Everything these days is branded: company logos cover everything. Kids these days rate cool by what brands you're wearing and where you shop. We no longer have a counterculture but an over-the-counter culture, and all the alternatives - hippy festivals, etc - are beginning to look just as branded. Orange sponsored this year's Glastonbury Festival, which used to raise money for CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament).
I am an art director and come up with branding for companies, which is increasingly drawn from so-called alternative culture sources. For example: our last three ads used the Propellerheads, the Prodigy and Amon Tobin(a Ninja Tune artist) These guys earn stacks off corporate advertising: music, formerly seen as a tool for rebellion, is now using the semiology of rebellion to sell itself.
I wonder if there is any real rebellion left? And if so, what forms it might take? How do we subvert the subversion of our subversiveness? Is every idea we come up with, in the end, doomed to be sold out?