If not a land of contrasts, the 1980s Michelob-beer-commercial (MBC) extended universe* is at least rife with evocative frictions. It is workaday, with its emphasis on periodic earned catharsis (drinking at night (after work) while music plays), but fashionable, with its strutting Vogueified brunettes (who, in real life, would take out a restraining order on any slob who offered them a Michelob). It is American (set in the U.S.) but cosmopolitan (crooning Brits typically score the urban dramas with post-blues pop-rock numbers). It is sultry (Dutch angle zooms on sensuous pours and windblown women) but also clean cut (men with trim haircuts, wearing blazers with pushed up sleeves, cruise the bars and poolhalls on mild-mannered sex safaris).
The goal, if I had to guess, is not to unite disparate markets or ideas but to confer ordinary Reaganite middle-class beer runs and bar nights with a modest, unearned sense of glamor. But how to do this convincingly with such a devoutly unglamorous demo? Sure, your average Michelob drinker in, say, 1987, was a hypertensive 39-year-old S&L huckster or an exurban dentist who had recently lost his license, but the MBC universe elevates the bargain-beer slurper to the status of a neo-noir urban swell with some charmingly stubborn homespun tastes (for example, he drinks Michelob, even when other beers are available for purchase and consumption).
There was scarcely a duller market and yet somehow the commercials still manifest a sense of smokey cool**. This should be impossible, since the audience, partially described above, is budget-conscious early-middle-aged divorcees, and their idea of exotic fun is playing pool and listening to Eric Clapton but somewhere nice for a change. The wish fulfillment is so measured that even the finger-snapping tunes never get carried away. There is nothing ecstatic in Eric Clapton’s “After Midnight,” Steve Winwood’s “What the Night Can Do,” or Wang Chung’s “To Live and Die in LA”; the jury is still out on Genesis’ “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight.” But in the main, the music (Michelob rock) serves to comment on the drama (things taking place at night) while elevating the banal to the working stiff’s attenuated idea of hipness.
It’s weird to think about now, but even your run-of-the-mill Contra Scandal apologist had an idea of what cool was in the 80s. Boomers weren’t that old yet; they were in their late 20s to early 40s, still trying to have fun until traffic court or the S&L Crisis caught up with them. Your weird emphatic uncle Steve who bites his lip and wears his tie around his head when dancing to BTO at your wedding reception was doing most of that shit 35 years ago, when he was just a youngish insurance-selling lush, because he thought it was cool. He liked Huey Lewis, jacuzzis, Firebirds, Foreigner, and Ronald Reagan for the same reason. It doesn’t matter that he was wrong.
So why not appeal to Uncle Steve’s wild side? Because his dating personality, which Michelob rock caters to, is much more restrained than his hanging-out-with-male-friends personality—this homosocial Steve might do things like drive a Chevy Caprice over a fire hydrant on the way home from a Kenny Loggins concert at an upstate amphitheater. But all that stuff takes place rather far upstream from the MBC metro-utopia. These are soundtrack commercials featuring major recording stars*** who manage to sell sex while keeping a lid on the id. This isn’t the venue for the ghastly, sexual churning of “American Woman” or “Mississippi Queen”; Michelob rock is for flirting with coworkers at the New Year’s Eve party or having an intense awkward mid-tempo dance at the high school reunion with an old flame. Such cautious erotic forays are underwritten by best-self fantasies rather than outright bacchanals. For women, the MBC message seems to be, live a little, let loose in sculpted and strategic ways; for men, it is, be cooler than usual so you can get laid.
All but lost to time is Michelob’s real on-the-street reputation from this era. It can be summed up in two words comprising a maximally unappealing phrase, meant to describe and disparage someone’s beer gut: “Michelob tumor.” My father used this phrase more than occasionally and I got the sense that it was a sort of pre-Internet Rotarian meme. Googling both words in quotes, so that only search results capturing the full, original phrase are returned, yields precisely two entries****. One is from a motorcycle website chat-forum post about lower back pain; the other is from a paywalled Akron Beacon Journal article, apparently about health and fitness, published December 24th, 1991. Merry Christmas. Neither of these sources claim, as the MBC campaign does, that “The Night Belongs to Michelob.”
It’s hard, very, very hard to imagine the kind of self and sensibility that would have found a Michelob refreshing all those years ago. Maybe plucking one from a cooler in your 1980 Datsun hatchback after nine holes on the public course was a special, historically sensitive reward that doesn’t translate to the contemporary mind. Probably so. But we still have the delightful inflations of the MBCs to remind us of the silly licks and jingles that would have played in the person’s head, by force of conditioning and association, as he drank his Michelob down to the suds, then grabbed another, for the long, hot, and suddenly pleasant***** drive home.
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*I’m thinking here mostly, but not exclusively, of “The Night Belongs to Michelob” campaign.
**Such that, at their best, you sometimes forget what’s being advertised. Saxophones? NYC tourism? A Blind Faith comeback tour? Dark hair?
***Who were either past their prime but still working (Clapton, Winwood) or only partially conscious of the youth market (Genesis, Wang Chung).
****Try finding a coherent search term or phrase with just two Google search results.
*****If fantastically dangerous.