Everything goes when it comes to marketing campaigns, really, everything? The famous Swedish retail-clothing company H&M is accused to have come up with a new series of fake metal bands to promote their new bomber jacket.
A mysterious ‘Strong Scene Productions’, which has made a new Facebook profile just a few days ago, came up with a brand new mythology of metal bands… As I don’t know anything about 80’s obscure black metal, I was ready to believe that ‘the French LANY, Mexican MORTUS, American ‘cosmic hippie metal’ -gurus MYSTIC TRIANGLE and GREY from Germany – the originator of the whole symphonic female metal-genre’ were totally legit, there are so many details in the bio of all these bands! But well, I guess they aren’t real at all and this is just another smartass marketing strategy? Just read this press release promoting a new H&M jacket which guarantees you a trip down to memory lane:
‘STRONG SCENE PRODUCTIONS is happy to provide a musical trip down in memory lane in support of HENNES & MAURITZ Heavy & Metal clothing line showcasing the talents and forgotten jewels of global underground metal music.
As illustrated by the bomber jacket and t-shirts worn by the models of H & M, the new items feature logos from long-forgotten underground goth- and thrash acts such as the French LANY, Mexican MORTUS, American “cosmic hippie metal” -gurus MYSTIC TRIANGLE and GREY from Germany – the originator of the whole symphonic female metal-genre.
These groups together with the likes of extreme metallers MOTMROS and neo-folkers THE ONE formed the basis for a whole generation of music in 1980’s, music that was traded on tapes rather than as files, music that served as an inspiration to all of the most successful bands still recording today, from Meshuggah to the likes of Nightwish.’
Is this totally BS? Can you make up false memory? Oh yes! And to prove their point, they have even come up with a YouTube video, a ‘demonstration sampler compiled by STRONG SCENE PRODUCTIONS showcasing the talents of these gone, but not forgotten underground metal talents’. You can watch all these talents below for your own listening pleasure…
So all this trouble to make you buy a $65 jacket? May be it is worth it, may be they want to get an award for the most original marketing campaign, but if you fall for it and buy the jacket, what will you do when you discover these bands have never existed? Pretty lame isn’t it?
Well it is, in fact a hoax: “ T-shirts were never actually on sale, and were actually part of a joke on H&M by, among others, Moonsorrow/Finntroll’s Henri Sorvali.
“When Noisey spoke to Sorvali about the hoax, he insisted, “The purpose of the group (consisting of literally tens of people from different areas of music and media around Scandinavia) was to create discussion on the fact that metal culture is more than just ‘cool’ looking logos on fashionable clothes, and has many more aesthetic and ideological aspects in different subgenres than what some corporations are trying to express. “
He continued, “The metal scene is varied, controversial and a sort of a wolf you can’t chain into a leash and expect it to behave on your terms like a dog. Strong Scene as a collective has absolutely no political nor ideological intentions, and is only bringing the conversation to the level it should be discussed at. Think of us as the one-time ‘Yes Men’ of metal music.”