Negativland's 1997 album DisPepsi, a searing critique of the empty sloganeering and commercial crassness deployed by major corporations to net loyalties in soft drink consumption, is an epic in plunderphonics, and there's certainly no track on there more epic than "I Believe It's L". Appearing late on in the proceedings, it's here that a topic that's been festering throughout the course of the album - the ongoing marketing rivalry between Coca-Cola and Pepsi, finally takes centre stage, in a dizzying eruption of all-out cola warfare. The soft drink giants are vying for the privilege of being your go-to enamel-stripper, and the result is not going to be pretty. Clocking in at six minutes and twenty-two seconds, it crams in a gargantuan avalanche of soundbites and samples; amid this monstrous mash-up, slogans are muddled, messages are mixed, and buried beneath that overload of useless information is whatever thin sliver of coherence we might have come in with, and yet the track is infused with a faux-urgency that makes the sonic spectacle of hearing two corporate brands go head-to-head feel as though it just might be the most important, exciting match-up in our shared cultural history. We feel the artificial tension of that dramatic gasp when Coca-Cola drinker W.J. discovers that he chose Pepsi in a blind taste test. Never mind that W.J., at least according to how the sound collage is edited together, is not exactly a self-professed Coca-Cola devotee - one senses that, as with the average individual described in the musings we intermittently hear on the problems with relying too extensively on focus groups to second guess what consumers are thinking, he couldn't be more indifferent as to which of these colas comes out as the reigning champion. Nor do we suspect that his participation in the taste test is likely to change his day-to-day existence.
"I Believe It's L" draws heavily from two dueling campaigns of the late 1970s/early-mid 1980s (aka the golden age of cola warfare) - the Pepsi Challenge, which originated in 1975, and loudly touted that a majority of Americans preferred Pepsi when tasked with sampling the colas in blind taste tests, and Coca Cola's counter-campaign, in which comedian Bill Cosby insisted that the findings of the Pepsi Challenge were a sham, but later appeared to double back on those claims when New Coke was thrust into the arena. (Since I've brought Cosby up, I do obviously have to acknowledge that there is now a serious elephant in the room where he's concerned, but I suppose that makes a few of the other tracks on DisPepsi - the ones dealing with the perils of celebrity shills - all the more relevant). In the earlier stages of this campaign, Coca-Cola went on the defensive by asserting that there was a larger narrative than Pepsi were letting on. Obviously, Pepsi were never going to feature footage of any participant who voted Coke in their advertising, but they must be out there; Cosby was at pains to point out "about sixty million times a day, people pick Coke...the Pepsi guys can play their numbers game, cos we've got number one." Coca-Cola indeed maintained its industry lead, but was currently losing market shares to Pepsi and rival beverages, and those taste tests were an omnipresent thorn in Coca-Cola's side, for they suggested that their dominance was in response to the brand more than the product. Pepsi's success in the taste tests enabled them to push the narrative that they had the better tasting cola, and while the Pepsi Challenge campaign left its mark on popular consciousness (a character even references it in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction), it didn't quite pan out into the total usurpation Pepsi were aiming for. This was the paradox at the heart of the cola wars. Pepsi was supposedly preferred, but Coke was ultimately more beloved.
The bombardment of sloganeering throughout "I Believe It's L" serves, in part, as a statement on corporate machinations to convince the public of what it wants by browbeating it into submission, but it also suggests a desperation on the part of said corporations to actually gauge enough of the public mindset to lure it in the desired direction. The overarching narrative of "I Believe It's L" has less to do with W.J. making the alarming discovery that that he apparently prefers the taste of Pepsi over Coke, so long as he can't tell which is which, than it does the New Coke fiasco of 1985, when Coca-Cola changed their formula and faced consumer backlash, and the cola wars really went off the rails. Assuming that Coca-Cola didn't second guess consumer reaction a little too ingeniously ("I Believe It's L" comes right on the heels of "All She Called About", which incorporates musings on the popular interpretation that they did), then how did they make such a gross miscalculation? The great, glaring contradiction of the Cosby campaign is that they initially emphasised that Coca-Cola was superior because it was less sweet than Pepsi (The taste buds say: less sweet means more cola taste! The throat says: less sweet means more satisfying!"), only for Coca-Cola to go the opposite route and adopt a sweeter formula, which Cosby proclaimed to be "the best taste in the history of ever". The cola-buying public declined to agree, even though response to the new product in taste tests and focus groups (where it was blind taste tested against both Pepsi and Coca-Cola) had been overwhelmingly positive. Evidently (to Pepsi's frustration as much as Coca-Cola's) what did well in taste tests didn't necessarily translate into a more popular product out in the real world. Could it be that the Coca-Cola brand was so iconic a brand and such an integral component of Americana that consumers couldn't help but react negatively to the very idea that anyone would have the gall to change it? Or was it that those blind taste tests in which both companies had put so much stock were not actually the be-all and end-all as to what indicates a more preferable drinking experience? They were, after all, based around single sips of the respective beverages, and not the full item. In this Slate article, Matthew Yglesias asserts that, "taste tests consist of relatively modest sips, and Americans don’t drink tiny sips of soda...and while we want something sweet, we don’t necessarily want that kind of long-term relationship with something too sweet." Maybe that earlier Cosby commercial was onto something all along.
Less than three months after launching New Coke, Coca-Cola announced that they were bringing back the old formula under the guise of "Coca-Cola Classic". At this point, Cosby ended his partnership with Coca-Cola, sensing that this participation in the blunder had made him look foolish. New Coke, however, did not go away overnight (it wasn't formally discontinued until 2002, although it spent its twilight years leading an obscure and low key existence under the moniker of Coke II), and Coca-Cola needed a new spokesperson to keep pushing the brand. In an effort to court the younger generation who perceived Coca-Cola as their parents' cola, they teamed up with Max Headroom, a faux-computer generated character portrayed by Matt Frewer, and "Catch The Wave" campaign, in which Headroom urged a generation of young "cokeologists" to not "say the P word", was born. Headroom's wavering voice and characteristic stutter can likewise be heard all across "I Believe It's L", as the narrative is reconfigured to reflect the fact that more consumers now prefer the "ne-eeeww refreshing taste of Coke over Pepsi." Or maybe not. Toward the end of the track, the cola brands have been strategically switched, so that Headroom emerges as a shill for Pepsi: "If you're drinking Pepsi, who's drinking Coke?" (Obviously, it was the other way around in the original commercial.)
Headroom is not alone. By the end of "I Believe It's L", all of the statements and slogans have been chopped up and rearranged, so that Cosby endorses the new taste of Pepsi and we are encouraged to "take the Coca-Cola Challenge". The assertions, "It's a fact!" and "It's true!" are brandished with vigor, but are divorced from all meaning. The soundbites come together in such a chaotic collision course that they become an incomprehensible scramble; it's as if in the fall-out of all the confusion the pieces are settling in the wrong place and none of the participants can remember whose side they were originally on. It's almost as though we've crawled through that rubble and emerged into an alternate universe in which the respective marketing campaigns were deployed by the opposing cola, which in turn illustrates just how interchangeable the basic message is. We are, after all, being harangued into choosing between two products that, in the grand scheme of things, are not radically different. By the end of the track, rather than seeming clearly distinguished from one another, the two seem to blur into the same mudslide of banality.
The most unsettling alteration, however, arrives shortly before the end, when we hark back even further, to Coca-Cola's much-celebrated "Hilltop" television commercial from 1971 - aka the one that gave rise to the pop song "I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing (In Perfect Harmony)", originally conceived as the advertising jingle, "I'd Like To Buy The World A Coke". The ad, which featured various youths from all over the globe assembled upon a hilltop in Manziana, Italy, each holding up a Coca-Cola bottle with labels printed in assorted languages, struck a chord with viewers, who were moved by the pro-diversity, anti-xenophobia statement. The message of the "Hilltop" ad is that Coca-Cola's global popularity provides a means of unity between the world's many races and cultures, so that we all effectively speak a common language in our universal love of Coke. Maybe there is a potentially dark side to this message, in that world harmony is equated with a conformist consumption of the same brand. Here, the song's mellow yearnings for peace, love and acceptance are in startling contrast to the generally hectic and chaotic pace of "I Believe It's L", but the final hook has been altered so that Pepsi, and not Coca-Cola, is now the product for which our universal reverence is going to lead us into a golden age of tolerance and understanding. Compared to the other slogan switch-ups, this edit feels far more conspicuous, as if someone has clumsily replaced "Coke" with "Pepsi" to reflect a changed message for this alternate universe in which Pepsi won the cola wars, so that Pepsi is now the product we are instructed to buy in order to avoid upsetting the apple cart. The call for peace seems hollow coming out of the marketing warfare we've just endured, the message now a simple instruction to consume and obey. We then hear the battle cry of "Challenge this, Coca-Cola!", which is an invitation for the entire process to begin again.
For the closing punchline of "I Believe It's L", we return once again to Bill Cosby, with a sample from an altogether different product endorsement, this one for Crest toothpaste: "People think I'm Bill Cosby, but I'm really Tooth Decay." It's another glaring contradiction that makes entirely perfect sense. In addition to underscoring the ludicrous interchangeability of celebrity endorsements (if the same figure encouraging the habitual consumption of sugary soft drinks was also used to promote a product emphasising the importance of dental hygiene), it acts as a final, witty means by which the two products merge definitively into one - neither beverage is promoting good health in the consumers they each purport to know what's best for. Whether you're drinking Coke or Pepsi, your enamel is unlikely to thank you for it.
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