Categories
GUEST EDITOR

From The Desk Of Times New Viking’s Elizabeth Murphy: The New Face Of Spokes-Creatures Has No Face, No Voice And No Identity

Times New Viking is an Ohio rock trio that delivers raw rock ‘n’ roll. Jumping from different labels over the years including Matador and Merge, the band has released five proper albums in a little more than five years. On its last album, Dance Equired (Merge), Times New Viking dropped the lo-fi fuzz in favor of more melodious songs. These art-school grads from Columbus, Ohio, are still making music, and the band’s Elizabeth Murphy will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with her.

Murphy: Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, I thought the General Auto Insurance Company was a local thing. The commercials had that aesthetic: uninventive, low budget and confusing, most likely created by friends and family with a persistent ear-worm jingle to round it all out. But to my surprise, after moving to Memphis a few months ago, I saw the General himself on television, the nostalgia-laced irritant was claiming Mid-South, cloaked in misleading signifiers and loosing his fucking mind.

Specifically, I am talking about the General’s post-retirement crisis unto three dimensions: the abrupt animation, his aggressively generic bucket list (the skydiving, karate, baseball, football, the comedy club, young people) and … where did that penguin come from? Is that the Bud Ice penguin, all cleaned up, completing his community service? The General’s dimensional upgrade is to be expected; people graduate from C.G.I. community college every day, but throwing a penguin on it (and they just had to give him sunglasses) screams zero sum result of market research. This is not even worthy of being called a slow moving target; it is a non-thing.

Around this point in my line of combative questioning, the wind gets knocked out of my sails through some form of protective empathy toward an imagined creator. He is trying so hard, using everything that seems to work in other commercials and striving for Geico-level spokescreature worship. These feelings easily get abstracted and confused by the presence of the General himself, who is a rather sad character anyway. Although my capacity to empathize with spokes-characters and the efforts of ad campaigns may veer on the extreme, disconcerting side, consider this: They were born with the assumption of a particular locality. This effect may be sneakily still at work. Rooting for the local underdog is practically an American past-time. And the General isn’t just anyone’s hometown hero, with that “local” aesthetic employed nationwide. He’s everyone’s hometown hero.

The Aflac duck is the opposite. Always around and brazenly irritating, it felt like the spoiled rich kid who was grandfathered into creativity was finally given his due last year when Gilbert Godfrey was inappropriate way too tsunami* on Twitter, costing him the voice-over job and the duck his signature Af-quack. But that one is on the company. Why rely on a celebrity? One of the perks of having a spokes-creature rather than a spokesperson is that they can’t publicly humiliate your company or die unexpectedly. Watching Aflac flap about, trying to come up with a hip replacement in real time was a bit entertaining until that inexplicable empathy crept in. Those rapping ducks are even more off-the-beat than the General’s entire oeuvre.

Of last years notable spokes-creatures, I had the most pleasant reaction to a sentient blob representing depression. Although working with the most sensitive of subject matter, the blob from round one of the Abilify commercials did not portray hostility, nor was I worried about the well-being of the lil’ guy himself; he just kinda bummed around with the lady. You get what you can pay for; this being a pharmaceutical company, we are talking ad agents who get paid Google-money. Apparently the spokes-blob didn’t test well because it was quickly replaced by an anthropomorphized house robe of the same illustrative ilk. The robe, equally as dependent on the afflicted woman as the blob, followed her out of the house and um, robed her? That’s fine, at least it wasn’t a Snuggie. I suppose you don’t even leave the house if you own one of those. The robe has since been replaced by an umbrella with an incidental Gonzo nose who is sometimes a hole. Save the hole, each new incarnation has further ironed out the abstraction I once loved about blob. What’s next? Sentient Burn Notice DVD box set?

*not my joke, saw it on Twitter

Video after the jump.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOruN55imxc