I Can't Dance (Genesis)

There exists a powerful symbiosis between advertising and popular music. Advertising has a well-established history of capitalising on the public's nostalgia and goodwill toward much-loved tunes in order to transfer some of that pre-existing emotional investment onto the products being hawked, while exposure in such a campaign can do wonders to make get any song, familiar or brand new, embedded into contemporary zeitgeist. Occasionally, you'll find a scenario that gets the process backwards, with a pop song that only exists at all by starting life as an advertising jingle. So much of the creative energy in advertising is fuelled by music, but how often do we find the boot on the other foot? Are there many pop songs out there that take advertising as the main source of their inspiration? I've already covered a couple of tracks by Negativland that satirise the tactics of soft drink commercials, but if we look for more mainstream examples then the first tune that comes to mind is the Genesis single "I Can't Dance". Released in 1991, the song offered a light-hearted potshot at trends in contemporary denim advertising, which was still riding a fashionable high that started when Nick Kamen walked into a 1950s laundrette in 1985 and stripped his Levi's 501 jeans (and everything else he was wearing, save his underpants) to the sounds of Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" (naturally, "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" was re-released and became a UK chart hit soon after).

In the early 1980s, the Levi's brand had lost much of its lustre with younger consumers, who'd tagged them as the kind of unhip clothing their parents wore, and the Kamen ad was conceived as a means of reinventing their image (come to think of it, Levi's was facing much the same problem in the late 1990s, only their response that time around involved a terminally depressed hamster; I still cannot fathom how anybody thought that was a good idea). The strategy paid off and sales of Levi's jeans increased by 800%. It was followed by a series of ads heavily emphasising the soundtrack of yesteryear and the sex appeal of their male protagonists. One of them, memorably, featured a young Brad Pitt greeting the desert highway in his boxers, which seemed to be recurring motif for the series.

The music video for "I Can't Dance" is best remembered for that knowingly awkward swagger that band members Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks deploy whenever the chorus kicks in (thus accounting for the title), but the really fascinating element is of course when they take on the then-established conventions of designer jeans advertising. The lyrics of each individual verse and the corresponding visuals all lampoon a different contemporary jeans commercial, starting with that iconic spot for Bugle Boy jeans in which a female motorist briefly stops to ask a male hitch-hiker if he's wearing the brand in question before leaving him permanently in the dust. Also under the spotlight are a couple of ads for Levi's 501, one featuring a beach hunk who has his dog keep watch over his coveted jeans while he catches some waves, another following a 501 patron who slays the competition at a bar pool table and demonstrates his authority by getting his opponent to reveal (what else?) his underpants. Collins plays the denim-sporting protagonist in all three scenarios; things don't work out half as well for him as they did the heroes of the aforementioned Levi's ads, although he gets much the same treatment as that unfortunate Bugle wearer.

 Let's dig in a little deeper.

Hot sun beating down,
Burning my feet just walking around.
Hot sun makin' me sweat,
Gator's getting close, hasn't got me yet.

 

Of the triad of ads being sent up in this song, this one is represented the most tenuously in the lyrics. In fact, if not for the music video I doubt I would have connected it with the infamous Bugle Boy hitch-hiker ad. I think what particularly throws me off is the reference to this mysterious alligator that's apparently stalking our hero, something that occurs in neither the original commercial or the Genesis music video. As such, I draw a blank as to how it fits in here (I've heard it suggested by at least one person that the "gator" is a reference to the French clothing brand Lacoste, but I doubt that - for one thing, their mascot is a crocodile). In the video, the scenario plays out in a very similar fashion to the original ad, except here the motorist doubles back not to question Collins about his taste in denim, but to offer a ride to his reptilian cohort (an iguana, not an alligator). There's also a lot more emphasis on Collins getting showered with dust on both occasions that she passes him by; a running gag throughout this video involves Collins winding up on the receiving end of some form of slapstick/humiliation, subverting the cool and confident rebel archetype that was pivotal to the Levi's 501 campaign in particular. 

Next up... 

Blue jeans sittin' on the beach
Her dog's talking to me, but she's out of reach.
Ooh, she's got a body under that shirt
But all she wants to do is rub my face in the dirt.

 

This verse homages "Beach", a 1990 ad for Levi's 501 in which a dog is tasked with keeping watch over a pair of jeans while their mutual owner, a surfer, is off chasing waves. The dog performs its duties diligently, but falters when approached by a girl in a bikini who figures that the jeans are up for grabs. She gets as far as donning the jeans and turning to make her exit before the dog's protective urges are reignited, and it makes a sudden lunge at her ankles. At this point the dog's owner, a typically glamorous 501 hero, returns and diffuses the situation. He gives the dog the okay signal, and the three of them strut off together, one big happy beach family. The adventure is set to the sounds of "Can't Get Enough" by Bad Company.

 

The Genesis video tweaks the scenario marginally, so that the dog now belongs to the bikini wearer, who seems peeved to even acknowledge Collins' existence. The dog takes it upon itself to tussle with Collins for ownership of the jeans, with the result that Collins exits the beach with a bite-sized hole in one of the cheeks, a far cry from the triumphant adieu of our 501 surfer boy.

And finally...

 

Young punk spillin' beer on my shoes.
Fat guy's talkin' to me tryin' to steal my blues.
Thick smoke, see her smiling through.
I never thought so much could happen just shootin' pool.

 

The most recent addition to the 501 campaign at the time that "I Can't Dance" was conceived was "Pool Hall", in which a characteristic 501 protagonist runs afoul of a cue-wielding bar goon who cajoles him into gambling his precious jeans on a game of pool. Naturally, our young and glamorous hero turns out to be an absolute wizard at the pool table, much to the delight of an attractive bar maid who silently roots for him from across the room. To the victor the spoils; not only does he retain ownership of his jeans, but he gets the satisfaction of refusing a cash prize payment from his bewildered opponent and forces him to drop his (non-denim) trousers instead, confirming to the bar patrons that he wears boxers and not briefs. Characters shedding their pants to reveal the garments underneath was a recurring image in the 501 campaign, and could be empowering or degrading, depending on the context. Whatever a man wears around the lower half of his body is clearly posited as the height of his personal expression and autonomy. Kamen's willingness to voluntarily parade his near-naked form around a laundrette was the ultimate mark of confidence and poise, but elsewhere in the campaign we have multiple examples of one character depriving another of their dignity by denying them the privilege of a well-clad waist. Both the hero and villain of "Pool Hall" know how to hit each other where it hurts, hence why the sight of their opponent in their undergarments is worth so much more to them than money. In Brad Pitt's entry to the campaign, we see him turn the tables on a sadistic prison guard who gets a short-lived kick out of turning Pitt loose in just his boxers, symbolic impotency that's swiftly obliterated when rescue arrives in the form of Pitt's waiting girlfriend, who brought a spare pair of Levi's, and with it Pitt's restored prowess. Command a man's pants, according to the campaign, and you command the man. In the Genesis video the pool hall scenario goes in the other direction entirely, with the bar goon absolutely slaughtering Collins and forcing him to surrender his jeans, which frankly seems more realistic than the improbable David vs Goliath outcome in the original ad. Anyway, it's thanks to "Pool Hall" that "I Can't Dance" exists at all; apparently the song started life as a riff inspired by "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by The Clash, which was used as the soundtrack to this particular ad.

 

One thing you might notice about the trilogy of spots being lampooned here is that none of the protagonists therein had actually attempted to dance or sing. The Bugle Boy jeans ad doesn't quite fit the mold, as the hero does get to open his mouth, albeit briefly, but the 501 ads avoided dialogue altogether and let the classic rock track of the hour do the talking. So what exactly are Genesis getting at in mocking these well-dressed rebels for supposed deficiencies in abilities we never even see them take a crack at? Circle back to where this all began, with Nick Kamen in that laundrette. After selling an entire generation on the delights of Levi's 501, Kamen attempted to capitalise on his newfound acclaim by making the transition from model to pop musician, but the response was much more tepid than when he had Marvin Gaye do the heavy lifting. He found early success with the Madonna-penned "Each Time You Break My Heart", which reached number 5 in the UK charts in 1986, but the law of diminishing returns set in quickly for Kamen, and while he continued to net appreciative enough audiences in several European countries throughout the latter half of the decade, as far as his native Blighty was concerned all Kamen's flavour had already been licked dry. In the book 100 Greatest TV Ads, written by Mark Robinson to tie in with a popular Channel 4 program in 2000 (Channel 4 did a lot of these "100 Greatest" things when they had a couple of hours to fill in the 2000s, and they by and large made for very poor viewing, but this one at least appealed to the budding ad buff in me), TV presenter Kate Thornton is quoted surmising what went wrong for Kamen: "He broke the rule - he talked. We just liked looking at him. It was as simple as that...fundamentally he was to be looked at and lusted over - and never to be taken seriously." (p.121) That, in a tidy little nutshell, is the message of "I Can't Dance". The rebel in shrink-to-fit denim was a mythical figure that existed only in the most facile of surface detail. A fantasy world in which all ambient noise was conveniently filtered out by your favourite retro radio station, not merely for the purposes of exploiting nostalgia, but because any first-hand vocalisation from our well-dressed maverick would have ruptured the mystique and brought us crashing back down to reality. "I Can't Dance" was about taking a humorous look at the absurdities nestled beneath the artifice.

 

Robinson offers the following epilogue to Kamen's career: "He turned a new Levi's ad into a much-hyped media event and ended up eventually being replaced in 1999 by a fluffy yellow puppet called Flat Eric." Somewhere in between there was also that hiccup involving a hamster, but Robinson was tactful not to mention that.