My review is up at my blog.

A snippet thou:

If you eschew Target to make your own clothes, buy from your local grocery & prefer Bust to Cosmo, would you take $2,000 from Ford to help spread the word about their new electric car? That's the main premise to Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing and the Erosion of Integrity by Anne Elizabeth Moore, but this is not just a book for the DIY/punk crowds. By giving us case studies on how easily some fairly indy people sell out, including the author, it forces those of us, like me, who don't claim an indy or DIY label to consider "How much is my work worth?", "When was the last time I sold out?" and "Do I even care?"

It would be a gross and offensive over-simplification to suggest that this is a marketing book. Yes, AEM does a great job of showing how corporate interests -in their rush to find new and fresh ways to reach an ever-more jaded pool of consumers- uses and twists the tools of DIY culture... But in doing so she navigates the notoriously sticky concepts of integrity, originality, and keeping-one's-hands-clean in the realm of cultural creativity.

While folks on the wrong side of this issue will undoubtedly see it as a primer on "how-to" exploit the creative work of folks operating on the fringes, it seems to me that it's an eloquent call for cultural creatives to NOT PLAY THE GAME... to resist the structure by consistently redefining the tools and the rules... Anne never downplays the complexities and difficulties of producing in this environment... but she does at least provide a partial map of the mine field... GREAT STUFF. ( )

An extremely honest (and often self-critical) examination of the ways that punk, underground, and DIY cultures have been co-opted by mainstream corporations from the 1990s to today, at the expense of integrity on both sides. Good for fans of Naomi Klein's "No Logo" and for moving beyond the marketing frenzy that December has become. -Emily

The most depressing book I've read in quite a while. ( )