When Martha Byrne, a star on As the World Turns, performs in Chicago on April 18, she won't just be trying to sell her music. Her 10-city tour around the country is part of the latest public relations effort by tobacco companies to infiltrate the "alternative" music and media scene. Byrne is the first artist on Philip Morris' Woman Thing Music label, and her CD is given away for free -- with the purchase of two packs of Virginia Slims. (Presumably, reviewers will refer to her voice as "smokey.")
Tobacco companies are working hard to develop an "alternative" niche. And Chicago's corporate "alternative" media are happy to rake in the money -- and willing to ignore one of America's leading causes of death.
It's long been documented that women's magazines which take cigarette money won't criticize the industry killing so many of their readers. But most media critics have overlooked the complicity of newspapers like the Chicago Reader, New City, and The Windy City Times in the tobacco companies' campaign to make cigarettes as hip as body piercing.
The revelations about the conspiracy of tobacco companies to conceal evidence of the hazards of smoking and recruit young smokers have recently appeared in the mainstream media (and before that, in serious alternative media like Mother Jones), but Chicago's alternative newspapers have had virtually nothing to say about the subject.
To understand why, you need only look at the back page of almost any Reader, New City, or Windy City Times. Odds are overwhelming that it's a cigarette ad. The Reader's music section includes a regular "Camel Page" promoting the trendiest events. Although tobacco companies are a small but important source of advertising, their influence is even larger because they're virtually the only advertiser willing to pay the high price for color ads (the other is alcohol, another subject ignored in alternative media).
Forced out of the TV and radio market, and leery of high-priced mainstream papers aimed at aging baby boomers, tobacco companies have sought out "alternative" media as a way to seem hip to youth. R.J. Reynolds has even developed an "alternative" brand, Red Kamel, which is marketed almost exclusively in these alternative newspapers; in the centerspread is a 1/4 page color ad listing various alternative clubs (Crobar, Subterranean, Twisted Spoke) where Red Kamel is available. The ads are appropriately "alternative": a black-and-white photo of a man wearing only a barrel with the words, "believed in an afterlife, never wore a watch, smoked Kamels" at the top and "back for no good reason except they taste good" at the bottom. The fact that a cigarette company can joke about the mortality of smokers only shows how successfully it has adapted to the ironic tone of "alternative" America.
Marketing tie-ins are another popular way of extending cancer sticks toward young consumers. One recent Marlboro ad listed over 40 local bars and clubs and a schedule where smokers could "win Marlboro gear" at the bar. (If the tobacco companies were forced to be honest, coffins with the Marlboro logo and T-shirts of blackened lungs would be among the merchandise offered, but expect instead the usual hats and junk.) By forming these relationships with local bars and clubs, Philip Morris builds a natural source of opposition to any future attempts to impose greater regulations on smoking. Bars are the last bastions of public smoker acceptance, and tobacco companies buy name recognition and hipness from the 20something crowds.
Virginia Slims now has made its link to music, using otherwise overlooked female performers like Byrne, who their ad amusingly refers to as "Daytime Emmy Winner and next big music thing." Once Virginia Slims gets to appoint the "next big music thing" with its massive marketing power, few budding music stars will be willing to turn against them, just as female tennis stars rarely criticize the tobacco industry's sponsorship of sporting events (a practice which continues with the Virginia Slims Legends Tour, which is coming to Chicago this month).
Music is appropriated in the same way as "you've come a long way, baby" feminism. Pop music is the latest instrument of their marketing; the Woman Thing label just happens also to be the latest Virginia Slims ad slogan ("Virginia Slims -- It's a woman thing"). And local female musicians are part of a contest to determine who is the opening act for Byrne: the alternative papers, naturally enough, are full of the "Dueling Divas" ads. The winner gets to be the first local musician to sell out completely to an industry that murders over 140,000 women a year in the US. Quite an honor.