By Katherine
I had a root canal last week.
That’s apropos of nothing related to this post or Simplifying the Simple Life, really.
I could make a tortured connection. At first when I woke up with unbelievable pain and a gray tooth, I thought, this must be from the overnight grinding and clenching I’ve suffered since I was a stressed-out law student and then a stressed out-lawyer. But no. The dentist tells me my dead tooth likely was due to a decades-old traumatic tooth injury—a school bus accident when I was a six.
Oh, I definitely have dental work to blame on my old lifestyle: prematurely receding gums from all that stress-induced grinding that will require me to have grafts done in the next year.
But the root canal just put me in a cranky mood. I feel capable only of complaining, which is why I’m giving out STSL’s second Simply Stupid Award. This time it’s to mega discount department store chain Target for shameless coopting of a really great song children’s song for a really obnoxious back-to-school marketing blitz.
The TV commercial to which I’m referring shows three androgynous kids, first drab in parochial-school-like uniforms and then transformed into jubilant, excited students as they slowly don more colorful, new clothes and accessories presumably purchased at Target. All the while, the song “Free to Be You and Me” is playing in the background.
Particularly if you grew up in the 1970s or 1980s (and especially if you’re a former theater camp kid, like me), you know this song and Marlo Thomas’ cultish show and album of the same name. It features famous folks such as Mel Brooks and Harry Belafonte writing and performing various songs, skits and comedy sketches with the purpose of empowering children to reject socially-constructed gender stereotypes and achieve self-esteem and self-determination.
Free to Be You and Me recently celebrated its 35th anniversary with a newly illustrated storybook and songbook
But boo on whomever owns the rights to this stuff and sold out Thomas' original message of tolerance and individuality to a corporate behemoth not only bent on selling us and our kids a bunch of ubiquitous, branded clothing made in China, but also having us believe it’s somehow liberating.
Not since Nike exploited The Beatles’ peaceful, countercultural anthem “Revolution” in 1987 to sell Air Jordans has corporate misappropriation of artful, meaningful music for a marketing campaign seemed so, well, inappropriate. (Incidentally, Michael Jackson, who owned the rights to "Revolution" and much of The Beatles songbook at the time and made the deal with Nike, performed as a young man on the original "Free to Be You and Me" album.)
I know this stuff is par for the course these days. Every time I turn around, there’s some great rock song from the 1970s helping to hawk new gas-guzzling SUVs on TV. The irony of this music having been composed during the decade of the last major oil crisis—a time when the United States should have started nipping its unsustainable consumption of oil in the bud—can not be lost on everyone.
But this blatantly hypocritical marketing to kids is really hard to swallow, root canal or not.
Shame on you Target.
At least you've had it taken care of. Just think about the benefits you'll have after you've gone through all that treatment. As they say: No pain, no gain.
Posted by: Nathan Bedingfield | September 23, 2011 at 02:38 PM