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Thursday, March 19, 2009
GIVE ME BACK THAT FILET O' FISH
McDonald's Advertisement
2009
COMMERCIAL BREAK
Basehead
The Soul of Rock and Roll
Imago : 1993
[Buy It]
COMMERCIAL
The Tokens
Intercourse
Rev-ola : 1971
[Buy It]
THE COMMERCIAL
Wire
Pink Flag
Pink Flag : 1977
[Buy It]
COCA-COLA COMMERCIAL
The Who
The Who Sell Out
MCA : 1967
[Buy It]
TALKIN' FISH BLUES
Bob Dylan
1961
The other week I was out drinking too much with friends and the question of pop music's use in commercials came up. It came up because one friend is an songwriter and the other one works in advertising, as a copywriter, and eventually the two of them came together on what turned out to be common ground. For a while we talked about the rock songs that have, over the years, been sacrificed on the altar of commerce -- "Like a Rock" has hawked pickups, "Rock and Roll" sold Cadillacs, "Picture Book" moved printers, and most recently "Forever Young" uplifted the Pepsi generation. Some of us had a problem with that, but most of us felt somewhat blase about the prospect. Then we turned to jingles, and the advertising copywriter turned to the songwriter: "You must think there's a big difference between the crappy jingles that advertising companies commission and the songs you write, right?"
He smiled. He shifted in his chair. "Well," he said. "I've written jingles." He proceeded to tell us about a few of them: one was for a national restaurant chain; the other was for something more modest, like dentures or car wax. I don't exactly remember. Like I said, we were drinking. The copywriter was either secretly pleased or secretly appalled. She didn't advertise her feelings. On the way home that night, I fuzzily tried to puzzle through it all, to figure out what lines have been drawn (and then erased) between art and commerce and commercial art. I vaguely remembered that I had read something about a recent album that plays fast and loose with those lines and limits. The next morning, slightly more sober, I sharpened my memory.
The album, as it turns out, is Product Placement, the debut from the Atlanta-based Advertisements. Composed of rock renditions of ten famous jingles, the album is the latest attempt to conflate (or confuse) aesthetics and economics. The four band members, all in their late twenties, use pseudonyms taken from the advertising world -- in addition to guitarist, lead vocalist, and chief spokesman Mr. Whipple, there's keyboard player Mikey, drummer Mac Tonight, and bassist The Michelin Man. Friends since they met in a late-nineties Southern-rock outfit named Red Dash, Whipple and Mikey first conceived of the Advertisements a few years ago, from what I can gather. "We were just sitting around watching TV, and he started to sing the GE song. 'GE, we bring good things to living, we bring good things to life,'" explains Whipple. "On a whim, we went down to his basement and recorded it, and it sounded great. So we called up the other guys, who we knew and had worked with, and that was our band." (I did not acquire these quotes personally. I found them in an article about the band, another form of advertisement.)
What does an ultra-gimmicky advertising-reliant rock band sound like? Well, I'll tell you. Founded on a "brisk organic sound" that recalls the "glory days of the Attractions," the band "crackles" (and "snaps, and pops, presumably") with "infectious energy." Promotional language, sure, but not far from the truth, and the lyrics, grating at first, soon become irrelevant, as they are in "Umbrella," or "Sexyback," or any number of infectious classics. From the sunny cheer of "Coke Is It" to the grungy crunch of "The Wiener Song," the band successfully works with market-tested hooks. And while a few attempts miss wide -- "You Can't Drink It Slow If It's Quik" is refashioned on as a swoony doo-wop ballad -- the LP is, for the most part, unconflicted pop.
The Advertisements' pick of advertisements run the gamut of the American marketplace, from appliances ("GE") to coffee ("Good to the Last Drop [Maxwell House]") to fast food ("Aren't You Hungry for Burger King Now?"). But with so many commercials to choose from, how did they make their final cuts? "We had a terrible time with the final track listing," Whipple says. "For instance, we knew we couldn't do more than one cereal song, and we picked Lucky Charms over Cap'n Crunch because we wanted to do this 'Within You, Without You' bit, Eastern-sounding guitars and a little raga. But we had to shelve some stuff that we loved, like a hellacious instrumental version of 'The Copper-Top Battery' with these crashing keyboards and thundering drums."
Over the years, critics who have charged themselves with protecting music's authenticity side have challenged, sometimes angrily, the appropriation of pop songs for commercial purposes. But this naive inversion -- appropriating commercial songs for pop purposes -- is surprisingly powerful. The Who hinted at this possibility forty years ago with the The Who Sell Out, where they jammed interstitial jingles between real songs. But unlike Ray Charles's "You Got the Right One, Baby" (which was written by Prince, by the way) or Yael Naim's everpresent Apple ads -- the performances on Product Placement are both unsolicited and unpaid, not endorsements of products so much as endorsements of jingles. The Advertisements aren't seeking corporate sponsors, and aren't receiving a corporate dime. "Believe it or not, we recognize these songwriters as artists," explains Whipple. "They're artists working within commercial constraints, but they're still artists. We credit them in the liner notes, people like Tom Dawes, who wrote 'Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz,' and Richard D. Trentlage, who wrote 'The Wiener Song.' These songs are an essential part of Americana, and we want them to get their due. And it's not just old songs. Have you heard that new McDonald's jingle, the one with the singing fish? Amazing."
I have heard that jingle. Have you? If so, you are not likely to forget it. My children have taken it to singing it every morning, and they may even be dreaming about it. I wrote my friend the songwriter. "I only regret that I did not write it," he said. I agree, in a sense: while I don't think it has quality, necessarily, it has qualities, and one of them is that it is memorable to a degree that would shame most pop songs, even those who set out to be purely memorable. Once, years ago, a friend of mine told me that R. Kelly's "Thoia Thoing" was the most annoying, infernally catchy recording she had ever heard. I am not friends with her any longer, but I am sure that wherever she is, she is revising her opinion in favor of the singing fish. The Advertisements take a more philosophical approach. "There's a beauty in the way that music can serve products," Whipple says. "When I was a kid, I loved watching baseball, and in one game there was a ball that was hit deep and the centerfielder had to climb the outfield wall to have a shot at it. Well, Eastern Airlines had rented the wall space, and in the newspaper the next morning there was a picture of this player catching the ball in the middle of the air, suspended in front of these giant wings. I was uplifted. When you see art and consumerism come together all packaged like that, it sticks with you."
Fine, as far as I'm concerned. And I'm not that concerned: the Advertisements have a long career ahead of them if they want it. There are plenty of brilliant jingles out there, some sung by fish, some by other animals. The elements that produce memorable songs (simple lyrics, sticky melodies) are neutral about context; they don't know whether or not they're working for The Man. But what about that fateful day when the well dries up? With the talent they've shown for fleshing out pieces like "Reach Out and Touch Someone" -- the band yells improvised phone dialogue and text-message speak over Michelin's slap bass -- maybe they'll consider recording original material. But maybe not: that might be selling out.Labels: ben, commercials
posted by Ben
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