The Persistence of Commodified Memory

Life after these messages

I just watched a bunch of these bumpers from old Saturday morning cartoons and the jingles made me crave a bowl of sugary cereal.

1. Time

I haven’t had a Diet Coke in over a decade, but if I ever look at the clock and see that it’s 11:30, I immediately think “Diet Coke break.” Then I hum the riff from Etta James’s version of “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” 

It’s the ad. I saw the ad dozens of times in its original run, when I was nine years old. Watching it on YouTube now, each frame is familiar. 

As a kid, I thought of the ad the way I thought of everything that was beyond my understanding—an image of adulthood to come. This is how adults look when they’re at work. This is what adults drink when they’re hot and thirsty. The subtler and muddier messages about sex and class went into my head even as they seemed to go over it. And like all the other media I gobbled up in my formative years, this ad surely shaped me in ways that are imperceptible but unavoidable today. But its most-obvious lasting legacy is an earworm that wakes up in midmorning.

I’m at the tail end of the generation that grew up with warnings about the idiot box warping impressionable minds. I was born the year Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death was published. By the time I was cognizant enough to operate the TV remote, the dire warnings of TV’s power had been proven so many times they were accepted as true, but the TV had become so dominant an instrument of information and entertainment that the suggestion we could do anything other than learn to live with it was absurd. Condemnations of TV had become something to make fun of, preferably on TV—a joke on Murphy Brown or the plot of a Simpsons episode. There was good TV and bad TV. The solution to the appliance’s mind-altering power was to have a sense of taste.

But knowing what to watch didn’t apply to the ads. They were always there, always fighting for attention. Before the days of the buy-now button, an ad had to stick in your head until you went to the store. Sometimes it stuck around longer, not just popping up in the soda aisle, but every time you saw a bead of sweat on an aluminum can, a construction worker on a break, or a woman with big glasses looking out of an office window.

2. Togetherness

You can’t choose what you’re nostalgic for. Nostalgia longs for a time and the feelings you had in that time. Any particular media or object is a trigger, not the target. Jingles are the sensory soundtrack. 

On a springtime walk with my wife, Linda, she said she often sees flowers and sings “fantastic flowers, made by me”—the jingle from a toy ad that was in rotation in our youth. When she said this, I immediately thought of the color scheme of the flowers—pinks, pastels, purples—and the grain of a CRT TV. I thought about being a kid. 

Every so often, I’ll come across a mention of the Pure Moods, a CD compilation of new age music that was aggressively marketed on TV, especially late at night on Comedy Central. The songs all blend together in my mind the way they do in the ad. 

But Pure Moods was art. Maybe it wasn’t my taste or your taste, but it was music meant to be enjoyed. What do we do with the jingles and the slogans that we never wanted to hear? The Big Red jingle is as tuneful as any pop song. I know I could walk into a room of my peers, sing “that Big Red freshness lasts right through it,” and get a rousing response of “your fresh breath goes on and on.” It would be like a retro karaoke night. The jingle wasn’t meant for this. A composer and musician worked hard on it, but they were selling chewing gum. There is no deeper message other than the longevity of Big Red’s cinnamony flavor. 

Is it art disguised as commerce or has commerce rendered art irrelevant? 

Does it matter? The song does exactly what it’s supposed to do, plus something more. It works in ways it was never intended to. 

It’s something to sing together to think about the old times. 

3. Trash

I knew the jingle and the dance, but I couldn’t have told you that Chicken Tonight was a line of sauces meant to be served over pan-cooked chicken. I always assumed it was an actual poultry product. 

But I could have told you that the dance was dorky. Even as a kid, I thought the documentary-style footage of the ad was suspect. Nobody likes groceries that much. My judgement was helped along by The Simpsons. In one episode, after a meal, the family’s grandparents remember Bart and Lisa doing a cute song and dance routine when they were younger, and push the kids to do it again. Turns out, it’s the jingle from a 1960s hot dog ad. After everyone joins in singing the big finale, Lisa asks “Doesn’t this family know any songs that aren’t commercials?” The family pauses, then does the Chicken Tonight dance.

A 2018 paper in The Royal Society Open Science journal suggested that chicken bones will be a marker of the Anthropocene age. Humans have bred chickens to a form that wouldn’t exist through evolution, and the ground around the world is full of discarded chicken bones. Would an alien archaeologist of the future think chickens ruled the earth?

YouTube is full of old commercials, usually ripped from VHS. The clips were caught on tape while someone was trying to record a show they wanted to see. Watching the old ads, seeing the wistful comments and the high view counts, it’s easy to feel like an archaeologist who stumbled into an ancient civilization’s long-buried trash heap. There’s value in what’s here, but there’s a reason these artifacts aren’t in a place of prominence or a tomb. We buried them, they weren’t buried with us. 

There aren’t that many jingles anymore. Ads are micro-targeted based on data mined over the last decade of device use. 

The space occupied by the jingle has been filled by the meme—another piece of catchy content meant for fast memorization. TikTok and Instagram are full of videos soundtracked by hooks from songs or clips of dialogue from an old movie or TV show, or that simply follow a familiar style and format. Users put their own semi-plagiarized spin on it, copying each other for clout and for fun. I have no doubt that in a few years, meme formats will be nostalgia fuel, infuriatingly and inexorably lodged in the memories of a new generation. 

This isn’t repeating commercials, but it is commodification. The person is the product, fitting into a market-ready package. There’s no point in complaining about it, though. Like TV, it’s already so widespread it just seems normal. 

Chickens rule the world.