8/13/13

Hellman's Mayonnaise - Gloss drop.

Hey, who loves mayonnaise? I do, I do. That's why I use mustard on my sandwiches. if I ate mayonnaise just whenever I wanted it, I'd die of congestive heart failure the in a year.

Okay, next question. What the hell does "'fresh-press' salad oil" mean? Hell if I know, but since it's in quotes and appears in an ad, it very likely means nothing.

When a company puts anything in quotation marks, that's your signal for bullshit. If it's in quotes, that means the advertiser can make up any meaning they want to, which translates to "nothing at all".

Anyway, what's with the two identical brands? There must be some compelling tale about interstate trade or tariffs or tax loopholes when a product is shipped over the Rockies, right? Nope. Turns out on mayonnaise maker bought out another and they both had such a strong foothold on the West and East coasts that the parent company decided to keep their names so as not to lose customers. To this day, Hellman's and Best Foods have identical label designs. Whee. Fascinating.

My mom used to make chicken salad out of mayonn... Dear god what the hell is that????

Green Jell-O, cucumbers, shrimp, and celery chunks? The mystery goop on top had better be barf, because that's what I would garnish this monstrosity with if someone slid it under my nose. 1937, you've got some explaining to do!

A quick Googling reveals this to be some species of "cucumber shrimp mold". I love mayo, but there's not enough of it in the world to make this Cthulhu salad go down easy. I prefer my veggies crunchy, with some kind of spicy/sour dressing on them, not suspended in a gelatinous fruity parody of Amon-Sul.

Still, the rendering is nice, and it would make a decent album cover for Gloss Drop, a wonderful album by neo prog-rockers Battles. Battles make music that, in a way, is a purer form of music than lots of pop music having intelligible lyrics. They use weird time signatures and all kinds of electronic effects without abandoning their guitar-bass-drums sound. The vocals are rarely comprehensible, being buried in pitch shift or some other studio shenanigans. Those rare occasions when you can understand the words, they're weird and abstract enough to leave you to interpret the song yourself from the pictures it conjures in your head. The vocals are used like an instrument, not as narration. Genius. Pointless album cover coming in three, two, one. PointlessalbmcoverNOW!!!


Ice Cream, track two from Gloss Drop, starts with a syncopated looped guitar sample that picks up speed and sets up a brilliant drum beat. Then come the vocals whose meaning matters not at all to me. Their debut album, Mirrored, is also wonderful.



4 comments:

Michael Leddy said...

I think the quotation marks would be better reserved for the words salad and salads. For example:

Don't you find your "salads" taste far more delicious?

Or to paraphrase E. B. White, "I say it's cucumber shrimp mold, and I say the hell with it."

PhilAreGo@gmail.com said...

Ironically, Battles released a sort of EP of alternate tracks from the Gloss Drop sessions. It was called Dross Glop, and that is very descriptive of the "salad" in this ad, I think.

Thanks for reading, Mike!

[-Mgmt.]

Steve Miller said...

God, I wanna be 19 again.

BakedSalmon said...

19... the mayonnaise years...

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