The other
day I found myself singing the jingle that accompanied a commercial for Bryllcreem
in 1965, the year I turned thirteen. I watched lustra of television when I was
a kid and must have heard hundreds of such jingles over the years. What
confounds me is why I remember so many of them and what triggers their periodic
return. I feel no nostalgia for such spontaneous revivals of wasted time, nor
do they possess camp appeal. Boomers are never so tedious as when they
sentimentalize such things. I’ve always found memorization easy, and I suspect
memory has no limit, unlike a measuring cup or a sonnet. Memory is elastic. But
what I’m describing is involuntary memory. It helps, I suppose, that the words
are set to music, which is why we can easily memorize songs and poems. The fact that never in my life have I bought
Bryllcreem or any of the other products entombed in the jingles in my memory is
irrelevant. What I bought was the commercial.
The author
of the observation at the top is Dr. Johnson. He is writing on this date, Jan. 20, in 1759, in The Idler #40. It’s
remarkable that advertising was already worthy of attention from so fine a
mind:
“The true
pathos of advertisements must have sunk deep into the heart of every man that remembers
the zeal shown by the seller of the anodyne necklace, for the ease and safety
of poor teething infants, and the affection with which he warned every mother,
that she would never forgive herself, if her infant should perish without a
necklace.”
2 comments:
Greasy kid's stuff, as a later ad campaign had it.
A little dab'll do ya, my friend. And more than a little dab of Ford Maddox Ford, to whom I've recently returned thanks to the constant recommendation in your blog. Many thanks.
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