Pop Song as Product Placement: Doublemint “Forever”

If you watch the latest Doublemint gum TV commercial — featuring Chris Brown dancing in the dark with the product’s new “slim” package — you might be wondering:  gee, that song and dance is nice but what happened to the infamously kitschy jingle and the wholesome set of twins? 

The ad itself is a twin:  it almost directly mimes the dancing silhouettes of those iPod TV commercials in its use of lighting, illuminating the pocket-sized product with its magical tracer lines that string back like earbud lines.  I have discussed the uncanniness of the iPod marketing previously on this blog; here the gum is imbued with a sort of magical power in that it seems to dance along with the dancer, spinning on his finger. 

But what’s more, it is also a media doppelganger:  the song is by Chris Brown, whose “urban” Doublemint jingle was commissioned by Wrigley’s with the full intention of being reproduced as part of a separately-released R&B song (called “Forever”) by Brown for his 2007 album, “Exclusive.”  The Wall Street Journal explains:

Other than the “double your pleasure” line, the lyrics to the song and the TV jingle are different. But the melody and the music behind it are nearly indistinguishable. A 60-second radio ad scheduled to air starting Friday further blurs the line between the song and the commercial. It starts with a section of “Forever,” and moves seamlessly into lyrics promoting the gum. “I’ma take you there, so don’t be scared,” Mr. Brown sings. “Double your pleasure; double your fun. It’s the right one, Doublemint gum.”

The campaign was conceived and executed by Mr. Stoute, a former senior executive at Interscope Records who counts rapper Jay-Z as a partner in his business. The idea was to connect the hit song and the jingle in listener’s minds. That way, Mr. Stoute says, “by the time the new jingle came out, it was already seeded properly within popular culture.”

Similar campaigns also took place with jingles for Juicy Fruit and Big Red. Although rap has always engaged in the art of cultural appropriation (referencing consumer goods to comment on mass culture or to appropriate the power of the dominant discourse for their own use on the margins), here the planning and deal-making that goes on behind such crass commercialism gives one pause. The literary form of “allusion” (an intertextual referencing strategy already widely practiced in the hip-hop) is not used to make an artistic statement of any kind, but is instead a prefabricated ruse, calling the integrity of the songwriting (if not the writer and the industry itself) into serious question.  At best, the stunt is redeemable as a sort of inside joke: Brown could be winking at us, suggesting that all music is commodity anyway, so what’s the difference?  Might as well make a buck, and one might excuse Brown’s selling out as yet another symbolic appropriation of the dominant culture by the marginalized. But at its worst, Brown’s jingle is the music industry’s desperate attempt at something akin to product placement in the movies: a orchestrated attempt to “plant” a cultural reference in the bald interest of breeding brand familiarity and loyalty for a commercial product.  Either way, a listener should feel cheated, I think, because it’s clear that there is advertising revenue at play here that cuts across markets which would otherwise be kept separate…unless, that is, one thinks of music as freely available as commercial TV.

I’m not writing this just to damn the campaign, but to show how tropes of the uncanny often function to wow us in order to make a spectacle out of consumerist fantasy. There’s little difference, ultimately, between Chris Brown choosing Wrigley’s Doublemint for his “dance partner” and any athlete who accepts a product endorsement on his uniform. But on a broader, cultural scale the signs become detached from their products and float freely in a quest to saturate the audience’s memory. When the boundaries between art and commerce are erased, tropes of the uncanny often become the method of erasure — and when the click of recognition hits us between the two texts we respond with a sense of deja vu that seems supernaturally predetermined. Clearly, it is not supernatural — it is, simply, a pretty savvy marketing scheme — but what it ultimately does is reify the “power” of the advertising industry as a “magic system” (as Raymond Williams theorizes it). As I show in the first chapter of The Popular Uncanny, Wrigley’s gum campaign has a long history of accomplishing this, with its doppelganger twins and its never-ending quest to get consumers to “remember this (w)rapper.”

The song hit #3 on the Billboard charts. There are direct gum references in the song and also in the music video, such as when Brown pops a stick of gum that almost “magically” launches the fantasy sequence in its opening segment. The ad at the top of this entry uncannily is resurrected in various light tricks in the video, as well, in which Brown “dances forever.” In the video, his partner is a woman; in the ad, a consumer product — are they not therefore fundamentally equated as ‘objects’ of pleasure in this intertextual way?