State of the Jingle
by Paul Davidson
Someone, somewhere, has taken our jingles.
Like the tooth fairy sneaking quietly into your house to take your old, dead teeth while you sleep, someone has taken the catchy little songs that used to stick in our heads. A country once filled with happily humming individuals, singing the praises of shampoo and soda pop and automobiles and paper towels that hold their weight in water, is now a mere shadow of itself.
It wasn't long ago that Finesse shampoo revealed, quite confidently, that sometimes we need a little Finesse, sometimes we need a lot. Volkswagen proudly sang to the world that "Volkswagen does it again!" and the king and queen of deodorant lyrically reminded sweaty Americans everywhere that our dry-armpitted goodness was brought to us "by Mennen."
From catching "that Pespi feeling," to playing with "a spring, a spring, a marvelous thing, everyone knows it's Slinky," there was creativity, originality and unadulterated silliness in commercials until this country hit the naughts. Lately, all we're getting is over-polished, well-marketed, completely boring dreck.
Shampoo, which once led the industry in catchy, sing-songy jingles, has now resorted to unemotional, European announcers and the over-the-top "orgasm women" who shampoo their hair in airplane bathrooms and courtrooms, literally creaming over what's in their hair. That the ad agency behind a recent series of car commercials suffers from a serious talent deficit is illustrated by the end result of their months-long creative brainstorm: a master jingle that was only three words long — zoom, zoom, zoom. And when the creative thoughts become extremely dry, advertisers do something that nails shut the jingle's coffin: license rock songs.
Advertisers fear the jingle. They fear getting it wrong. They want to re-release the music from their commercials on a compilation disc and make even more money when people decide they'd rather not purchase their products because, subconsciously, the jingles just aren't there telling them what to do.
So, where have all our jingles gone? What alerted the advertising companies that we were no longer game for cutesy, repetitive, choral goodness? What made them wake up one day and say to their fellow advertising executives, "Fire the jinglers and get some of those guys in accounting to take their places?" Were we, the TV-watching public, so quiet in our support that they never knew just how on-the-nose they had been?
Look at the world around you. Death and destruction. Sadness and pain. Horrific acts of violence that boggle the mind. Do you honestly think that if, minutes before a suicide bomber was about to pull the plug, a rollicking jingle happily informed him that "my bologna has a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R..." he would go through with his dastardly plans? No way. He'd be smiling ear to ear with the knowledge that someone's processed meat actually had a name.
So where do we go from here, knowing that the jingle rug was pulled out from under us without any real warning? Do we write our congressmen? Do we hold a sit-in at the corporate offices of some of America's largest advertising firms? No and no.
Faced with a future completely absent of songs in major keys, repeating choruses sung by extremely happy-sounding people and silly catch-phrases that stick in our heads is sad. It's damn depressing, actually.
People in the past have tried to right the wrongs of advertisers and their corporate stooges. From the 1991 "We'd Like Refills On Our Cokes, Please" sit-in at the Denny's corporate headquarters to the 1996 "I Too Spilled Really Freaking Hot Coffee On My Lap In The McDonald's Drive-Thru," petition, Americans know how make a change when they want. Have you lost that spring in your step and that song in your head? Have you finally come to the conclusion that while "sometimes you feel like a nut," currently, you don't? It is time for change. Let us join together, America, and demand that the jingles return.
E-mail Paul Davidson at paulseth@earthlink.net.
— graphic by D.P. Barsam (barsam@hotpop.com)
