Birth of a Chevy Nation
In the veritable onslaught of basketball I've been submitting myself to the past few days, I have learned a few important things - I don't know shit about college basketball, Miller Lite is an award-winning pale ale respected around the world, and the United States of America belongs to white people in cowboy hats who drive pick-up trucks.
The "This Is Our Country" Chevrolet ad campaign started, in my memory, around the time of the NFL playoffs, and at first they ran a full one-minute video of images from American history that included Ali (I believe it was the Champ knocking down Zora Folley), MLK and Rosa Parks, all set to the lyrics that in the most banal of terms (the song, after all, is borne of the hit factory known as Mellencamp) celebrate American individualism:
Well I can stand beside Ideals I think are right
And I can stand beside
The idea to stand and fight
I do believe
There's a dream for everyone
This is our country
Of course, this type of bullshit is offensive, the association of historical moments to a brand name, the implication that such courageous acts could possibly have some link to what kind of truck you drive (not even to get into the fact that a supposed outspoken individualist like Johnny Cougar Mellencamp wrote a song intended for a car commercial). But whatever - you see this crap all the time ("Jesus wore khakis") and that's American life in the advertising age.
Lately, though, these "Our Country" ads have been truncated into something that is truly insidious, particularly when we all as sports fans are being subject to them over and over and over again. Ali and Rosa Parks are long gone... all people of color are gone... everyone is gone who is not a white person in a cowboy hat or a baseball cap driving a truck in some idyllic Midwestern farm-based paradise. The only lyrics of the song left in the ad are, "And this country it belongs to folks like you and me... this is OUR country."
Personally, I don't care if Chevy puts black people or Asians or white people like me (a.k.a. non-cowboy-hat-wearing ones) in their ads. They know who their audience is, and it ain't Manhattan, and it sure ain't the South Bronx. Fat Joe doesn't rap about the rodeo either. Fine. But when the forum is so enormous, and the soundtrack so possessive, so alienating, so absolute, it starts to become offensive. The ads now feel to me like this large wink-wink sales pitch to the red states - "this country it belongs... to folks like you and me" - and we all KNOW who those folks are. They're not black or Latino or Asian or Jewish or, perhaps most emphatically, gay. They're man's men and women's women, white Republicans with their hats and their trucks and their unbearable nostalgia for a monochromatic past that never actually existed. In short, they're a car company's idea of the Aryan race.
8 Comments:
I rarely watch TV but I've done nothing but watch basketball all day for the past 4 days. I've made it a point that when the commercials come on I either switch the channel to The Score (2nd Canadian channel with alternate set of games on, or if I can't avoid the commercials I just mute them.
The programming on TV has gone to another level to the point that they are actually programming you with their own perverse message.
The message in these commercials is so insidious and yet so transparent. You are right Large, Chevy know exactly what they are doing with this ad, and who they are talking to. And its extra disappointing that they chose these ads when there is such a large and diverse audience.
I don't really know too much about JCM's politics but when I read the full lyrics to this song I get the impression that the Chevy ad totally missed the point on this song and twisted the meaning around.
This is why artists should never sell the rights to their songs to be used in commercials.
What is interesting about that is that Mellencamp is definitely not a right winger at all. He was a John Edwards supporter the last time around. He's just an old guy trying to get some airtime realizing that that mainstream radio won't play his new stuff anymore so he does corporate work.
But I agree with pretty much everything written here and I live in a semi-suburban/rural area that these people seem to be targeting. I have an old 60s Chevy truck similar to the one in the snow in that one ranch through the years ad.
However, I seriously doubt they would show my Latino ass with the caption or voice over saying "This is our lunch break" while I sit in a Walgreens break room eating a Lean Pocket.
Large:
I am an avid reader and I disagree with your column for a couple of reasons:
1. The other two prominent Chevrolet commercials on television feature a black guy driving slowly in Dale Earnhart's Impala and then switching back to his standard impala; and some Latino dudes with low riding Impalas being impressed by a new Impala. [Also, a commercial where a heavy duty truck pulls a train of light-duty trucks.] Though one might consider it just as insidious (that is, using minorities to try to make a staid family car seem cool), I don't think Chevy is trying to make their corporate image entirely cowboy.
2. I think it's worthy of some note that whoever made the longer-running ads put Ali, et al in them, isn't it? That probably took some time and cost some money.
3. If you watch the commercials of many of the same truck manufacturers (including the new non-Apple pie entrants into the field like Toyota and Nissan), they feature the same people (white cowboys).
The thing that I think is the most frustrating about that commercial is the bombardment. It's insufferable. Just the same, in my mind it's a little much to say "Chevy [knows] exactly what they are doing in this ad."
Uh, I meant to cite that quote as from Chief's comment above. Sorry.
First of all, let me say that I in no way mean to indict Mellencamp's politics in this. His song is clearly an attempt at a modern-day "This Land is Your Land," and horrible though it is, it's not meant to be exclusionary at all. I do have the idea, possibly wrong, that this song was not so much sold to as commissioned by Chevy, which shows you where Little Johnny Cougar is at these days, but whatever.
Second - I only mean this as a critique of this particular ad that's running now, eighty thousand times per half of basketball. That they started with MLK and Rosa Parks, well, they took a lot of shit for that as well, as they should have, because how dare they appropriate the civil rights movement to sell their fucking trucks. But as I said, worse has been done.
And even those ads were also roundly criticized for not having and Latinos or Asians in them. Now even the African-Americans are gone and you have only the white Midwest represented, certainly a cultural demographic that seems most apt to trade in the "This is our country" kind of sloganeering in the first place.
It all comes down to this - you walk a fine line when you start running ads claiming ownership of the nation for whoever you're aiming them at. Yes, Nissan ads, truck ads, beer ads - you can deconstruct them all and find something creepy in them, but as far as I know, none of them are saying "Drink Budweiser, white Midwesterners because we all know you're the only TRUE Americans."
And honestly, I don't think Chevy does know exactly what they're doing in this ad, because it's such bad p.r. that if they did they'd take it off the air. They think they've just got a good ad campaign aimed at their target audience - the overtones of the "this country it belongs to folks like you and me" shit is beyond them.
http://prowrestlingmatches.blogspot.com/
couldnt wait for thursday.
You know what? Maybe I was mistaken when I wrote that 'Chevy knows exactly what they are doing with these ads.' The only thing that they know for sure is their target demographic (good ol' boys in Red America). But when I am inundated with these ads, and I take them in, I know exactly what they are doing: They are pandering to their core base and their inadvertent white supremacist tendencies are an inevitable consequence.
great find Kevin.
I wonder if he got that idea from me.
Probably not, but one can dream
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