"Our Country"

The new Chevy Silverado truck ads, using the same John Mellencamp song as the one we watched in class, seem to have gone too far for some people by using images from the Civil Rights and Vietnam/Watergate era, as well as from more recent troubled times, to make the GM brand seem somehow essentially American and triumphant. Here's how Slate puts it:

It's not OK to use images of Rosa Parks, MLK, the Vietnam War, the Katrina disaster, and 9/11 to sell pickup trucks. It's wrong. These images demand a little reverence and quiet contemplation. They are not meant to be backed with a crappy music track and then mushed together in a glib swirl of emotion tied to a product launch. Please, Chevy, have a modicum of shame next time.

You can watch the ad at Slate. There is also an instant parody on YouTube:

The New York Times has another take on it:

Critics have attacked the ad, in part because it also invokes Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks to sell trucks. But something more subtle, perhaps more cynical, may be at work here: the image of America (and its leading auto manufacturer) as victim, mostly of itself, but still worth loving.

“The first time I saw it, I thought, holy mackerel, they are using negative images to generate positive emotions,” said Bob Garfield, the advertising critic of Advertising Age. “I have never seen that in a commercial.”

“I feel a little violated when I watch it,” he said. “I don’t mind when they have a tent sale on President’s Day, but those guys have been dead for 200 years. I’m not sure I’m ready for a Rosa Parks sale-a-bration.”

Kim Kosak, director of advertising and sales promotion at Chevrolet, said there was no thought given to drawing a parallel between the struggles of a nation and the struggles of a corporate icon.

“We never discussed that or thought about it,” she said in a phone interview. “The idea was that the pickup consumer is honest, hardworking, authentic and real. In order to be real and honest, we needed to show the scars and bruises, as well as the triumphs, of this country in order to be true.”

Presumably, as the Slate article eventually points out, this ad appeals mainly to "red state" Americans, where there is the biggest market for pickups. The response on YouTube is clearly from a left-of-center perspective. Slate and the Times are both left-leaning publications. This ad is thus a good example of something we should always consider in analyzing media texts, and which we will be discussing in the coming weeks: meanings are different for different people. To ad critics in big East Coast cities, the Chevy spot smacks of bad taste. But to television viewers around the country it might (how can we know?) seem "authentic and real." When it comes to matters of interpretation, media texts rarely have a single "correct" meaning.

(Beware: if you watch the ad or the parody you are likely to get "Our Country" stuck in your head for hours or days. Even if you hate it. Especially if you hate it.)