Luana’s Mudhut of Pleasure. Og’s Mastodon Steaks. Texaco Star Theatre with Milton Berle. General Electric Theater with Ronald Reagan. Man-on-the-seat interviews about poop for the Ex-Lax Big Show. Popeye yam-what-I-yamming for Wheatena. B.B. King pitching Pepticon. Rochester hawking Lucky Strikes. More laxatives. Bugs Bunny pushing Tang. The Flintstones guzzling Busch Beer and sparking up Winstons.
There, you’re all caught up. You’ll recall we had progressed to the point of celebrity shills, famous personalities pimping product. You know them, you love them, you trust them, so when they tell you what to buy, you reach for your wallet.
Over time, noncelebrity spokespeople began taking on a life of their own – or rather, the life of the product. Instead of a generic announcer laying out a snake-oil pitch, characters were invented who embodied the product and became minor stars in their own right. Gen X’er will never forget Mr. Whipple, lasciviously squeezing that Charmin. Or Ajax’s “stronger than dirt” White Knight spurting bursts of cleanliness out of his big lance. Or the queen pimp, Clara Peller, angrily demanding “Where’s the beef.”
Animated critters personified their products in a way even the most engaging humans couldn’t. Bored housewives got hunky Mr. Clean to fill their empty homes with some excitement, or Speedy Alka-Seltzer’s “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is,” or the delectable little Pillsbury Doughboy, long before his cousin Stay Puft perpetrated those heinous acts of terrorism against New York City.
Kids were treated to Tony the Tiger, the Frito Bandito, Choo-Choo Charlie, and Joe Camel. Wait, that last one wasn’t for kids, was it? Of course not, silly thought. Meanwhile Snoopy sold insurance for MetLife, presumably to adults or facsimiles thereof, setting the stage for a gecko and a duck to become two of the hottest insurance pimps around.
The music biz has always been rife with parasitic pimps. Worst were certainly the vultures who fed off talented Black musicians from at least the 1920s, peaking probably in the 1950s and 60s and continuing until… well, until about yesterday, helping to “promote the artist” by stealing their rights, royalties, and reputations.
Music pimps have morphed over time, from traditional agents and label execs and public relations teams to online marketing and distribution services, but they’re always lingering just overhead on a dead branch, ready to swoop down and whisk away any profits they can snatch in their serrated beaks.
And it’s not just music. Every artist is beholden to the pimp, in every medium. The Internet was supposed to help democratize society, to make things more accessible to a wider audience at low- to no-cost. Instead it created new avenues and methodology for pimpdom.
What nobody foresaw, and by nobody I mean me, was that the Internet would evolve a whole new breed of pimp: the Influencer. In retrospect it seems perhaps inevitable, the obvious offspring of the dreaded Home Shopping Network, that ludicrous conceit of removing any semblance of entertainment, education, or esthetic value from televised programming and leaving only the parts everyone wants to skip. A 24/7/365 stream of blatant, unrelenting pimpdom so egregiously grating it was guaranteed to fail… and instead became an instant cash juggernaut.
Well, if the glassy-eyed clowns at QVC could get the registers ringing, why couldn’t any shlemiel with a cellphone get into the act? And so they did, and once again America responded with open arms and opener wallet, throwing money at people with no discernable skills who have never done anything remotely notable.
The salesman, in other words, as star. The pimp elevated. I’m not talking about the celebrity influencer, the old model of pop idol who first gained an audience through skill and effort and then exploited it. That’s passe, not to mention expensive. I’m talking about the attention-craving wannabes and narcissists seeking their 15 minutes in the media spotlight by pimping any damn thing that crosses their path.
It’s a brilliant model that works for the companies, which have only to supply free product. Works for the influencer, who has only to summon up cotton-candy enthusiasm for the whatsit. Works for the public, with its eye-blink attention span and insatiable need for novelty.
To be sure, companies still spend obscene amounts hiring aging superstars, creating ad blitzes, cramming commercials into the Super Bowl. All while prepubescent children rack up billions of views online and tens of millions of dollars for doing nothing more than gleefully unboxing toys.
The medium is the message, as Charles Manson once told us, except the message nowadays is neither medium nor rare nor well done. It is simply banal. Which ultimately is the appeal. As the ease of access to media has given everyone a soapbox, people find it comforting, a boost to their self-esteem, to see others gaining huge followings and exposure who are not skilled or schooled or clever or attractive, but instead are demonstrably even dumber and more awkward and inadequate and desperate for attention than they are. And so, rather than admiring those with genuine accomplishments, against whom our tiny lives seem pale and wan, we make ourselves feel better by elevating the classless, the crass, the vapid and the vain, anointing them our spokespeople and representatives and role models.
Which brings us neatly to the end of our lesson for today, having started out talking about pimps and ended up with something even worse.
Politicians. The third oldest profession.
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