Jingle-riffic! I just want to go on about jingles.

Some of them are really good pieces of music--and some are just capricious, burrowing ear-worms. I thought I'd litter the brain of my casual wanderer-in with some memorable jingles.


First, I have to single out the work of Barry Manilow. There is not a single jingle-writer on this planet, to my mind, who was better or more influential. You can take or leave "Mandy". But you can not deny the influence of these:

State Farm:



(The "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there" is his--iconic. Used for years.)

Band-aid:

Like so many of these things, you can't find the good, original ad--the one with a very young John Travolta. Here's an '80's version:


Same song, basically.

I think it's actually disputed whether he was the Dr. Pepper jingle-writer on the internets--Wikipedia says Jake Holmes wrote the actual song. Anyway, it was a kick-ass jingle, so enough about Manilow:



He also didn't do the "You Deserve a Break Today" McDonalds' jingle, but it's still interesting:




how just the "You deserve a break" bit could be inserted in differently-themed jingles.

Here's just a really neat iconic ad:



Now, it pre-imagines the "Real thing" campaign, it's multi-national, it's hippie-riffic, and in a way, it tingles the same "universality bone" that this Youtube thingie "Where the Hell is Matt?" did. It's water with caramel coloring, sugar, citric acid, caffeine and flavoring, and just incidentally tastes awesome with rum or whiskey. It's not going to give us world peace. But still, nice ads.

Here's one that always gets to me:



Aaron Neville, give me back those sentimental tears you jerked out of me over undie-fabric! This jingle is the equivalent of "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler on the Roof. It makes me unaccountably misty.

Yeah, Richie Havens, you too:



Are we selling the brotherhood of man, or clothes that you will totally "f" up in the laundry inside of five washings, amirite?

One more:



The fabric of my life is spandex. Let's just keep that straight. Lots of elastic and spandex.

Anyway, let's devolve to the obvious:



Have you ever seen a Weinermobile on the road? I have! It makes one so weirdly satisfied: I have seen a Weinermobile. Now I can die, fulfilled. You wouldn't actually die right then. But still. It's like a four-leaf clover or something. You wish you could make a Polaroid of the Weinermobile just to have it wash out in thirty years like many of my baby pictures did. It's a big f'ing deal.

Anyway--that was me, reminiscing about jingles. One of the things that occupy my brain.