These paralleled the Bohemians of the 1500s who dressed like gypsies, had sex outside of marriage, drank too much wine and absinthe, and lived in squalor to show that they were not conformist products of the system. Contrarians do the absurd in order to make themselves seem more socially important.
Any sane person would note that the Death brand relies on death metal and its strongest representatives are the early albums, therefore merchandising should serve that image and promote death metal. However, the metal audience online has been from the fruit and soy crowd, so the marketing has changed.
Instead we get the official merch which pitches to the Reddit audience which wants to make death metal contrarian too, so it can be trendy, sensitive, harmless, and ironic instead of an actual artistic movement.
