I keep seeing this commercial, and it makes me sad inside
for several reasons. First, let’s
watch, then we’ll discuss.
For one, I know that it’s totally great that this actor got
a national commercial, but why do I feel embarrassed for him when I see him
lip-synching this song?
Also, I’m pretty sure there is a segment of the population,
however small, that doesn’t actually know that this is a spoof of theme song
for the movie “Footloose,” like maybe even the actor himself. This makes me feel old. Is anyone with me on this?
Then, there’s the lyrics.
OH MY GOD the lyrics. It’s like a
copywriter wrong a song parody, then it was hacked and rewritten to death by a
bunch of executives (you think this is sexy because of Mad Men, but you could
not be more wrong. In reality it is
low-level executives all trying to justify their jobs and leave their own
unique mark on a project until what you’ve written turns into a zombie version
of itself), and now the actor is tasked with the job of bringing “enthusiasm
and life” to the number. Compounding this sad feeling is the fact that, despite the huge number of actors in Los Angeles who are also musicians, this actor seems to NOT KNOW HOW TO PLAY A GUITAR, so his fake-plucking is almost as distracting as the lip-synching.
The cumulative effect of this (at least on me) is that it
makes me cringe (at best), and at worst, it makes me think of a bad clown on
the Third Street Promenade–the one who smells like booze and whose five
o’clock shadow you can see through his greasepaint makeup.
Everyone’s mind goes into this kind of analytical spasm when
confronted with song parodies, right?
RIGHT?