MagneticMediaFed

You know that guy at the rock show, the one that’s maybe pushing 40 and has lost a good deal of his hair? He’s a good guy. He likes to rock, and rocking out is all that matters at a rock show. The problem is he also wants to be cool, and sometimes rocking out isn’t cool — which is what makes it cool in the first place (rock and roll is very complicated). But see, coolness is and will always be based on the degree of effort put into being cool. Think about it. All of the coolest people you know, or even don’t know but know of, those people don’t try to be cool, they just are cool. And you know some people who are kind of cool, but seem to want to be cool perhaps more than they really need, and it’s a shame because they could have been so much cooler if they just quit focusing their attention so much on the coolness of those around them. More after the jump…

Well this guy, the one at the show who’s maybe a tad old for that stained and stretched v-neck t-shirt and tight tight tight jeans, well he’s NBC. He wants so desperately to be cool he seems to be doing everything in his power to drive away his friends. He’s pushing his way to the front of the stage despite the fact that he’s 6′2″ and is going to be blocking some cute girl’s view of the act, and then proceeds to hit on her friend… who’s like nineteen. And it sucks because this guy knows his shit. He has the best taste in music and is always one step ahead of the trends. Sure, he isn’t all that popular, but the people who know him love him and they just don’t understand why the f*ck he’s acting like such a douchebag.

Here’s where I’m going with this:

Last night I was watching a kind of meh episode of 30 Rock and Tracy Morgan was probably saying something crazy while Alec Baldwin is talking in a gravely voice and Tina Fey makes jokes about her characters crazy single lifestyle, when NBC flashed one of their oh-so-famous and oh-so-annoying banners across the screen. It said, “Me Want Food” T-shirts available at NBC.com, to which I thought to myself, “Yeah? So?” Then about three minutes later Frank pitches a sketch idea to Liz about how Jenna, since she’s now fat, should start screaming “Me want food!”

And that, children, is the moment in time when viral marketing died.

Sure, it was already pretty close to death. The fact that “Don’t tase me bro” went from fantastic, spontaneous moment, to catch phrase, to t-shirt, to annoying, to backlash, and back to kind of funny again in the period of, oh, 18 hours kind of put the writing on the wall, but this? This is ridiculous. NBC actually started selling a catch phrase to us three minutes before a single person in this country had even heard it. And of course it isn’t a super-slick NBC-Universal t-shirt, no it’s a shirt purposefully designed to look like it was made on Cafe Press or as something you’d totally see the Snorg girl wearing.

Let’s think about this. The levels of meta-craziness at play here feel like they’re actually causing a tear in the very fabric of existence. The kids, for a while now, have been putting obscure cultural moments on t-shirts as a way of saying, “I’m plugged in enough to get this,” only to have an enormous media company design a shirt that suggests, “we’re plugged in enough to get that you get this,” except for the fact that the people do “get” it would never let a giant media company sell them a shirt… or would they!? By the time this is posted will we be able to find shirts that say “Me Want Food Shirts”? Probably, but why, and what does it all mean?

This of course is tacked on to NBC’s already shaky track record of completely spoiling dramatic tension by producing promos that give away significant portions of a series future plot, their almost compulsive insistence on product placement, and their thinly disguised carrot-dangling of several very prominent blocks of advertising in an effort to get Jerry Seinfeld’s face back on their air (which, FYI, I did not watch last night in protest).

Is all of this because no one watches commercials anymore? I thought all of the DVDs we’ve been buying was suppose to counter all of that?

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 2:39 am and is filed under 30 Rock, Commentary, NBC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.