Making this in-universe would be in line with Sell-Out being restricted to in-universe examples.
As far as I can tell, this is what it would look like (assuming I didn't miss any). I decided to remove the "Real Life" folder entirely; if we make this trope In-Universe Examples Only, it's probably safe to make it "No Real Life Examples" too.
Examples:
- Possibly the Ur-Example: In 1968, Columbia Records ran a notorious ad in Rolling Stone showing a bunch of picket sign-toting young radicals in a jail cell with the caption "But The Man can't bust our music." For extra hilarity, the albums shown in the ad are all Classical Music. (Wendy Carlos' early electronica Switched-On Bach was a bit more far out then.)
- Also in the late 1960s was a TV ad for one of Dodge's muscle cars in which the driver is pulled over by a cop straight out of Easy Rider who eventually gets so offended by the car and its carefully-enunciated features that he ends up booking the driver for "sassin' a law officer."
- Often the theme of Sprite's "Obey Your Thirst" campaign, particularly in later commercials, where they make fun of commercial gimmicks to get you to buy their products, by using commercial gimmicks to get you to buy their products. The initial ads of this type were more like 30-second motivational spots that were sponsored by Sprite. e.g. A teen sees Grant Hill drinking Sprite and then effortlessly dunking. The teen thinks, "Grant Hill drinks Sprite". He gets a Sprite, drinks it, and tries to dunk, while a deep voiceover says, "If you wanna make it to the NBA..." The kid fails miserably, landing on his ass. "...practice." Then, the little tag at the end, which seemed to say, "Incidentally, Sprite can't make you dunk, but it quenches thirst, so why not get some next time?"
- Acknowledged in a commercial for a specific cellphone carrier, Sprint:
Underling: Is that your new Sprint Phone?"CEO: Uh huh, with Sprint's new fair and flexible plans no one can tell me what to do. I can talk when and how I want. It is my little way of sticking it to The Man."Underling: ...but you are The Man.CEO: That's right.Underling: So... you're sticking it to yourself?CEO: ...Maybe. - Apple's famous "1984" commercial
equated the then-dominant IBM with Orwell's "Big Brother", and offered the new Macintosh as a way of reclaiming your individuality. The motto "think different" was emblematic of the "everyone have the same difference" mentality. To this day, Apple emphasizes its distinctiveness, but it's more presented as being "cooler" than the competition—see the "I'm a Mac"/"I'm a PC" ads.
- Look at their "Crazy Ones"
Commerical. Remember everyone: If you buy an Apple-brand computer, you TOO can be just like Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lennon!
- Look at their "Crazy Ones"
- The Hot Topic chain of clothing stores is built on this, with an edgy, rebellious image carefully crafted by some marketing suit in City of Industry, CA, where the main offices are located. Yeah, the city looks exactly like you think it does. The Hot Topic building is generally non-descript, but driving past at night you can see that the lobby is decked out with a 27-foot tall gothic altar, and the receptionist sits at an antique autopsy table. (First photo.
) Apparently the rest of the building is no let-down either.
- The infamous "Don't Be So Mayo" and "We Will Not Tone It Down" Miracle Whip commercials apply this trope to eating mayonnaise.
- Used in a Scion commercial, painting people in other cars as "Sheeple" and Scion owners as rebellious "Little Deviants" who feed on them. Yes, we're all going to blindly buy your car in order to reclaim our own free will.
- An even more blatant example was the Scion AV "punk label,"
which had a roster of bands including Meshuggah and Black Lips to promote the Scion.
- An even more blatant example was the Scion AV "punk label,"
- Dr. Pepper's "Be part of an original crowd". No, seriously.
- "Always One of a Kind."
Show your individuality by wearing a red-and-white shirt all but identical to everyone else's!
- "Always One of a Kind."
- An old drug PSA used the tagline of "Be An Original". How does doing what the commercial tells you to do make you an original? They probably meant: "Don't be like all those drugged-out kids out there, because you're morally superior to them." Not only an arrogant point of view, but pretty cynical as well. (Later ads evoke the same theme, with their "Above the Influence" slogan.)
- Reebok's U.B.U. campaign, which was brazen enough to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous essay on self-reliance.
- Budweiser beer is now viciously and sarcastically attacking morons who drink beer in some of their ads, such as the "Real Men of Genius" series. Weird, huh?
Some of the guys in Marketing must really hate their own company...
- Advertisements for Total Gym have Chuck Norris giving a runby of how the workout equipment works and stating how while other commercials use gimmicks to sell their product, this stands on its own.
- Sega ran a campaign of "pirate TV" ads advertised by sticking flyers on billboards, because flyposting and pirate transmissions are cool and edgy. But also illegal, so they put up their own billboards for fictional products and flyposted them.
- In the nineties Subaru ran spots of a know-it-all skater kid explaining how "This car is like punk rock." Which probably drove their business with actual punk rockers down by 75%.
- OK Soda
. Made by the Coca-Cola Company in 1993 to target the Gen-X/grunge demographic. The campaign itself Lampshaded and Parodied this trope, rather than played it straight. The campaign assumed that the Gen-X market believed they were being exploited and manipulated by advertising in general, and so was simply transparent about it.
- Around the same time Coca-Cola also introduced Fruitopia
, which used a more gentle version of the trope. Its marketing had a heavy New-Age Retro Hippie vibe, with the implication that Fruitopia's main concern was helping you achieve self-actualization, and only incidentally were they also in the soft drink business. After a few years they dropped the campaign and had a more conventional rebranding, but it didn't help sales and it ultimately got scrapped in the US market (it's still sold in Canada).
- Around the same time Coca-Cola also introduced Fruitopia
- 7-Up's short-lived "Are You An Un?" ad depicted their competitors as Orwellian overlords hunting down the "Uns," people who thought for themselves by drinking...7-Up. Viewers saw right through it, and it was soon pulled.
- Nintendo's "Play It Loud"
ad campaign made it look like buying SNES games was an excellent way of rebelling against those stuffy, repressive authority figures, as well as trying to make them look much edgier than they actually were in most cases.
- In 2004, a short-lived ad campaign for V — The Ultimate Variety Show appeared in at least one Las Vegas freebie magazine (publications left in hotel rooms, etc. for tourists), encouraging potential theatergoers to "Dare to be different" and choose it over Blue Man Group, Cirque du Soleil, and/or Celine Dion. It even had a cartoon illustration with a black sheep choosing the variety show while tons of white sheep chose the others. The show is a B-list, low-budget production compared to those A-list ones, so the ad was assuming the target audience did not know that.
- An infamous example of The Woman Sticking It To The Man is Virginia Slims' "You've Come a Long Way, Baby" campaign from The '60s.
- Pepsi's 2010 "Refresh Your World Campaign", at least in the Czech Republic. In this ad
they reach out to some young "edgy" types to help put some stickers on the communist landscape but Obstructive Bureaucrats get in their way. This one
shows a pair of hip pensioners painting a bus stop to a hip hop beat. Also, the project's website is noted by its use of colloquial spoken language, which indicates some unplugged executive is behind it all.
- A short time ago Levis ran ads for their "go forth" campaign in black and white, showing young models doing things like standing alone in a field with either recordings of a Walt Whitman poem
or a voice over that that spends the entire commercial calling the people in the commercial (and by extension everyone who wears Levi's jeans) "pioneers.
"
- Pace Picante Sauce commercials: Pace is made by a big company, but to differentiate themselves from other picante sauces, they point out that their competitors' sauces are made in big factories that aren't in Texas.
- The "Hold Fast" series of advertisements for Sailor Jerry purport to chronicle nonconformists and rebels...who all drink Sailor Jerry.
- McDonalds ran a series of ads in New Zealand for its new "Lamb Burger", one of which had a man complain about how New Zealand is now overrun by overseas influences, such as American TV shows and European cars, until he is told that McDonalds now offer Lamb Burger. All this, coming from an American franchise.
- When New York was still threatening to implement the 16 ounce soda ban (a judge has since tossed it out), every soda corporation in the city joined forces for an advertising campaign on each delivery truck reading, quote-unquote, "Don't let bureaucrats tell you what size beverage to buy." Complete with a silhouetted figure raising a fist in defiance, with a soda bottle in his clenched hand.
- Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi took one look at the "cult of Apple" and crafted its own cult
. The name of the company refers to revolution, supported by a Chinese revolutionary bunny mascot, and you too can be a "mi fen" and part of the in-crowd if you buy their t-shirts, dolls and of course their actual phones, which are anything but exclusive
and whose MIUI operating system shamelessly borrows from Apple's iOS.
- On a can of Monster Assault energy drink, they claim that the camo pattern the can is decorated with "helps fire [them] up to fight the big multi-national companies who dominate the beverage business." Elsewhere on the can, at least those sold in Canada, can be found the words "Distributed by Coca-Cola Refreshments Canada."
- A TV commercial for Converse sneakers depicts a bunch of young people dancing in a nightclub in slow motion. Onscreen text scrolling upwards describes how this commercial was made by a bunch of old white men in a corporate office whose knowledge of teenagers and young adults is entirely derived through focus testing. At no point in the commercial does it ever remotely suggest the viewer to buy Converse sneakers, nowhere do the shoes ever appear in the commercial, and the logo doesn't even show up until a less-than-a-second shot at the end.
- Several commentators on the documentary The Corporation note this trope's existence in Real Life. However, it's not presented as all doom-and-gloom — they also note that, as long as demand for anti-corporate material exists, the corporations within a capitalist system will always provide supply to meet that demand, thus allowing for resistance and possibly even eventual subversion of them.
- The Adjustment Bureau references this when Norris, a Senatorial candidate, admits that despite his small-town anti-conformist tone he has his entire appearance dictated by careful studies from large corporations to find what will get the best reaction from the population.
- The 1994 movie The Chase provides an excellent example of the two incarnations of "The Man" coming into conflict, with the film intrinsically claiming that the "hip" Man is somehow less of a Man than the stodgy old corporate Man. Kristy Swanson is the daughter of a mega-successful California businessman. After she is kidnapped by a desperate prison escapee (played by Charlie Sheen) and finds herself slowly falling in love with him, she decides she's had enough of her father trying to control her life. Long story short, the couple abscond to Mexico ... and how do they "rebel" when they get there? They lie on the beach and drink margaritas – something the girl's father most likely did a lot of in private himself.
- Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It showed this. The '50s Rock and Roll era was basically run by gangsters from The '30s who turned legitimate. One of the gangsters, played by Edmond O'Brien, wants to cash in on the youth market by launching his own pop sensation and finds out his ex-rival now runs the big music company. At the end of film, he becomes a rising pop star himself and his rival is so impressed with his success that he hires him and gives him a contract, because hey, he's a hit with the kids.
- The entire history of this phenomenon - at least in America - is traced by economist Thomas Frank in his book The Conquest of Cool. Frank points out that the "do-what-you-wanna-do" philosophy of The '60s was actually an aesthetic crafted by Mad Men-style Madison Avenue types. That's right: the "cultural revolution" that supposedly turned everything we knew about the world completely upside-down was the handiwork of middle-class kids aping the consumer culture of the guys in suits they claimed to despise.
- Richard Hofstadter noted the presence of this trope. He argued that American history is fundamentally about consensus (with the single exception of The American Civil War) rather than polarization between pro-and-anti-business interests. In his book, The American Political Tradition, Hofstadter noted that parties often present or dress up their platform on anti-capitalist themes while at the same time furthering business interests and tricking the public into believing that they really are going to reform the system:
The fierceness of the political struggles has often been misleading: for the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major parties has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise.
- This is the main theme of the non-fiction book The Rebel Sell
by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter. Namely, there is no "system" against which to rebel, and the desire to fight conformity and make ourselves distinctive is essentially the very thing which promotes consumer capitalism.
- French literary critic Roland Barthes called this "Operation Margarine" in his book Mythologies and in the post-script he identifies the same point arrived by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.
- Hilariously inverted in the fifth Captain Underpants book. The school puts up posters saying things like "Mindless Conformity - It's Fun!" or "Individuality Causes Pain!"
- George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has this as a prominent theme. The Infodump book at the story's midpoint argues that throughout history there have only been three groups of people: the High, the Middle and the Low. The entire history of civilization could be summed up as a battle between the Middle and the High; the High trying to retain their position, the Middle trying to usurp it by duping the Low to their cause.
- Tom Wolfe coined the phrase "radical chic" to describe rich establishment liberals who support radical groups like the Black Panthers by donating money or hosting parties for them, just so long that they don't actually have to do anything that would affect their upper class lifestyle. The phrase first appeared in an article Wolfe wrote for New York magazine titled "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's", which was reprinted in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and The Purple Decades.note
- Mad TV episode #213 had an opening sequence with a statement from "The Man". He makes it quite clear that it is impossible to Stick It To The Man, to Put One Over on The Man, or to Get By The Man, because The Man is watching at all times.
- Jack O'Neil(l) from Stargate SG-1 complains about his inability to do this after he gets a promotion: He likes sticking it to the man. But now he is the man. At which point Jackson helpfully suggests he could try sticking it to himself.
- In one episode of Coupling, Sally tries to claim that the Lefties are essentially the "struggling rebels". Patrick points out that the Left has not only been mainstream for quite some time, but has held a majority for several years. Howard, a Gay Conservative Jane is trying to seduce, sides with Patrick despite Sally's insistence that as a gay man he should be on her side.
Sally: Come The Revolution—Patrick: What revolution? You guys are in power, we're the revolution now.Sally: [horrified] No. That can't be right...Patrick: [mocking] You're the Evil Empire.Howard: Yes! It's like Star Wars, and Patrick and me, we're the Rebel Alliance.[They start humming the Star Wars theme]
- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: Detective John Munch is an avid conspiracy theorist and actively voices suspicion of all branches of government, including the justice system of which he is a part.
- A newspaper opinion piece once featured the captain of a 'satirical panel game' protesting vigorously that Cedric Brown over at British Gas was getting £10,000 of public money for just three days of work a week. Producer Harry Thompson (of Have I Got News for You amongst other things) pointed out that the satirist was getting £10,000 of public money for three hours of work a week.
- In an episode of Los Simuladores, a teenage kid dressed as a stereotypical goth wants help to cure her sister from her bulimia and anorexia. Mario Santos agrees to help him and notes that his clothes, supposedly there to express non conformity and anarchism, were sold to him by major retailers and that "the industry of rebellion is quite lucrative". His advice is "if you want to be a rebel, you have to wear a suit and a tie". At the end of the episode we see him in a nice suit walking with confidence around awed students.
- Sara Bareilles' "Love Song", a catchy, major-label "corporate" pop song, is a slam by Bareilles against her record label for trying to force her to write a love song before they'd allow her album to be released.
- Jonathan Coulton's "Sticking It To Myself."
- The entire post-Illmatic career of Nas can be considered playing this trope straight, as he's been long considered an icon of antithesis to "commercial" hip hop while also owing his career to radio-friendly songs and media hype. The most glaring moment was him naming one of his albums "Hip Hop is Dead" as a response to what he feels is extensive Executive Meddling in the genre; it also happened to be his first album released under Def Jam Records, the biggest hip hop label in the world and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Universal Music, and the album itself was made in collaboration with many mainstream artists and producers.
- tool's "Hooker With A Penis" lampoons this trope. In it, the speaker is confronted by a former fan who accuses him of "selling out" with his latest album. The speaker laughs in his face and tells him that he sold out long ago. That's how the fan ever heard of him in the first place. The fan is also covered head to toe in product brands: Vans shoes, Levi 501s, a Beastie Boys t-shirt and is drinking Coke.
- Psychosocial by Slipknot brings this up with the line about "Packaging subversion."
- Ayria's song "Selling Rebellion" is pretty much all about this trope.
- "Uniform" by Bloc Party is about, in its own words, "Commerce dressed up as rebellion".
- The Clash for their part, acknowledged and dealt with this discrepancy in their music. Their single "Complete Control" is an angsty, furious Punk anthem about the fact that recording companies and radios owned the airwaves and they determine and sell the most youth-appealing songs for money that the singers will never see a cent of, all just to cash in on the rebellious youth sentiment of the era.
"Complete control / even over this song"
- Their song "Hate and War" also addressed this trope:
"An' if I close my eyes
They will not go away
You have to deal with it
It is the currency- Of course much later, Clash ran into controversy when they allowed one of their songs to be used by Jaguar. Joe Strummer defended this out of solidarity with the auto workers for Jaguar's factories who were suffering as a result of Margaret Thatcher's crackdown on manufacturing.
- The Crass song "Punk is Dead" is about how this trope has killed what punk rock was in the seventies, turning it into "just another product for the consumer's head."
- The Industrial Revolution (And How It Ruined My Life) has a part about looking down on the masses and buying a rebel brand, just like everyone else.
- "Packaged Rebellion
" by Anthrax is all about this.
- Pink Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine" explores this; when the supposedly edgy, rebellious band finally encounter the Machine of the music industry, it is able to correctly guess and predict their every move. Because the music industry is built around supposedly edgy, rebellious bands, and they're ultimately just as big a cog of the industry as the suits and executives are.
- As well as the page quote above, Calvin and Hobbes had another take
on this:
Calvin: Mom, can I have some money to buy a Satan-worshiping, suicide-advocating heavy metal album?
Mom: Calvin, the fact that these bands haven't killed themselves in ritual self-sacrifice shows that they're just in it for the money like everyone else. It's all for effect. If you want to shock and provoke, be sincere about it.- Paradoxically, many heavy metal bands have used Calvin's mother's argument to their own ends, as a defense of their free-speech rights. When Judas Priest were accused of inserting secret messages into one of their songs to persuade listeners to commit suicide, they retorted that making their fans kill themselves would be counterproductive to the band's fortunes, since no one would be left alive to buy Judas Priest albums.
- A cartoon in a high-school political science textbook showed the irony of teenagers objecting to uniforms in public schools. It shows a long line of "cool" hip-hop aficionados wearing identical brand-name athletic clothing and saying "School. Uniforms. Would. Make. Us. All. Look. The. Same." in creepy "cult member" fashion.
- John Lydon said something similar about gigging with the Sex Pistols and being annoyed that the audience were all dressed like him and the other band members rather than being individualistic: "I didn't get into punk to join the army".
- The brand war between Pequods and Quee Queegs coffee shops in Deus Ex: Invisible War has shades of this, especially after The Reveal that the war itself is a scam. Both chains are secretly owned by the same company. Which is in turn owned by The Illuminati, the ultimate "Man".
- The Vladof Corporation in Borderlands 2 always mentions in its radio adverts that true socialist warriors and the proletariat buy Vladof to overthrow the capitalist pigs.
- Pop star Brittany Wyoming in At Arm's Length promotes an image of rebelliousness and individuality, which is of course carefully crafted by her record label
.
- Learning with Manga! FGO: Assassin figures out that this is Gudako's shameful weakness: she puts on an image of being rebellious and controversial while voicing her complaints on how DelightWorks runs the game, but since she's also on their payroll, she can't go whole hog with them.
- Done more literally than usual in the Homestar Runner cartoon "Cool Things". Homestar needs to buy some paint from Bubs' concession stand, but Bubs insists that he's closed. Then Homestar asks Bubs if he'll bum some paint for him, and Bubs says that he never misses a chance to stick it to the man (who is actually himself), and gives Homestar the paint free of charge.
- Satirized throughout The Simpsons:
- In "The Heartbroke Kid", Springfield Elementary School puts in "edgy" vending machines—Ralph Wiggum says, "It's fun to obey the machine." The corporate mascots Scammer and Z-Dog are described by their creators as "spokesrebels".
- Several commentators have also noted that The Simpsons in general frequently satirizes corporate culture and capitalism while significantly benefiting from them; it often rips into Fox, its home network, while at the same time being one of Fox's flagship shows which is merchandised and promoted up the yin-yang.
- Fox News and Fox's entertainment division are generally masters of this trope. The Simpsons show has been making fun of its home network and lambasting Murdoch as a right-wing fascist "billionaire tyrant" since long before he even launched Fox News. So far, Fox's network of affiliates and Murdoch himself seem to be taking all of this in stride, and why not? For all the viewer ratings they've got and as much money as they're making, they're probably laughing all the way to the bank and know they already have a lot of enemies.
- The Banksy opening is a most prominent example of this, showing how horrible conditions in a sweatshop producing merchandise for ''The Simpsons'' supposedly are.
The operative word is "Supposedly"
.
- Daria sums up this trope nicely in "The Lost Girls":
"As far as I can make out, 'edgy' occurs when middlebrow, middle-aged profiteers are looking to suck the energy- not to mention the spending money- out of the "youth culture". So they come up with this fake concept of seeming to be dangerous when every move they make is the result of market research and a corporate master plan."
- Also an example of this trope by being on MTV, which does have something of a reputation for being this trope, though the quote itself is so on-the-nose that it is most likely Biting-the-Hand Humor.
Edited by TheMightyHeptagon on Apr 9th 2019 at 12:04:25 PM
That's a reasonable amount.
Making this trope In-Universe Examples Only and No Real Life Examples, Please!, the latter because this is a narrative trope and to help curb complaining.
I already mentioned I'm in favor of an IUEO transition, so I'll add that I support making this NRLEP as well.
I got a rock for Halloween.
I hollered for a mod to hook it. Apologies if the holler is a duplicate.
Anyway, I'm assuming none of the options are mutually exclusive.
I got a rock for Halloween.
Crown Description:
Many examples amount to Complaining About Shows You Dont Like. These options are not mutually exclusive.

The trope page for The Man Is Sticking It to the Man has become a major magnet for complaining, and it's currently suffering from most of the same issues that plagued Supposedly Rebellious Series before that trope was ultimately cut.
The definition of the trope is ostensibly "A work that uses rebellious or nonconformist social messages to sell itself", and the current Laconic summary is "Be rebellious by buying what we're selling." To put it mildly: the page has quite a few entries that only barely fit that definition.
I'm seeing a lot of protracted whining about how popular works and series don't "deserve" to be praised for their freethinking mentality, even if that has more to do with their reputation than their actual content. The page has also been flooded with blatantly opinionated entries implying that certain works have "sold out" by becoming popular or successful, as if it's inherently hypocritical for a Cash-Cow Franchise to contain progressive messages about freedom and individuality.
Without getting too much into my own feelings about that particular line of thinking, I think it's fair to say that a trope page isn't the place for bashing popular works for (allegedly) being overrated and hypocritical—particularly since The Man Is Sticking It to the Man isn't a YMMV trope. I don't want to jump to conclusions and argue that the page is beyond saving, but I worry that its definition invites complaining about works and their political subtext; to say the least, it's a bit problematic to argue that works of fiction can be defined as "The Man" (i.e. tools meant to uphold a country's existing political and social order) just because they don't actively contribute to revolutionary causes.
Just to list a few examples:
At the very least, those problematic examples really need to go—but they seem to be indicative of a trend, which worries me. I think it's fair to say that the whole page needs help.
Edited by TheMightyHeptagon on Mar 14th 2019 at 1:09:31 PM