16.6.08

talkin at me




You know this ad, right? Fucking annoying thing it is, too, I know - along with those godawful Optus ads featuring animals carrying out surveillance in cranky Telstra customer's homes, the telcos have the 'most nerve-wrenching commercials' categories tied up.
Anyway, I think the wonderful thing about this ad (viewable here, if you are tricky enough to click 'Small & Medium Business' or 'Enterprise & Government') is how it dramatises the condition of these 'classic' Gold FM ditties. Because no one actually does remember the original lyrics (or artist) of the song it so shamelessly tears apart and rewrites according to its control society telematic narrative - this ad thematises the way in which this sort of music is so completely divorced from any original context and just floats around disanchored in our culture as a little harmony or rhyme or snatched lyric, ready and waiting to be snatched up by some misguided Telstra ad-man. Its lyric-sheet might as well read:

everybody's talking at me
i hear every word they're saying
with my phone and laptop combined


people conference call me

i can see there faces

send them files every time


etc. etc.


(btw, it was Harry Nilsson who sang it 'originally')
(btw, how did we ever conduct business without this array of highly useless-looking technologies? The answer, of course, is that we did. Telstra always seem so desperate to concoct practices that never really need practicing)

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