Visa's done it again. They've taken a song that means the
world to many and used it as a crude glue to affix happiness to credit
card debt. My teenage years have been retroactively sullied, and I'll
never be able to relive the halcyon days of my adolescence without hearing
the ca-ching ca-ching of cash registers.
Psyche! Visa's newest ad features the song "Super Freak" by
Rick James, and I can't imagine what you were up to in the early '80s
if you've gotten yourself worked up about this one. Nevertheless, it
is fairly bizarre:
So you've got a random assortment of people singing lines from the song
as they're doing things and then Morgan Freeman's voiceover: "Who
isn't a little freaky? Visa debit is the safe, secure way to pay online
... More people go funky with Visa." I totally understand the attempt
at hilarity in the first part with the singing, although it's not nearly
as good as the Sony Ericsson ad with everyone singing "Enjoy the
Silence." But what does "freakiness" have to do with
buying music online? Sure, I get that the girl is buying the song they're
singing, but that could literally have been any song in the world and
it would have been the same tendentious connection to the sales pitch.
"Super Freak" is long past its expiration date for yuks,
and we get the "everyone is a little weird premise," but it
goes nowhere; perhaps if the girl had been purchasing, I dunno, kinky
S&M equipment on the web, this song would have actually been kind
of perfect ... and maybe even funny.
Also: putting weird thoughts into our heads about Morgan Freeman getting
"freaky" is definitely not funny.
