Just saw a Mercedes commercial featuring Janis Joplin singing "Lord Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz." A song which, as far as I can tell, was supposed to be lampooning the kind of self-centered materialism that would ask God for a status symbol car (or a night on the town or a color TV.) Now stripped of its original meaning and used to sell those very same status symbols! Thank God for the Irony-Inverter Ray!
The moral: If you write a popular song with an iconoclastic theme, don't die. Sooner or later your relatives will need money and then they'll sell the rights for some completely inappropriate use. Unless you don't have any relatives. In which case, a record company will own the song and they'll sell it before your corpse is even cold.
Also, if you become a popular, iconic actor like Steve McQueen or Humphrey Bogart, when you die advertisers will use your image to sell everything from pretzels to radial tires. They'll CGI you into some radial tire showroom and there you'll be, saying "Here's lookin' at you, kid" to a set of all-season Rainbeater steel-belted tires (with advanced anti-hydroplaning directional tread design.)
Hey, those would go perfect on my new Mercedes Benz! If you're listening, God.
Posted by flamingbanjo at January 23, 2005 12:17 PMI've been seeing a lot of irony inversion lately. I'm not sure I know what "irony" means any more.
The headline at the New York Times was "Bush inaugurated; vows to end tyranny".
And then there's this baby, on CNN
It's hard for The Onion to keep up.
Posted by: The Green Man at January 23, 2005 11:26 PMI saw this McSweeney's thing recently-- a list of things you'd say to the TV if the Bush presidency were a TV show like The West Wing. There were a lot of good ones, but the one that rang most true was, "That would never happen in real life."
That CNN thing fucking killed me by the way.
Posted by: Joshua at January 24, 2005 10:00 AMYes, that CNN headline is some funny shit.
Posted by: flamingbanjo at January 24, 2005 12:06 PM