What Were They Thinking? Two Revolting Commercials

There are two rather bizarre commercials, both by major advertisers, making the rounds of prime-time TV. Both use disgusting, dehumanizing images for ostensibly humorous effect, and in both cases I found myself wondering what the advertisers were thinking.

The first of these is for Fed Ex, and shows a group of chimney sweeps discussing ways that the company can help them. As each man talks, black smoke emanates from his mouth. To find this revolting, one need hardly be aware of the brutal history surrounding the use of children as chimney sweeps in England during the early part of the industrial age, or of studies by Percival Pott, a physician of that time, who noted the heavy incidence of cancer in young men who had served as “climbing boys”. Anybody with a functioning brain can infer that people who constantly breathe black smoke—even standing around in the relatively fresh air, as the men in the commercial are—will not live to see a ripe old age. Yet in the Fed Ex commercial, this fact is presented as an amusing sidelight to their profession.

The other spot is even more clearly grotesque. This one is for Burger King, and involves a plastic-surgery patient preparing to receive a hand transplant, presumably so that he can have hands large enough to handle Burger King’s burgers. Now what were they thinking? It would seem to me a fairly obvious rule of advertising, but maybe it needs to be spelled out: When promoting a food product, do not show or suggest surgical operations, scalpels, sutures, transplanted body parts, or anything similar. I would have thought that was a no-brainer, particularly for a company whose product involves the flesh of mammals. Or maybe I’m the only person who, next time he sees a Burger King, is likely to think about somebody’s hand being cut off.

Ages ago, there was a 7-Up commercial that revolved around people drooling, and it too seemed to defy a more general version of the aforementioned rule—namely, don’t show anything disgusting while advertising something that you want people to put into their bodies. Apparently the 7-Up spot struck others much as it did me, because I never saw it again. What’s surprising about the Burger King commercial and the Fed Ex one (which seems almost sensitive by comparison) is the fact that these are running at the same time, and both apparently have been judged successes. The Fed Ex commercial has even won recognition in the industry.

Oh, and lest these comments seem to suggest that I’m easily grossed out, let me state for the record that I’m the guy who has movies such as Helter Skelter, Hated—G.G. Allin & the Murder Junkies, and The Curious Dr. Humpp on his Netflix movie queue. I love schlock, violent movies, true-crime shows, etc. But when dehumanizing images are used to promote products—both of which are, in this case, geared toward the mass buying public—it seems like something’s wrong. But maybe I’m in the minority on this.

The Accidental Rock Snob

A few months back, I saw something in Entertainment Weekly about a book I knew I had to have: The Rock Snob’s Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Rockological Knowledge by David Kamp and Steven Daly. It just arrived the other day, and my only complaint is that it’s too short. Yet I can hardly fault a book that includes many beloved artists, such as Big Star, MC5, Gram Parsons, Crazy Horse, the Small Faces, Wilco, the Last Poets, Gang of Four—even Ennio Morricone, composer of the soundtrack to Once Upon a Time in the West.

If none of the aforementioned number among your faves—if, as is likely with most normal people, none or all but a few of them are completely unknown to you—then you don’t inhabit the weird world of the rock snob. And ever since buying this book, I’ve begun calling myself that, though with enormous reservations.

I’ve always despised true snobbery of the “you can’t belong to our club” kind, yet I’ve certainly been one for reverse snobbery along the lines of “my childhood was more underprivileged than yours.” Yet my identity as a rock snob comes quite by accident. I don’t look down on people who enjoy pop; in fact, I have a soft spot for some of the most sappy pop songs of my younger years in the 1970s: “Shannon” by Henry Gross, for instance, for “Just When I Needed You Most” by Randy VanWarmer. (BTW, when I went looking for the spelling of this guy’s name, I discovered that he had died early last year.) And—admittedly, thanks to my wife, though with little protest from me—our CD rack includes greatest-hits packages for such icons of the 1970s pop pantheon as Abba, the Babys, and the Bee Gees. (In the addition to the disco-era Bee Gees hits, I recently added a collection that features their hits of an earlier incarnation more favored by rock fans: “Massachusetts,” “Lonely Days,” etc.)

Anyway, the fact that I’m a rock “snob”—personally, I would feel more comfortable with afficiando or connoisseur—ultimately arises from that I have already gone through all the classics, and need something more. For people who have already “done” the Beatles and all the other major bands (and I even wrote a book about them, as well as a three-volume reference set profiling rock, pop, and R&B stars of a more recent vintage), there’s really nowhere else to go. Album-oriented radio is hopelessly boring, being confined to essentially the same song list they had when Jimmy Carter was president. Oh, they’ll throw in an occasional Nirvana track just to try to let you know they’re with it—apparently not knowing that Kurt Cobain has been dead for well over a decade. And if you try to listen to only current music, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll ultimately be drawn back to the classics—to a time when rock n’ roll still seemed fresh and open to virtually limitless experimentation.

So it’s into the realm of the rock snob that I have gone, always looking for the “new” thrill from some previously undiscovered closet classic. On my playlist currently, for instance, are Jeff Beck’s Truth and greatest hits packages by Savoy Brown, the Staple Singers, and Curtis Mayfield. I don’t belong among the ranks of the true haute rock snobs: Forever Changes by Love is still only on my Amazon wish list, as yet unheard by me, and I don’t own anything (yet) by Van Dyke Parks, the Stooges, or the Meters. But I will eventually, if only because I’ve heard all the classics one time—or more like a thousand times—too many.

P.S. In addition to the artists on my current playlist, none of which are included in this book, I would humbly submit the following as some suggestions for a future edition of this extremely entertaining reference work:

Bauhaus
John Cage
Stanley Clarke
Rick Derringer
Robert Johnson
The Mystery of Bulgarian Voices
NRBQ
John Prine
Dakota Staton
Status Quo
The Strawbs
United States of America
Tom Waits (too mainstream, perhaps? The fact that one would even have to ask such a question about Mr. Gravel Voice says a great deal about the difficulty of maintaining one’s rock snob credentials.)

Choosing a Good Title

There's something about a really great title--something compelling that extends beyond the work itself. It's especially powerful when the work so titled is as great as the appellation applied to it--One Hundred Years of Solitude comes to mind, as do several albums from the Beatles' middle period, or any number of French films from the mid-twentieth century (The Grand Illusion, The 400 Blows, Breathless, etc.)

This connection between the power of a title and the power of the work itself can be equal for the lowbrow as for the highbrow. I think of a book we have on the bookshelf in our downstairs bathroom (yes, we have one--a bookshelf in our bathroom, that is) called Dig That Crazy Grave, a 1960s pulp detective novel by Richard S. Prather. Or a book my older brother Jon supposedly brought home when we were kids (I was too young to know about this at the time) allegedly titled Kids Who Love to F____. KISS songs from the classic era often had extremely compelling titles ("God of Thunder," "Shock Me"), and then there's one of my all-time favorite horror film titles: Make Them Die Slowly. (That was the title for U.S. audiences, anyway, where people are less literate; in Europe, it was the much less visceral Cannibal Ferox.

But what if a work doesn't live up to its title? I'll never forget my disappointment when I discovered that I'd already read the best part of Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land before I cracked the cover. (And the title itself came from the Bible.) Or The Bridges of Madison County: with that title, I expected to be awed, and I was, well, rather less so. Or the movie Strange Days (in contrast to the Doors album after which it's named, which completely lives up to its title.) Yet if a title of a bad work is entirely original--for instance, Ed Wood's I Woke Up Early the Day I Died--doesn't that count as a form of art in itself? And though the Bridget Fonda movie Point of No Return was laughably horrible, should somebody get kudos for the cool title and poster art?

I don't know; I only know that I have a hard time coming up with titles that don't sound stupid, and I'm always impressed with those people who go out on a limb for something really fresh that ultimately sticks in the mind: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, say, or Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red. I never figured I had that kind of ability, so I've tended to swim a little closer to shore. Mostly I rely on my wife, agent, and muse, who's titled many a book for our clients, and helped me come up with character names, etc.

So when she set me up with a blog and asked me what I wanted to call it, I shrugged and said, "What do you want to call it?" And she came up with this crazy title, which I liked immediately because I took its sheer grandiosity as an inherent form of self-deprecation. Probably won't have much of an epic nature to offer in this little world, but at least I hope it will be entertaining.

Judson's Epic Posts

This is a test and will undoubtedly be deleted later. For now, it is our effort to see what this blog will look like.

Jud is now a blogger. :)