A Huge Penis For Apple, A Blowjob For Pepsi

Last night as I was staring blankly at enjoying the season finale of PARKS AND RECREATION, I somehow spaced out enough to forget to fast-forward past the commercials. Just as I realized my error, I heard a familiar riff on the upright bass, immediately placed it, and watched the rest of the commercial in growing disbelief:

That the Pixies would license their first single, 1988’s “Gigantic,” for a commercial is not all that shocking. Having continued their post-2004 reunion career even after losing, if not their most important, certainly their most popular and charismatic member last year, and soon after that firing her replacement, it would seem that they are not being particularly coy about soldiering on for the money.

After reuniting and playing their back catalog on tour for twice as long as their entire pre-breakup career, next week they are releasing their first new album since 1991’s Trompe le Monde, so “Gigantic” popping up in an Apple commercial is very likely the result of some canny corporate brand synergy, with each brand leveraging the other into key demographics, to use only a couple of the marketing terms that make me glaze over in meetings I shouldn’t have been invited to.

So it’s not the commercial element of this that I find odd — other than the fact that they’re selling out with a song written by and prominently featuring an ex-band member that the other three original Pixies are probably sick of taking questions about. Like it or not, commercial licensing is one of the only avenues of Big PR left to musicians anymore, so you can’t blame the Pixies for taking advantage of it (though the use of “Gigantic” rather than something from the new record is telling, to say the least).

No, what’s strange is that, while “Gigantic” is one of the Pixies’ most popular songs and certainly their most radio-friendly, it is unambiguously a song about a huge penis.

That’s fine with me, I’m cool with huge penises (much the way I’m cool with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster — I’ve never seen one in person, but if they’re really out there, I don’t want to tangle with one). But how does a song that’s unambiguously about a huge penis end up in a nationally televised ad campaign for the world’s most profitable company?

Did the folks at the ad agency not listen to the lyrics? Did they listen to them but not get them? Strike that one, because it’s impossible. This song is unambiguously about a huge penis. No one could possibly not get that.

Maybe they listened, but figured that the hook is so good (it really is awfully catchy), without the verses to put them in context, the chorus (“Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic, a big big love”) could mean anything and the 99% of Americans who weren’t in college in the early ’90s would never know the difference. Or maybe our society has progressed to where we’ve decided that putting the image of a huge penis into the head of a potential consumer is not necessarily a dealbreaker.

It reminds me of a similar situation that happened 25 years ago, when Madonna licensed her song “Like a Prayer” for a Pepsi commercial, despite the fact that it is unambiguously about giving blowjobs.

The video threw everyone off the scent of the song, with the burning crosses and the black messiah and the gospel choir and Madonna being not-blonde for the first time — the best Madonna ever looked in a video, if you ask me. The video was so poorly received by people who objected to the burning crosses and the black messiah that it sparked a boycott, and Madonna lost the lucrative Pepsi endorsement and the company’s sponsorship of the “Like a Prayer” tour, but the song is unambiguously about giving blowjobs.

When you call my name, it’s like a little prayer
I’m down on my knees, I want to take you there

Now, certainly it’s possible that Madonna’s meaning was a little higher-minded than just “I love giving blowjobs” (although rumor has it that she got her big break in part by distributing them rather generously in her early career). It seems like she’s trying to get at the spiritual nature of sex, to de-stigmatize it, and that is an interesting line of thinking. We come the closest to feeling like we’re doing what we were put here to do when we’re feeling the kind of pleasure we can only feel with a person we really love — I have certainly said my wife’s name as though it were a prayer a time or twenty — and to write that off as wrong or dirty is certainly a hypocrisy worth exploring.

But the song is still unambiguously about giving blowjobs — that’s fine, I’m at least as cool with blowjobs as I am with huge penises — so it is amusing to think that Pepsi went ahead and used it for a commercial that premiered with great fanfare during THE COSBY SHOW, the biggest family sitcom of all time. Once again you have to wonder: How did that happen? I know the ad industry was pretty much a Peruvian blizzard in 1989, but did no one stop to listen to the song?

As it turns out, the Apple ad attracted some notice in the advertising, tech, and music trades, and if this piece is any indication, or this one, or this one, apparently I am the only one who ever noticed what this song is about. Maybe I need to re-examine just how cool I am with huge penises and blowjobs.

I’d just like to close with another misinterpreted (or more likely, uninterpreted) ’80s AM radio staple: Hall & Oates’ “Your Kiss Is On My List (Of Things I Think About When I Masturbate).”

One comment

  1. Part of me hopes that this kind of thing happens when some young asshole tries to slip something past the supervisors, and somehow pulls it off. But I think it’s more likely a case of squares who live in a world where rock n’ roll is just a bunch of jangly guitars, and cynics who would use a song about abortion to sell diapers if they thought it would make their numbers rise.

    For instance, Disney had a short stint where they were advertising a Winnie the Pooh movie with a song about crystal meth addiction. It seemed clear they were only interested in the “doot doot doot” nonsense lyrics of Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Kind of Life” from their use in the spot, so I have to guess the former. As far as I remember they actually pulled the ad once it was pointed out to them, but 10 years later they used it again for the Blu-ray release:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bba-dK_nS-M

    Either way, there can be no confusion about Royal Caribbean Cruise Line. They must know that “Lust for Life” is about being a drug-addicted, death-spiral hedonist, because they make a conspicuous cut between the lines “Here comes Johnny Yen again” and “with the liquor and drugs.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7dCrtdRtZQ

    But that beat goes great with shots of white kids jumping into a pool, so you cut a little here and there and everyone is (somehow) happy.

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