And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [49]
But that had been a mere reference to flash mobs, whereas Fusion Flash Concerts was a true co-optation—Ford was planning to create real-life flash mobs, in order to make its product seem cool. By presenting myself as an interested member of the news media, I was able to confirm this latter point with Ford directly. Ford was, a spokesman told me by phone, “looking for cool ways to connect with their target audience,” at both a “price point” and what he called a “cool point.” The flash concerts idea, he said, had “a spontaneity and a cool factor that was attached to it.”
He invited me to come and see the flash concert in Boston, at City Hall Plaza. The featured act would be a band called Staind, whose upcoming album Rolling Stone had described as “a unique combo of AAMEETING ballads and fetal-position metal.” Most concertgoers would have to register at the site and wait to receive the details just beforehand, but to a reporter in good standing he was willing to reveal the secret show date. It was a week and a half away, in early August—the same date, as a matter of fact, that Staind’s new album was to be released.
City Hall Plaza is a singularly poor spot to hold a flash mob. A good mob site, I would assert with some experience, must conspire to make a mob matter: it must be confined enough to make the mob seem grand, unassuming enough to make the mob seem absurd, well-trafficked enough to provide an audience for the mob’s visual shock. In City Hall Plaza, by contrast, it is as if the urban space had been calibrated to render futile-seeming any gathering, large or small, attempted anywhere on its arid expanse. All the nearby buildings seem to be facing away, making the plaza’s eleven acres of concrete and brick feel like the world’s largest back alleyway. There is no nearby community to speak of, the historic neighborhood there—the old Scollay Square, a convivial knot of tightly packed apartment houses and popular burlesque theaters—having been entirely razed in the early 1960s. In its stead was laid down a plaza so devoid of benches, greenery, and other signposts of human hospitality that even on the loveliest fall weekend, when the Common and Esplanade and other public spaces teem with Bostonians at leisure, the plaza stands utterly empty save for the occasional skateboarder grinding a lonely path across its long, shallow steps to nowhere. The Hall itself, hailed at its construction as a paragon of what then was approvingly called the New Brutalist movement, approximates both the shape and the charm of an offshore oil platform; its concrete facade is now pocked with spalls and dulled by weeping dark patches of smut.
Wandering the site two hours before showtime, I was struck by how every vestige of “flash” had already been stripped from the evening’s event. The “last-minute” e-mails had in fact gone out six days beforehand. Two radio stations had been tapped to promote the show with ads (“just to pump everything up,” another Ford rep had told me). Newspapers had even listed the concert in their daily arts calendars. Here at City Hall Plaza a tremendous soundstage had already been erected, its prodigious backdrop displaying the cover art from Staind’s new album. Phalanxes of motorbike cops rumbled around, eyeing the hundred-strong klatch of diehard Stainders lumped directly in front of the empty stage. Ford had already set up a hospitality tent, had cordoned off a VIP area, and, atop yard-high stands in the near distance, had perched two new Ford Fusions, the eponymous guests of honor, tilted widthwise as if banking gnarly turns.
While we waited for the soundcheck, Barry Grant, a Ford rep, offered to show me around the product. Barry was a sunny fellow whose face had a pleasingly Mephistophelian