Jingle Hell

As an unemployed individual I've had occasion to watch a little more television than I might if I were a useful member of society. Now, I know there have been a lot of people who have made fun of daytime television, and thankfully, I have no desire to do that. In fact, I do not watch daytime television if I can at all help it. And, fortunately, with my predilection for wasting tons of time online, I can!

However, I still watch a lot of television at night (and listen to quite a bit of radio in the daytime) and there is something I have a huge problem with. It's commercials. The whole thing about a really bad, bad commercial that I find so soul-crushing is that I worked in the industry and can picture perfectly how it happened. You can blame the agencies all you want, but a lot of times the culprit is the client. No matter what, they get final approval over ever single commercial, and I've seen many a clever, creative idea turned into mediocre shit more times than I care to say.

I'm not going to go into every commercial I hate and who I think is responsible for it's horribleness, but I've noticed a trend lately with commercial music that I'd like to talk about. Now I don't know much about musical copyright laws, but I think it might be safe to say that music from when I was a teenager is getting cheaper and cheaper to get access to nowadays, because some of the songs that used to bring back fun memories for me are now being used to sell all sorts of products. And not only are they being whored out, they are changing the lyrics to suit the purpose better. It's sickening. It's sad. It's, well, advertising.

Let's take a look at 5 Commercials that I Hate Mainly for Their Choice of Music, then, shall we?

1. Fool and the Gang
The pitch: Folger's Crystals are so powerfully aromatic that a person's nose is overpowered to a distressing degree.
The disturbing visual and soundtrack: A poor, beleaguered actor (who probably took the job because he owes Tony No-Thumbs 5 large) smiles benignly as his nostrils are animated to sing and dance to Kool and the Gang's Fresh when he takes a whiff of the instant coffee crystals. The nostrils happily sing "It's fresh! (It's so fresh!) Exciting! It's so exciting to me! It's fresh! (It's so fresh!) Inviting..." etc.

I'm not sure what happens at the end of the commercial because I usually have harmed my own eyes in some way by then. Maybe the nostrils jump off the face and into the coffee grounds and start doing the backstroke, I don't know. That seems in keeping with the message. All I know is that I am in perfect agreement with something that my friend said to me a while ago: "Just because you can use computer animation for certain things (like a rogue nose or talking animals) doesn't mean that you should. Amen, brother.

2. Yogurt in a Cloud
The pitch: Yoplait's newest yogurt is so good that after taking a bite you and a group of women friends will have no choice but to resort to interpretive dance to express your ecstasy.
The disturbing visual and soundtrack: A group of frilly women dressed in flowing gowns eat yogurt and dance around a cloud together to the Flashdance song What a Feeling. Of course the lyrics are changed slightly to incorporate their fantastic message.

However, after a bit of searching on the net I cannot find out what they are and I change the channel as soon as humanly possible whenever it comes on so I'm going to have to make a guess as to what the lyrics have been changed to. I only remember the first little bit, but my guess is that the rest go something like this: "Yoplait passions... It's a passion... Makes you dance and twirl like convulsing febrile twits..." Well, it's something like that anyway.

In any event, it doesn't make me want to eat yogurt. Actually, it doesn't make me want to exist on the same planet as yogurt.

3. Radio's Deadly Cyn
The pitch: Parents need something to do with their squalling brats during the summer months, they might as well bring them to Ontario Place for one day of expensive, generic amusement park/waterslide fun.
The disturbing soundtrack: An overly energetic mom-type sings enthusiastically to Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, "I wake up with a smile on my face, cuz I'm going to take the kids to Ontario Place... We're going to hit the rides and play in the sun, oh kids just wanna have fun!"

*sigh* You see why I hate children? Because of them we all have to put up with these stupid songs every year as soon as amusement park season comes around. And because the little blighters have such a short attention span they play these frickin' commercials five times every hour so they can burrow into your brain like some sort of alien parasite waiting to devour logical thought at the first sign of resistance.

And if those magnificent bastards don't use Cyndi's hackneyed old song to hawk their long lines and $8 hotdogs, then it's [We've Got the] Cure for the Summertime Blues or Summertime, Summertime, Sum-Sum-Summertime or some other annoyingly catchy song. All over North America we're all being subjected to these cruelly upbeat commercials. It's an epidemic at this time of the year, I tells ya!

I'm not saying the people who make these commercials aren't fiendishly clever, but I am saying that these commercials are almost enough to make this Canadian long for the icy cold hand of winter to return as soon as possible. Almost.

4. Turn Your Head and Kauf, Mann
The pitch: Just your generic American department store (Kaufmann's) showing images of generic American white people overjoyed at buying generic fashions and housewares at generically reasonable prices.
The disturbing visual and soundtrack: Generic white people (and perhaps maybe one black person) walk past a completely white background wearing their generic fashions while grinning idiotically. A voice-over explains whatever sale is going on now. At the end of the commercial the music comes up and it is discovered that it is a generic cover of Naked Eyes' Always Something There to Remind Me, only now it's a whole lot more upbeat and the lyrics have been changed to "Always something there to EXCITE me!"

Well that's excellent. They've taken a song rife with melancholy remembrances, a song that so aptly and bittersweetly describes the wretched agony of getting over a one and only true love and turned it into a peppy jingle. Sure, your life has been forever changed by your crushing heartbreak, but BATHMATS ARE 25% OFF!!

You know, I wouldn't be surprised if this commercial was pitched by the same geniuses who advised Reagan to use Born in the USA as his campaign song. "Well, it says something about being born in the USA, and all the kids love that Bruce Spielberg fellow."

Shmucks.

5. Yo, Gurt... WTF?
The pitch: Um... That fat free Source Yogurt is good for... Your feet? Or something?
The disturbing visual and soundtrack: Scenes of yogurt being opened interspersed with people tapping their feet to the music of The Stampeders' Sweet City Woman. And that's it. Doesn't show anyone's faces, doesn't show the product that much, just shows feet and plays the song. "Sweeeeeeeeeet, sweet city woman... I can see your face, I can hear your voice, I can almost touch you..."

They don't change the lyrics or alter the song in any way, they just play it over the inexplicable feet tapping. When I first saw the commercial I said to myself, "Oh, I remember this song... this must be a commercial for shoes... or nylons? Oh, maybe antidepressants?... Yogurt?! The hell? What's that got to do with feet-tapping? Or sweet city women for that matter?"

This commercial doesn't bother me so much as baffle me. I feel like Timmy's mother when Lassie stands in front of her barking in an urgent way. I know there is an attempt at communicating something to me, I just can't for the life of me figure it out. Oh if only it meant that the people responsible for the commercial had fallen down a well...

Well, that concludes my skewering of radio and television commercials that use music from my youth to sell me things that I don't necessarily need or want. I didn't mention the Hewlett-Packard commercial that features The Cure's song Pictures of You that made me fall off of my chair when I heard it, mostly because it's not a bad commercial and the song tends to match their message... I guess.

But I felt the same way that folks must have felt when they heard Bob Dylan's The Times They are a Changin' used as a jingle for the Bank of Montreal. There was a general disconnect and disbelief that the artist had anything to do with the decision to have their music used in this way. Although, The Cure have never been against going corporate like Bob Dylan was, but still, Pictures of You is a song that holds a lot of emotional memories for me. I guess I just never imagined that it could be used to sell photocopiers.

But then again, musicians gotta eat, too. If they don't mind their songs being used like this why should I? At least they're getting paid for what they do.

Hm, maybe I should look into that...