Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about my parents, who are moving to a smaller house in the fall and are, consequently, in the midst of an extended purgative frenzy. My mother is the brains of the operation and an eminently capable and disciplined person. She has a vision and ethos that prevents her from ever accruing the third-rate clutter that rivers hopelessly through my house as of this (and any conceivable future) writing. She returns borrowed items and discards useless ones as often as she can. She is no slave to nostalgia. And yet she finds herself living in a sort of rained-out yard sale, on the verge of a grand indiscriminate liquidation, wondering how throwing stuff away became a full-time, if temporary, job.
What she presents to me is not a practical or moral template; I, lacking her virtues, can scarcely hope to emulate her example, and so her struggles are all the more disquieting. Still, she will prevail eventually, paring her domestic inventory down to the nunish fundamentals in a way I never could. What her predicament offers me instead is a complex figure for the mind—I find myself in a state of perpetual rummaging, plagued by clutter and inefficiency, tempted, at times, to see richness in the mess, though I mostly see it for what it is: mazes of junk that are almost impossible to navigate or shed.
And what is this junk exactly? Memories, most of them bad or dumb. The bulk of them fall into three shitty categories: 1) embarrassing and/or pointedly disappointing experiences 2) scenes from trashy movies 3) snatches of old and profoundly tacky songs. Most of my writing here deals with #3, and this work is both exegetical and archeological—I hope it can help me sort and organize the crapola of my inner life, even if I can’t, much as I’d like to, throw it all away.
In my exhumations, I try to remind myself that category #3 memories didn’t really happen to me but were imposed upon real (though meagre) life events. The MTV videos and jingly commercials I watched are not memories, in and of themselves, and yet they are what I remember, more, in many cases, than my own life. What they obscure is how little I was doing back then, how little I lived. To come to terms with this Kozinskian passivity, I must sort out where I start and where the stupid music ends.
Hamlet had Yorick’s skull; I have Chevy’s “Like a Rock” commercials, scored by the blue-collar rocker and yawn-shaped-like-a-man Bob Seger. I cannot say that Seger’s soulful, full-length adult contemporary “mock-rock”* classic “Like a Rock” has had an important place in my life, since I doubt I’d ever listened to it in its entirety until “researching**” this piece. But what surges and snarls through me at unpredictable times and with variable and sometimes shocking intensity, like Rust Cohle’s flashbacks from his days as a drug-guzzling, deep-cover biker narc, is the tightly edited miniature from Chevy’s iconic if luridly bland ad campaign from the 90s and aughts***. In these ads, Seger’s vocals are cut, copied, and crowded together, telling the viewer how to feel about Chevy trucks, America, and themselves. The condensed format means you get a lot of money-shot blues yowling; it is like being electrocuted by America’s most boring man.
I cannot summarize the campaign and retain any sense of coherence, so I will offer a couple of general remarks about the breadth and evolution of these commercials before concentrating on the inaugural ad. 1) The trucks got much bigger and more expensive over time 2) so did the blowhard American (often male) Chevy owner, for whom luxury pickups became something of a cul-de-sac status symbol rather than the working stiff’s**** vital and necessary engine of labor. I suspect there was a bit of a demographic shift, rather than just a personal transformation, in Chevy owners during the life of the campaign, but whatever: Seger was fine for either demographic since his vanilla, star-spangled affirmations were and are almost metaphysically inoffensive*****.
But Seger’s voice, despite the musical insipidity that frames it, is a bit of a roller coaster, full of scratchy swoops and stomach drops. Even now, years after being shocked to attention by these commercials and this godforsaken song, I still howl-copy it myself, almost involuntarily, as I sludge around the house. The only lyric I know for sure, when away from the computer, is the title and chorus; the rest I fill in with analogous screech-blues noises: “Like a rock…I was standin’ on a gate! / Like a rock…I was with a dog named Nate!” It will never leave me. And despite my sloppy, performative sarcasm, corporate amber waves of grain imagery always haunt my ululations.
The inaugural “Like a Rock” ad aired in 1991 though it has post-911 feel, with its generic if insecure weave of soft-filtered patriotic chores and scenes. The first thing we see is a flag being raised solemnly in the rainy foreground, by a couple of somber schlubs, with a Silverado parked inconspicuously down screen to the right. Then we see some guys tossing tools and shit into a truck bed from the POV of the truck bed itself (duck!). Then a truck speeds through some blurry wheat. Next, fishermen in yellow slickers toss lobster traps into a huge, inadvisable mound on the bed, Beverly Hillbillies style. After that, a dually bounds through fields of mud, careening wildly to the left, perhaps in a life-ending skid—thanks to some tasteful editing, we never discover its fate. The 30 second ad is maybe half over at this point. Eventually there are images of welding sparks, snow, disaster relief, and a screen full of financial fine print.
All the while, Seger sing-proclaims his metaphorical imperturbability: “I was strong as I could be / LIKE A ROCK / nothing ever got to me,” as the bourbon-voiced narrator touts Chevy’s sales and customer polling numbers. The relationship between these two elements, hymn and sermon, is jarring. In a flash, the church service to the American male self-image is interrupted with a pawing sales pitch for a creek-fording truck that, thanks to magic of advertising, now seems like it should either be priceless or free by birthright. It always felt weird to go back to the Mets game after that.
Two things amused me about these ads when I first saw them: 1) Seger’s weird avidity, and 2) the almost non-genre dinosaur sound of the song itself that, I swore, NO ONE could actually like, though, apparently, most people did. I listened to hard rock and metal, and Seger just seemed like some obsolete but emphatic dud with bad taste, singing songs for flag-hoisting old farts with lots of useless, hard-earned money.
Seger wasn’t alone in praising the straight****** and narrow. Mid-80s radio-friendly white rock had a pretty inflexible sense of rock tradition and an ars poetical streak to boot. Huey Lewis’s “The Heart of Rock’ n’ Roll,” for example, is a kind of ad for itself and its “Hip to Be Square” normie aesthetics:
When they play their music, ooh that modern music
They like it with a lot of style
But it's still that same old back beat rhythm
That really really drives 'em wild.
“Modern music” here could be anything from new wave to dance pop to hair metal. What Lewis wants is “that…back beat rhythm” that very little girls can dance to with their uncles at the family barbecue. Even the comparatively hard-driving acts that Lewis eschews resorted to rock songs about rock, I should point out, having, perhaps like Lewis and Seger themselves, not a whole lot else to say. AC/DC released “Rock n’ Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” and “For Those about to Rock…” just a few years after the group had written the definitive rock meta-analysis “It’s a Long Way to the Top If You Want to Rock n’ Roll.” The first two songs pose as defiant, but probably derived from a simple lack of imagination. Seger himself had “Rock n’ Roll Never Forgets” and “That Old Time Rock n’ Roll,” which are, true to form, simultaneously spirited and sonically inert. Like Lewis, Seger pines for (and embodies) a no frills “back beat” driven rock fundamentalism, which is aesthetically reactionary if not quite politically so, heavy on the enormous alto saxophone and light on electronic hullabaloo. I thought it was hilarious that he would devote himself so religiously to such a vast repertoire of anti-modern snoozers. What’s worse is that he built a kind of puritan rock work ethic around it******* that he eventually sold to a major auto company that was selling much the same thing********.
The “Like a Rock” ads feature masculinity without sexual charisma and rock n’ roll without cool. They were tailor made for a repressive conservative ideal of yore, not our current ecstatically deranged one. The ads sell manly prowess and sentimental workaholism—this isn’t the aesthetic for psychos who blast their vertical exhaust stacks at cycling libs or fly Three Percenter flags as they speed toward Sam’s Club at six desultory gallons per mile. Seger describes himself is a political centrist, which means, in terms of commercial appeal, he ought to be dull enough for everybody, but that kind of big-tent banality won’t cut it anymore.
Nonetheless, he’s a legend in my mind, a kind of musical poltergeist who violently but tepidly spooks me at odd moments. While I’m almost glad he’s in their yowling, I do wish less of my soul was comprised of obsolete shlock like this or the Freedom Rock commercials—though I wonder, in all honesty, what I would replace it with. And the answer is…nothing, I guess, because if all the garbage were gone, I wouldn’t even be here myself.
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