Stayin' Alive

So I got the IPod that I wanted for my birthday. As I frequently do with things that I like, I have gotten rather obsessed with it. But this post is about what I found when I first turned the thing on.

Basically, I think that The Muse loaded some songs on it so there would be something on it to start. And one of these songs was Stayin' Alive by the Bee Gees.

Now this song was a joke when I was a teenager. Stayin' Alive was right up there with YMCA for evoking sarcastic laughter during the mid- to late 80's. Basically, it was a way to rip on the prior generation, who, by definition in teenagers' minds, is always uncool. I remember, one time when I was about 15 or 16, I was humming the base line from Stayin' Alive and one of my friends looked at me with a withering glare and said, "God, why are you singing that?"

When I got my IPod, though, as soon as I figured out how to turn the writing from Chinese to English (it's hard to find and use the settings menu when you can't make out the language that the menus are in), I played Stayin' Alive. For I have come to realize what a great song it is.

Part of this is me fondly remembering my childhood. Saturday Night Fever was everywhere when I was about 8. Given that I wasn't allowed to see it, I obviously didn't get into it in the quasi-religious way that I got into Star Wars (I say "quasi" only because I know that some people have developed their own actual religions based on Star Wars), but it was everywhere. The songs were on the radio all the time. The lady who cut my hair used to ask me if I wanted a "John Travolta haircut."

And Stayin' Alive was the biggest song. It wasn't until I saw the movie all the way through (which took a long time, for some reason, although I made sure that I watched the R-rated version) that I quite understood just why Stayin' Alive was the big song. That opening sequence with John Travolta just walking down the street with the paint can swinging on the beat is pretty awesome.

I can't really think of a song that has ever quite caught the zeitgeist like Stayin' Alive. Maybe I Want To Hold Your Hand, but I wasn't around for that, so I don't really know. Smells Like Teen Spirit hit like a bomb, but it didn't come with the hottest movie too. Hey Ya? Maybe I'm too old to really know about that one. Amazing as it is to think now, Michael Jackson was undoubtedly the undisputed coolest guy alive in 1983, but Thriller spit out so many hits ("I want to love you, PYT, pretty young thing, you need some lovin'" Little different connotation now, unfortunately) that no one of them really was THE ONE (although Beat It and Billie Jean were THE TWO, I suppose).

But the song is damn good. You don't get too many songs with not one, but two, big, fat, awesome base lines. Stayin' Alive has got the big drumbeat (which has to be a drum machine or a loop, but oh well), but that classic bass guitar line too (duh-da, duh, duh, duh-duh-da, duh, duh). I'm kind of amazed that no rapper or hip hop artist has ever stripped that baseline out and mixed it into something else. (Maybe Puffy has made a song that uses all of the same music and just changes the words. That kind of seems to be his MO.) It could be pretty darn great.

The Bees Gees' vocals then add just the right fragance of fromage. Good Lord, what did the parents of those guys to do them that allowed them to sing like that? I guess that I don't really want to know. But, man, it's kind of hilarious to hear guys singing about they're rough ladies' men in voices that dogs can barely hear.

The whole thing, though, is such a great mash-up of good music, good cheese and good nostalgia. It makes me want to wear a white suit.

That Chevy Ad

I am watching baseball these days. It's the World Series and, even though I don't really give a fig about the Tigers or the Cardinals, I'm a baseball fan, so, like Tommy Lasorda says, I watch. (It's good to see Tommy. I like the one where some woman calls Tommy to talk her husband out of a tree. He says "Who's he a fan of?" When she says "the Cubs," he say "Ugh.")

This, of course, also means that I am watching Chevy commercials. GM seems to have made a decision about 75 years ago that it would advertise Chevy heavily during baseball games to show that Chevy is darn American. They even had a song at one point where the chorus was "Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet." So I guess a lot of people see baseball and Chevy as a natural fit. Sort of like Tiger Woods and Buick. (Oh, wait, no, those ads are ludicrous. Ferrari or LeSabre? Of course, Tiger would go with LeSabre.)

Anyway, so they've got a new Chevy ad for postseason baseball this year featuring the vocal stylings of John Cougar-Cougar Mellencamp-Mellecamp (given his various personal issues, the Muse calls him The Singing Scumbag) played over a montage of "American" images. He's singing "this is our country."

I am fascinated, weirded out and appalled by this ad. For a 30-second ad, it works hard.

The montage goes roughly like this: women in 50's two-piece swimsuits dancing on a beach, Rosa Parks sitting in front of a white guy on a bus, kids riding bikes in a suburb, lots of people at the March on Washington, Martin Luther King giving his "I Have a Dream" speech, hippie-looking people doing the Fugue or something, Muhammad Ali flattening a guy with a quick right while shuffling (dude, Ali was awesome), soldiers in Vietnam, protesters with peace signs, Nixon doing his weird victory wave he as he boards the helicopter after he resigned, some stuff that I don't remember, scenes of New Orleans being flooded after Hurricane Katrina, a shot of a black guy standing by his Chevy truck on a destroyed New Orleans block, generic scene of guys and Chevy trucks walking through a field, a shot of Dale Earnhardt's car racing on a track (amazingly, he's not bumping someone loose from behind), some non-Amish people pushing up the framing of the wall of a house, some supposed firefighters who like they're about ready to bust out with a Chippendales number and then the towers of light coming out of Manhattan from where the World Trade Center was.

On the one hand, I am fascinated by GM's disproportionate reliance on what were very, very controversial African-Americans in the ad. Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali. I recognize that each and every one of them has become kind of a transcedent icon. You are not going to convince me, however, that everyone in the U.S. thinks of those people as "their country" however much they truly are. Obviously, MLK was assassinated. People refused to call Muhammad Ali by that name for years after he converted to Islam and the US government tried to throw him in jail for refusing the Vietnam draft. It's fascinating to me that GM, the prototypical American company, is putting those three out there as a very large part of GM's vision of "our country."

On the other hand, Nixon flying off in disgrace as a big part of "our country." OK, some significant part of the country views Nixon as a big part of American political history (at Nixon's funeral, Bob Dole said that he thought that historians would come to call the second half of the 20th century "the Age of Nixon"). But does even that segment of the population want to see him flying off after resigning as "our country?" How about the picture of Nixon shaking hand with Vegas Elvis instead? As it stands, it's just weird. Maybe in 20 years, the Chevy ad will show Clinton waving his finger at the camera about how he "did not have sexual relations with that woman."

Finally, on the other hand (wait, that's three hands), I am just appalled at GM's blatant use of the two most horrible recent disasters in the US to sell cars. Flooded-out New Orleans is "our country?" No one wanted it to be, that's for damn sure. Is GM going to donate some slice of its Chevy sales while the commercial is running to some Katrina relief fund? Even worse is the use of the WTC towers of light. I have pretty much come around to the conclusion that there should be a law against the use of images from, or allusions to, Sept. 11 for commercial purposes. I am not kidding. I am a big believer in the First Amendment, but I don't really care that such a law probably would be unconstitutional. Let someone sue to throw it. Something like 2,749 people were murdered in the WTC. They are still finding body parts at the site. It is freakin' wrong for people to be Sept. 11 to sell anything. Although I guess cars are better than those flip-up coin things that I saw on cable TV a while ago.