Spero Consulting

Archive for November 1st, 2009

What’s Up with the Wuss Music in So Many TV Com­mer­cials Nowadays?

Since we’ve returned to West­ern Penn­syl­va­nia, we’ve seen numer­ous reports in the local news about high lev­els of estro­gen in rivers and streams along with the coin­ci­dent dis­cov­ery of many her­maph­ro­ditic fish by folks who are inter­ested in fish gen­i­tals. (Given that the study of fish gen­i­tals has little-​to-​no prac­ti­cal value, these folks seem to be employed by uni­ver­si­ties and state gov­ern­ments, which we fur­ther sup­pose keeps them off of the street and safely away from the gen­eral public.)

Sup­pos­edly, the high lev­els of estro­gen are due to the wide­spread use of birth con­trol pills, and from that we sur­mise that estro­gen isn’t extracted from waste water at sewage treat­ment plants; so, it remains in the water at highly-​concentrated levels.

We sus­pect the vis­i­tor could read all about it on the web – well, not at our site – but we’re really not that inter­ested in the effect on fish. More­over, we don’t know if there were a lot of her­maph­ro­ditic fish in West­ern PA before there were birth con­trol pills.

Instead, we wish to offer evi­dence that the estro­gen is being recir­cu­lated into the drink­ing water sup­ply (or at least the bot­tled water sup­ply) and is hav­ing a detri­men­tal effect on soci­ety. What evi­dence? We cite the music in many of the new tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials this Fall.

We don’t mean the Cat Stevens song for the Google cell phone. He makes Raffi seem like a sil­ver­back gorilla, but we sus­pect that song was writ­ten before there was much estro­gen in the gen­eral water sup­ply, and we have no infor­ma­tion about what the for­mer Mr. Stevens drank when he wrote that non­sense. (Actu­ally, if you want to sing out, shut up – unless you have a good voice or some­thing use­ful to say. Oth­er­wise, you’re just being a nuisance.)

We mean the song in one of the new Sub­aru com­mer­cials – the one where the dorky hus­band loses his sun­glasses in his hoodie – and we think in a Jeep com­mer­cial, and a few oth­ers prod­ucts, too. We can’t remem­ber the other ads that have the wuss music, because we tend not to pay much atten­tion to com­mer­cials. It’s more that we’ve noticed (and been both­ered by) the bad back­ground music despite not really pay­ing atten­tion to the set.

Last month, we wrote about another annoy­ing Sub­aru – the mean-​spirited one – in We Really Dis­like the Lat­est Sub­aru Ad. Yes, we really don’t like Sub­aru ads. Most of them remind us of the old Sat­urn ads where Sat­urn own­ers would go to Ten­nessee to hang out with each other: very, very dorky. If one has an over­whelm­ing need to affil­i­ate with other folks who bought the same econ­omy car, then one has deep, deep, problems.

The songs are all from the same genre, which we’d describe as wimpy, folksy, hip­py­ish, almost whiny, and very annoy­ing. Yeah, kind of like Cat Stevens, but even more fem­i­nine. (We’re not sure if they are pop­u­lar songs, and, in fact, we take pride in not know­ing.) Actu­ally, the song we men­tioned in the above-​reference post as being very evoca­tive of the typ­i­cal Sub­aru ad, is a canon­i­cal exam­ple of the genre: “I Gave My Love A Cherry,” which as the reader may recall, was the song being sung by the folkie in Ani­mal House before Blutto (John Belushi) grabbed his gui­tar and smashed it against the wall.

On sec­ond thought, we’re won­der­ing if, in fact, the fish researchers don’t have it wrong. They seem to imply a cau­sa­tion that per­haps does not exist. Per­haps, the fish became her­maph­ro­ditic by lis­ten­ing to the music, and the increase in estro­gen lev­els in the water is just a coin­ci­dence. (Unless, it is com­ing from the fish.)

We promise to update this post with the names of the other prod­ucts when we see those com­mer­cials, but there seems to be a fad start­ing, and we want to help crush it early on. Here’s one: the Radio Shack ad where some­one is singing some­thing about ici­cles falling. Here’s another one: an Ama­zon Kin­dle com­mer­cial. Here’s another: the Chrysler Town and Coun­try ad where the women go to the beach. In that one, the cam­era fix­ates on the lower back of one of the bikini-​clad women. To be clear, despite the insipid tune we have no prob­lem with that part of the commercial.