It Took Seconds

Three minutes and forty-six seconds: Negativland’s music usually leaves me fairly cold - as in, I don’t laugh (or fight the man) - but “Aluminium Or Glass: The Memo” is different. Partly this is to do with my job: I have been privy to the occasional meeting in which questions equally as asinine as “Could a man living in Los Angeles understand what a seagull is?” have been asked in all seriousness. Equally, the “Memo” of the title - a supposed casting call for a Pepsi spot - is presumably completely invented but the writers (and reciter) have got the tone pretty much right: “Contemporary is a GOOD WORD HERE”. Again, before I actually worked in marketing I would have assumed it over the top, but it’s not. Best of all is the air of tear-jerking uplifting unctiousness with which the “When we’re back to back” tagline is delivered.

What Negativland have - maybe unwittingly - caught here is that the problem with marketing isn’t (just) its venality or even its hypocrisy, it’s the extreme, pinched caution involved in much of it. That’s what makes people gravitate towards statements and ideas that aren’t even wrong, just smiling voids of meaning. That said it remains a professional ambition of mine to one day lean across a boardroom table and say with the utmost sincerity: “We can go out of the ordinary - but we can’t live there.”

What would your 3’46” track be?