When people start listing great brands you can count on Apple being at the top, then Nike, then Starbucks, then usually Sony, etc.

To make my list more interesting and less credible I think I am going to start dropping the Cramps into the second or third spot.

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The Cramps were my first and purest brand experience. They were my favorite band during my transitional years between high school and college, the years when I left my parents’ home and was airdropped into alien college territory. I loved the Cramps, but I only sort of liked their music. There was something inexplicably compelling about them but it had little to do with the sound. I didn’t know what to do with this discrepancy, so I just left it alone and assumed I actually did love their music, despite the fact that I listened to it only occasionally, primarily when I wanted to be existentially Cramped.

It took me years to realize: In the space of that discrepancy is the life of brand.

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Looking back, the Cramps’ way – a rigorous logic founded on a strictly limited set of aesthetic premises (*see note 1 below) to create a world-view as consistent and coherent as it was irrational – was ideally suited to my own situation as an alienated, disoriented kid in chaos.

The Cramps’ modus operandi: Don’t look for order out there, because the world is mostly ridiculous and what isn’t ridiculous is boring and not worth the pain. Found your life on your own ridiculous enthusiasms. Then, with the diligence and discipline of a medieval scholar, build out a world of pure, crystalline nonsense. Finally, and most importantly, do not talk about it. Do not explain the punchline. Simply do it, and let the actions and the artifacts speak for themselves. Enjoy it when people get it, and enjoy it even more when they don’t.  This stance was pure first-wave New York punk (*see note 2 below).

The Cramps provided me a starting point for creating order founded on meaning, and gave me relief from disorientation, boredom and anxiety. This is what good brands do in our nutty post-modern world, where meaningful orientation and coherence are far from given.

Human beings cannot live without meaning. Even a tiny grain of authentic meaning (even something as insignificant as really digging your iPod) properly understood can eventually grow out into a robust life-sustaining vision. Brand is not enough, but it is a start. Learning what brand essentially is, can help us recover many other forgotten human truths.

R.I.P. Lux Interior.

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Some examples of the vision:

• “Human Fly”
• “What’s Behind the Mask?”
• “Goo Goo Muck”

* NOTE 1: The premises of the Cramps: 1. music fandom – rockabilly, surf and 60s garage punk – recorded by crazed geniuses stranded in obscurity, limited releases, collected by obsessed cultural packrats; 2. cheap horror flicks; 3. severe mental disturbances (psychosis, lycanthropy, adolescence, major inbreeding, etc.); 4. sexual perversion, conceived as something cartoonish and as innocent as Elvis.

* NOTE 2: Anyone who thinks punk rock was primarily a musical form or just a style has missed the point. Punk rock was a vision for a dignified existence in a undignified world.