As the music industry becomes increasingly more sophisticated at the very necessary and increasingly difficult task of converting art into products into money, musicians who explore the intersection of art and commerce have similarly had to get their game up. There was a time when riffing on a corporate logo for a band t-shirt design could qualify as a scathing commentary on the brand-ification of cultural properties, but as the relationship between music and marketing has grown deeper and more complex, subtler methods are called for.
Much of the excitement over the London collective PC Music comes from their artful manipulation of pop music’s most widely criticized aspects: its plasticky, high-gloss production; its elevation of form over content; and, especially, its aggressive pursuit of commodification. The various projects bundled up under the group’s name emphasize different elements of the equation, and the one who leans the heaviest on the commercial aspect is QT, whose first release was a love song to a fictional energy drink and whose second was the actual, suddenly non-fictional energy drink itself. (Although PC Music affiliate Sophie was the first of the group to score an actual commercial placement.)
According to QT, the energy drink isn’t simply a piece of merchandise. "When I first started making music," she wrote on Instagram, "I knew I wanted to make an additional sensory component... So when you hear one, you can taste the other... [.]" At a PC Music showcase in New York she declared, "I’m dedicated to creating pop products that promote a different type of energy," before performing her (so far one and only) single, "Hey QT", in front of a spinning CG can of the drink. It’s worth noting that the event was solely sponsored by Red Bull.
The point of the overarching QT project goes far beyond simple merchandising and product placement—it’s about reaching a state of ecstatic, transcendent brand synergy, where there is no line between QT the performer and QT the product. QT the artist has been compared to the computer-generated virtual J-pop star Hatsune Miku, but what she seems to be trying to achieve is closer to "OS-tans," anime-style anthropomorphic avatars (usually female, often eroticized) of computer operating systems created first by fans as a spontaneous expression of brand enthusiasm and later adopted as an official corporate branding strategy.
If I understand QT properly, drinking a QT energy drink should be just as authentic an experience as listening to "Hey QT" or seeing her perform live. There are definitely some common qualities between them.
The QT slogan is "100% Supernatural," which, if you take it to mean "beyond natural" in more of a cybernetic than an occult sense, applies to every aspect of QT, from the heavily processed sound of "Hey QT" to the heavily photoshopped images of the singer, to the flavor of the energy drink, which manages to taste somehow even more artificial than the typical energy drink. Even the idea of bringing yet another new brand of classic Red Bull-style energy drink—the quintessential beverage of the Britney era—into a green-juice world feels like an extension of QT’s hyperstylized interpretation of turn-of-the-century pop aesthetics.
But there is something mystical about QT’s quest to become one with her brand identity that comes from the same place as pretty much all religious impulses, a desire to transcend the constraints of the self and unite with something bigger than ourselves. From that perspective, drinking a can of QT might be considered an act of communion, which isn't something that most other brands of energy drink can claim.
Of course most people probably didn’t pay 20 dollars for a can of QT—packaged in a plexiglas display box and personally sprayed with rosewater by QT herself—in order to drink it. Its advertised guarantee to "contribute to upward shine, vertical connectivity and personal growth" for the purchaser, which doesn’t come from the taurine and caffeine inside, but from the totemic power that the whole object’s infused with. If you’re only looking to elevate your heart rate and anxiety levels, there are plenty of other products that do the job better and don’t taste as weird.