Why co-opting punk for ads is risky
Canada's largest phone carrier had to apologize after a vintage Sex Pistols "BELSEN WAS A GAS" pin appeared in billboard ads for its cellphones.
Link. (thanks, Farai Chideya!)The ads for Bell Canada's Solo discount service showed a young woman decked out in flashy punk rock attire, with a button that reads "Belsen was a gas" -- the controversial title of a song by the Sex Pistols, and a reference to Nazi Germany's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
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Bergen-Belsen is where Anne Frank died. Smooth, Bell Canada!
Methinks the protesting is too much. Like the Reich, punk (which even adopted some nazi emblems) was an ass-slapping for civilization that Civ obviously needed, wanted, and ecstatically enjoyed. All the mock horror, censorship and hair-pulling notwithstanding.
Alas, poor babies: the novelty is gone, and because of drug tolerance, one can never get to the same high again. Like Spinal Tap and the Bush years, this "accident" is clearly part of a subliminal horror nostalgia trip.
Is Civ on the road to recovery? Not if we can find new drugs that amplify the horrors once again. I'm optimistic about the human capacity to do just that.
I saw the poster on the subway, but didn't notice the button - I think it was only really legible on a billboard scale. In fact when I saw a news story that the ad was controversial, I was expecting it to be about Asians offended by being stereotyped as harajuku kids.
To be honest I don't think the ad campaign (and the related one that shows old grad photos crying because they're not eligible for the student plan) is very effective - I feel so sorry for the weeping people that I wind up hating Solo for making them cry (at first I thought the grad-photo ones were protesting some policy unfair to people still paying off their student loans).