Ryan Moede

It took a few days to adjust to the quiet of Woodstock. Dylan was suddenly alone with nothing but an empty notebook. And there was no need to fill this notebook – Dylan had been relieved of his creative burden. But then, just when Dylan was most determined to stop creating music, he was overcome with a strange feeling. "It's a hard thing to describe," Dylan would later remember. "It's just this sense that you got something to say." What he felt was the itch of an imminent insight, the tickle of lyrics that needed to be written down. "I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit," Dylan said. "I'd never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me that this is what I should do." Vomit is the essential word here. Dylan was describing, with characteristic vividness, the uncontrollable rush of a creative insight. "I don't know where my songs come from," Dylan said. "It's like a ghost is writing a song." This was the thrilling discovery that saved Dylan's career: he could write vivid lines filled with possibility without knowing exactly what those possibilities were. He didn't need to know. He just needed to trust the ghost.

This was a staggeringly strange way to create a piece of pop music. At the time, there were two basic ways to write a song. The first was to be like the Bob Dylan that Dylan was trying to escape: compose serious lyrics on a serious topic. The second way was to compose an irresistible jingle full of major chords. Such predictability is precisely what Dylan wanted to avoid; he couldn't stand the clichéd constraints of pop music. And this is why that "vomitific" writing was so important: Dylan suddenly realised that it was possible to celebrate vagueness, to write lines that didn't insist on making sense. He would later say that Like A Rolling Stone was his first "completely free song... the one that opened it up for me".

A little-known American charity dedicated to helping victims of African conflict has scored a public relations coup. Invisible Children's new 30-minute Kony 2012 video, directed by Jason Russell, has been viewed over 440,000 times since being placed on YouTube on March 5. The film is intended to raise public awareness of the devastating Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) conflict in Uganda; Fast Company has written previously about the LRA's routine use of child labor and rape.

So far, the campaign has managed to get more than 4 million total views across the web in a little more than 48 hours. The documentary focuses on Joseph Kony, the LRA leader responsible for years of violent atrocities in Uganda and nearby countries. According to Invisible Children, the film and a related campaign “aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.” Invisible Children has been canny about marketing the film through social media via the use of Twitter hashtags (#kony2012) and celebrities. Rihanna, Stephen Fry, and The Onion's Baratunde Thurston have all tweeted about the film. In addition, Invisible Children is organizing a celebrity pressure campaign to get, among others, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Lady Gaga to publicize #kony2012.

“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are “The Advertisers” and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”

~ Banksy

Simple and clever.

"People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it."

I loved the ad, despite it's terrible design. But it also goes to show just how it easy to stand out if your brand actually stands for something. Patagonia's is a simple message. But it's a value that's real and counter to the mindless crush of consumerism. I'm thrilled that Patagonia has taken this stand in their advertising, not just that it may in its own small way help shape consumer behavior towards more sustainability, but also that it may inspire other brands to re-think the values they stand for.