I had to get a haircut this weekend, but I slept late on Saturday and missed the opportunity to go to my regular barbershop—an old school, no-nonsense barbershop in the basement of an early 20th Century building in downtown Normal, Illinois. My regular barbershop is called Shorty’s. It’s across the street from the Normal post office, and three doors down from the restored art deco Normal Theater.
Shorty’s is pretty much like most privately-owned barber shops in small town America, and not that different from most privately-owned old school barber shops in Big City America. They have a television on at all times, playing one sporting event or another. The barbers get into heated conversations about sports, local politics, current events, and the weather.
But on Sunday, most neighborhood barbershops are closed, and I desperately needed a haircut. So I drove around the Bloomington-Normal area looking for an open barbershop. All I could find was Supercuts.
The Supercuts in Bloomington, Illinois is half a block off of Veterans Parkway. Veterans is the street that exists now in every suburb and medium-sized city that is choked with every imaginable corporate franchise restaurant, retailer, big box, and chain store.
There are no sidewalks along Veterans Parkway, and even if there were, it wouldn’t be a very pleasant place to walk. Cars zip along Veterans Parkway at 50 mph. There are no crosswalks at any intersection. The street is lined with telephone poles, parking lots, giant signs with corporate logos, debris, motels, cookie-cutter apartments, corporate offices, business parks, and mini-malls. Veterans Parkway in Bloomington-Normal could just as easily be a similar street in Amarillo, TX; Jacksonville, FL; Southfield, MI; or Bellevue, WA.
Entering the Supercuts in Bloomington, there was a corporate welcome mat with the Supercuts logo. There are thousands of them around the country. The local Top 40 radio station was playing American Top 40 hosted by Ryan Seacrest. This week’s #2 song is "Party in the USA" by Miley Cirus, which makes heavy use of the vocal auto-tuner, like just about every song on this week’s Top 40. The number one song this week is from Jay Sean, "Down," which also makes heavy use of the vocal auto-tuner--- but features a guest featured rap performance by Lil Wayne!!
Even if the sky is falling down like she supposed to be,
She gets down low for me,
Down like her temperature, ‘cause to me she ZeRo degrees,
She cold, overfreeze,
I got that girl from overseas,
Now she my Miss America,
Now can I be her soldier please,
I’m fighting for this girl
On a battlefield of love,
Don't it look like baby cupid sending arrows from above,
Don’t you ever leave the side of me,
Indefinitely, not probably,
And honestly I'm down like the economy,
Yeahhhhhh
What a treat! Nothing compares to the experience of hearing the banal, focus-group tested rap of Lil Wayne run through an auto-tuner while looking through a window at corporate logos, the State Farm Insurance headquarters, parking lots, a six lane highway, and utility wires!
The titles in the magazine stand included "American Cheerleader" (I never knew such a magazine existed) and every celebrity news magazine on the market. In the barber chair, the only conversation from the automaton-like barber, was "How do you want it?"
The haircut at Supercuts was a nickel less than the haircut at Shorty’s-- $12.95 instead of $13.00. I gave my typical minimum tip-- three dollars. I have no idea how much the stoic, silent barber got and how much went toward the Supercuts corporate headquarters (probably located in a cookie-cutter business park somewhere off an Interstate highway somewhere).
Seriously, is this how the majority of America lives now? Soulless, empty, banal, technology-styled pop music; corporate franchise haircuts; mini-mall architecture; focus-group tested corporate art; nothing but robotic, stoic, capitalistic-focused conversation; deliberate barriers to pedestrians; a pile of stupid magazines intent on making people more stupid; illuminated and rotating corporate logos framing the roadside; ugly, naked corporatism everywhere; and cranky, humorless people populating the entire bleak landscape? If this is what we are now-- a stupid potential market for corporations-- how can we really ever expect to become a better society?