What's that tune? I can't put my lickin' finger on it
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Your support makes all the difference.I feel tremendously warm and wet about Nick Hornby. Fever Pitch and High Fidelity get the worrying world of the modern middle-class retard so exactly (lost in music; caught in a trap).
And all credit to his new book 31 Songs that it's so entertaining, even though most of his choices are awful.
But his real feelings translate into ad world populism terribly easily. That little cultish record shop world shows up in the new KFC commercial, along with a shadowy figure outside the window who must have been consciously cast as a Hornby lookalike. And it's all about investing KFC's fillet burger with soul. Here's a prime example of what Julie Burchill calls "mugging your memories" – recycling cues from a real engagement to make industrial mulch in a bun sound better.
In the graffiti-covered record shop (ie, a seriously Orwellian man-trap), there are three victims: a young studenty black man with short dreads in the Basquiat mode; an all-purpose grungy white circa 1993; and a 12-year-old boy in a woolly hat. They've shut the shop to eat their fillet burgers which, so they say, have just got better.
I'm one step behind here. I didn't realise KFC had graduated beyond the 20 pieces in a cardboard bucket offer. So I've no idea what the fillet is.
Dover sole off the bone? 8oz of Aberdeen Angus? Fish or fowl, surf or turf? Anyway, it's in a bun.
The lads love it and they dance around, cramming their faces, in that Boys' Own dance of death with masses of finger-pointing.
They're dancing to lovely old soul, of course. Or more precisely, something a bit Motowny. But – and here's the geeky pedantic moment – are they really? It sounds familiar, and it's got some key words such as Pagliacci, as in "just like Pagliacci did, I try to keep my sadness hid" (from "Tears of a Clown", Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, first issued on Motown in 1967). Except it isn't. It isn't actually that lyric or that tune. Is there another Motown classic that sounds a bit like "Clown" and mentions Pagliacci too? Nick Hornby would know.
Or is it pastiche? And if it is, how come? Why couldn't a rich advertiser like KFC get the rights to a real soul classic? And where does this leave KFC's added-value positioning move from finger-lickin' to soul food?
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