While sitting and enjoying some Sunday Night Football, I was faced with three instances of music:
- John Williams’ Sunday Night Football score
- Pink’s Sunday Night Football song
- John Mellencamp’s “This is Our Country” in the Chevy commercials
To begin with, John Williams. A legend. A great. He’s done hundreds of film scores. In fact, let me copiously quote from the press release NBC issued about the score:
War of the Worlds, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, The Terminal, Catch Me If You Can, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Minority Report, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, The Patriot, Angela’s Ashes, Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, Stepmom, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad, Seven Years in Tibet, The Lost World, Rosewood, Sleepers, Nixon, Sabrina, Schindler’s List, Jurassic Park, Home Alone, Home Alone 2, Far and Away, JFK, Hook, Presumed Innocent, Born on the Fourth of July, the Indiana Jones trilogy, The Accidental Tourist, Empire of the Sun, The Witches of Eastwick, E.T. (the Extra-Terrestrial), Superman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Star Wars trilogy, Jaws, and Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
Okay, honestly? Did anyone really need to know that he did the score for The Witches of Eastwick or Stepmom? I can’t imagine that some bored reporter in Duluth was scanning the daily press releases and thought to himself “Star Wars… blah blah blah… Saving Private Ryan… blah blah blah… Oh! Snap! Goodbye Mr. Chips!!!”
Anyways, his score has been a welcome addition to the Catchy Football Jingles. Not an instant classic like the Monday Night Football jingle (which ESPN has been marketing oh so well), but perfectly good in its own right. Maybe a little too cinematic and not enough jingly.
Moving along, Pink pulls a Hank Williams, Jr. and does the “pop” theme song for SNF. Again, no calls to action such as “Are you ready for some football?” Instead, we get:
Hey Jack it’s a fact, the best show in town,
Sunday Night Football we ain’t messing around
Al and John will make you crank up the sound
Wow. I can’t remember the last time John Madden made me want to do anything but mute the television and jam gauze into my bleeding ears. Fred Gaudelli, Sunday Night Football’s producer described their reasoning: “We chose Pink as the signature voice because she is a tremendous talent with a crossover appeal that makes her relevant to all segments of our audience.”
Come on. No matter how much you try to build your football broadcast around diversity in audience, your core group will remain Guys Who Like Football, and how many GWLF do you think listen to Pink? Silly silly silly.
And now, of course, we come to the infamous “This is Our Country” song that Chevrolet has played during every single commercial break of every single football game every single week of this season. I won’t try to repeat everything that Seth Stevenson so eloquently said in Slate back in October, but the blend of patriotism and buy-this-truck imagery is completely repulsive and unintentionally hilarious. A misinterpretation and rebranding of a song to such an extent hasn’t been seen since Reagan’s Born in the USA days. Look at some of the actual lyrics of the song:
That poverty could be
Just another ugly thing
And bigotry could be
Seen only as obscene
And the ones that run this land
Will help the poor and common man
Not too bad, actually. But will you hear this in one of the Chevy commercials? You’re more likely to hear
Now I remember when
The water burst the levees
New Orleans could’ve used
A couple extra Chevys
This is my country!
Hey-o. Thanks to Chevy, I’ll have a bright side to look for when football season finally ends. An escape from endless Mellencamp. Actually, wouldn’t that be a great Choose Your Own Adventure?
To quote Mr. Chuck Klosterman in Killing Yourself to Live:
“But Zeppelin is far and away the most popular rock band of all time, and they’re popular in a way the Beatles and Stones cannot possibly compete with; this is because every straight man born after the year 1958 has at least one transitory period in his life when he believes Led Zeppelin is the only good band that ever existed.”
I think my transitory period is coming on now. The only question is, would it have happened without Mr. Klosterman encouraging it?
