Of Corporate Anthems and the Insanity of the '90s

Back in November 1999 there was a Ford Motor Company commercial which had Charlotte Church singing over a lavish two minute music video glorifying the global automotive colossus and its then-subsidiaries Aston Martin, Jaguar, Lincoln, Mazda, Mercury and Volvo in a manner befitting the title "Global Anthem."

Seeing that commercial at its first airing I thought it was proof that the world had lost its [many, many expletives deleted] mind.

The passage of a quarter of a century since has only confirmed me in that opinion--as has the fact that in all of the commentary I have seen, in which people gush over the sheer technical virtuosity of the production and the expenditure of money and the number of people who saw it, and all the records it approached or broke in the process of becoming an historic global media event, I saw no evidence of apprehension of its social or political significance. Of how in those days when the utterly unhinged New Economy euphoria (or more accurately, marketing scam) with all its "market populist" idiocies was approaching its climax, people did what Norman Jewison showed them doing in Rollerball, rising for their corporate anthem--eagerly embracing what he had presented as repellent dystopia. And I think now as I did then of how very, very '90s all this was--the era's irony, as usual, absent when we needed it most, with all that says about the usefulness of irony as a response to the world's troubles.