We’ve never really known the difference between cutting-edge music, bubble gum pop and advertising
“Got my fingers stained red and I cannot get ’em off me/You can catch me and my crew eatin’ Hot Cheetos and Takis/BOW!/ SNACK, SNACK, SNACK, CRUNCH!/ SNACK, SNACK, SNACK, MUNCH!” — The Y.N.RichKids, Summer 2012
“Won’t you try Wheaties?/For wheat is the best food of man/They’re crispy and crunchy/The whole year through/The kiddies never tire of them/and neither will you/So just try Wheaties/ The best breakfast food in the land.” — The Wheaties Quartet, Christmas Eve 1926
To have fallen in love with Y.N.RichKids in the dwindling days of the summer of 2012—to go so far as to anoint their five-minute jam the song of the summer—was to become immediately curious about their story.
You’d find yourself playing “Hot Cheetos and Takis” on a continuous loop in one Firefox tab, piecing their background together in another.
“THAT. HOOK.” gushed the Village Voice at the top of its list of things we’re supposed to love about “HCAT.” Grantland’s Rembert Browne devised a chart, illustrating the flow between hook and each member of the tween rap collective. Ad Age concluded—I’m not making this up—“there is hope for humanity yet.”
Nobody asked: is this an advertisement?* Could these impossibly sincere, exuberant—and preternaturally polished—12-year-olds from the after-school program at Nellie Stone Johnson Beacons Center in Minneapolis be hired guns? (There is hope for humanity!)
It’s not for nothing that the Berklee College of Music course catalogue lists Jingle Writing (CW-218 ) between Hip-Hop Writing (CW-141) and Writing for Woodwinds (CW-247).
Ever since The Wheaties Quartet sang the world’s first jingle on Christmas Eve, 1926—also in Minneapolis—there has been a stigma to the form. A jingle wouldn’t exist unless someone was willing to pay for it. A song, on the other hand, is something that seems to have come from the gods. Despite its cost, a jingle inevitably feels cheap. A song is art.
The muse takes many forms. Cheetos and Takis were taken much as Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace frantically place products in their novels not for cash, but for verisimilitude—the unlikely touchstones that tie together our modern human experience. Why should the muse be some ancient Greek harlot? These kids wax about Cheetos from their heart. And while Hot Cheetos and Takis is significant on several levels—a genre written off for selling homobophia, misogyny and crack to suburban America—the question remains: is it a jingle? And: who cares if it is?
“A jingle wraps up a little too neatly in favor of an argument it was rigged to win,” wrote Young & Laramore’s Charlie Hopper in his ongoing McSweeney’s column Dispatches From a Guy Trying Unsuccessfully to Sell a Song in Nashville. “A song might end with a satisfying conclusion, but the singer experiences a little friction on the way. A jingle has no friction.”
Until one day it suddenly does.
Last year’s very dark song of the summer, “Pumped Up Kicks,” came from a struggling jingle writer named Mark Foster while working at an ad-jingle lab called Morphonics—not on Madison Avenue, but in Venice Beach. Instead of commissioning 30-second “custom pieces,” Morphonics develops existing music from promising musicians—it also works with Fitz and the Tantrums and Mansions on the Moon—to create full-blown three-minute pop pieces for a list of clients that begins: “Apple, Adidas, Audi, AT&T, Axe.”
Kaplan Thaler, who wrote “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” for Toys R Us, believed that a jingle wasn’t successful if you listened to it once and liked it. The hook must infect you like a zombie. You have to listen to it and need to sing it and then need others to as well. In 2012, that means you remix the hook. You remake it into your ring tone. You lip synch it on YouTube. You are committed to spreading the hook and whatever brand it represents.
Despite our best attempts to coronate “HCAT” as The Song, it’s disingenuous to suggest this summer was owned by anyone but Carly Rae Jepsen, who took an otherwise forgettable folk piece to a producer in North Vancouver named Josh Ramsay. Ramsay, whose father Miles is the jingle writer who put that huge tuba in the A&W theme, scrapped everything from Jepsen’s earnest demo—except for three words. “Call me, maybe” was really a cellphone ad waiting for a brand to sign up.
And therein lies the last post-millennial twist. K’naan can sell (out) “Wavin’ Flag” to Coca-Cola, but simultaneously chastise Mitt Romney for using it at rallies—the Republicans will never figure this out—while inviting Obama to use it instead. It’s not K‘naan Coca-Cola. It’s the world’s biggest marketing machine suddenly being infected to sell the K’naan hook.
Concluding his exhaustive analysis of Y.N.RichKids, Browne wrote: “I can’t wait until Michelle Obama convinces them to start rapping about fruits and vegetables.”
*Hot Cheetos now falls into that weird PBR category of “What do you do with this?” A hundred-million dollars of market research by Pepsico’s Frito-Lay couldn’t have come up with this jam. (Or did it?) While it’s hard to think that the overpriced, half-filled packages of malnutrition that constitute anything but the worst of marketing could have been anyone’s muse, the best thing Hot Cheetos can do right now to leverage the bump from HCAT is to humbly plow the bulk of next quarter’s media budget to the kind of after school community program that led to this.
Chris Koentges is a writer based in Vancouver. His work has appeared in The Walrus, Maisonneuve and Reader’s Digest.
