Bad idea.

One thing I love about digital music is the freedom to find and play insipid novelty songs. This dates to college, when we figured out how to share MP3s on the LAN, and somebody dug up a recording of “New Age Girl” by Deadeye Dick. This is an achingly stupid song, and everyone played it constantly. I still play it. Shouldn’t I have the right to listen to tasteless music in my own home without everyone knowing? Do I really want to feel like I’m expending social capital when I put on a Roxette song? Do I want my friends seeing a notice that says, “Your friend Daryl enjoys music by Genesis.”?

Online radio program Pandora integrated some of its features with Facebook recently, enabling a little box that shows what artists your Facebook friends like. I swiftly disabled it after a message appeared saying “Your former girlfriend also enjoys the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.” I imagined a reciprocal message announcing, “Daryl is currently listening to Ke$ha” and decided to put a lid on that.

To be sure, my most-played list in iTunes isn’t particularly shameful. It’s a lot of power pop and catchy music by indie singers like Neko Case and Ben Folds. Entirely appropriate to my branding as a geeky writer in Brooklyn. But scroll down and there’s “Skipper Dan” by Weird Al Yankovic, played 48 times. There’s “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes,” by Edison Lighthouse, played 44 times. Below that are “That’s Not My Name” by the Ting Tings, and “High School Never Ends” by Bowling for Soup. For these songs, I offer no explanation. I just say, “Mind your own business.” On the blog, I can do this, but on iTunes Ping, I might not have that luxury of context. Is it acceptable to announce that I’m a Brad Paisley fan?

I don’t want to worry about what people think of me when I load up my iPod. I need the small joy of listening to totally uncool music. That’s my message to Apple and Pandora and everyone else working to encode word-of-mouth marketing into a software program that extracts our money $1.29 at a time.

Come to think of it, this isn’t an Apple problem or even a music problem. It’s a social media problem. Quite often, what we share doesn’t reflect our actual behavior. It reflects whom we aspire to be, or whom we want our friends to think we are. As we get used to sharing things—what we watch, what we listen to, where we go out to eat—I’m worried that social media is pressuring us to pretend to be things we’re not. In the future, we will all listen to Grizzly Bear for 15 minutes. Then we’ll disconnect from the Internet and crank up some Steve Winwood, tapping our toes in delicious secrecy.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

They’re tasty little mints, too. (Too bad Great Bite’s web site is less persuasive than their tins. What sort of candy company lists “Food Safety and Social Compliance audits by internationally recognised companies” as a callout?)

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Here’s one of the greatest success stories in technology: The HP 12C financial calculator. It was introduced in 1981 and is still selling. After a generation of seismic advancements in technology, this weird horizontal calculator has kept its edge. It costs $70 and people still buy it.

Name something else battery-powered that hasn’t changed since 1981. I’ve got nothing. Blackberries and iPhones seldom last two years before better ones come out, yet this calculator could bury us all. Now I don’t work in finance and I’m far from an expert in calculators, so I can’t explain in detail what’s so amazing about this device. But I know calculators are a competitive space. This one’s success can’t just be an accident of history or the result of marketing. It’s adoption isn’t a requirement; surely there are other calculators that fit with today’s business conventions.

It could only have survived this long by being good. Good enough to be deeply loved by exactly the right customers. The HP 12C designers nailed it. They achieved something unheard of in technology: perfection. If we’re lucky, once in our lifetimes we’ll work on a team that does that.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

That slogan has been drilled into our brains repeatedly since 1985, when ad agency DDB created it. It’s poetry in a tire commercial. Why is it so good? Six reasons.

1. It takes a totally boring product and invents an emotional benefit. What’s riding on your tires? First, the safety of you and your passengers. Secondarily, your job, your social life, and any other reason you need reliable transportation.

2. It’s good writing. The slogan is concise and easy to understand. It has a rhythm that naturally emphasizes the important words so much.

3. It contains a pun that isn’t a groaner.

4. It lends itself to charming commercials involving adorable babies.

5. It’s perfectly suited for the product it’s selling. Tires are mysterious. We only buy them every couple of years, and a layman can’t tell the difference between a good tire and a cheap one. But if you convince us, through repetition of a catchy slogan, that your brand-name tires are better than the cheapo brand, we just might buy them.

6. It contains an implied threat. “If you don’t buy our tires, your children will die and you will live out the rest of your days wracked with guilt, you pathetic cheapskate.” Said with a smile!

Now, here’s the crazy thing. Michelin doesn’t even use this tagline any more. They haven’t for years.

The company’s current slogan is “A better way forward.” Not only is it totally unmemorable, it could represent anything. It’s just a shade away from Toyota (“Moving forward”), or the Wisconsin state motto (“Forward”). Presumably, the new slogan is meant to signify that the company is about more than tires, and to make its products appeal to customers beyond just families with children.

Thing is, I’m a single adult with no kids and no car. I have no interest in tires. But I can’t get “so much is riding on your tires” out of my head. I have a positive opinion of the Michelin company based almost entirely on that old slogan. (OK, and its much-celebrated travel guides.)

It’s a hard thing to get right. But when it’s right, advertising works.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

But the Macy’s parade delivers a single, visual quality that towers (literally) over the sloppy choreography and humiliating celebrity appearances. The balloons! Round and colorful, they bob like hallucinations past the flat, stone edifices of the city. Tiny ants at the ends of guylines ease these cartoon behemoths around the corners of Midtown office buildings. The feat has become so routine—this is the parade’s 83rd year—that our eyes miss seeing it for the remarkable spectacle it is.

Some of my earliest, dimmest impressions of New York—before I ever visited the city—are of the Macy’s parade on TV. At no point did I ever imagine being there. As childhood impressions go, New York City was similar to the Land of Oz—vivid, fun and purely fictitious.

Now this is my 8th November in New York. I have never actually been to the parade, since I always travel to Maryland to spend Thanksgiving with my family. But I always catch a few minutes of the parade on TV, or I see the photos later. Don’t let familiarity spoil how cool those images are. Balloons and buildings, speaking to one another: A pairing of color and monochrome, soft and hard, fleeting and permanent. The Macy’s balloons are a perfect artistic response to the canyons of Manhattan.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

The commercial has been playing for months and the first few times I saw it I ignored it, as you probably did. Then after the repetition sunk in, I realized this was something special. “We must march my darlings!,” the ad proclaims. What is this? Turns out it is a Walt Whitman poem called “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”

Photographer Ryan McGinley has his fingerprints on the “Go Forth” campaign—he gets credit for print/outdoor executions—and his “look” was obviously translated into motion for the TV component. Sometimes his work is hard to take—celebrations of intoxicated youthful excess make me concerned about the next morning’s hangover. Naked kids cavorting in fields are lovely, but really, it’s lollygagging, and we all have a lot of work to do.

But in this ad, there’s something more. These free young things are mashed up with a call to arms: “Get your weapons ready!,” the poem insists, over thunder, drums and strings. Here is a perfect pairing of words and images. Whitman’s poem grants purpose to the lanky kids in the pictures and erases the guilty pall of wasted time. More incredibly, the pictures give the Whitman poem a new layer of meaning, as if he’s calling not just to rouse soldiers, but to endow outcasts and nonconformists with the dignity of a mission. The music—barely even there—provides just enough glue to bond it together.

Then there’s the matter of the voice reading the poem. What a sound! It turns out to be a vintage recording of Will Geer, whom Wikipedia tells me was an actor and activist who died in 1978. Doesn’t he sound like John F. Kennedy declaring, “We choose to go to the moon!“?

Levi’s ad agency is Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, which should collect an award or two for this work. Even if they don’t, they deserve credit for getting a risky and high-minded ad approved and seen. All in the interest of selling casual apparel. Don Draper would be proud.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

A banged-up Volkswagen sedan picked me up at the hostel. As I climbed in the back, the driver apologized in part-English, part-Portuguese for the busted rear window, which was stuck open. We turned onto the road that parallels the beach. The air that blew through the car was warm and smelled like the sea.

We followed the coast and passed through tunnels cut into seaside cliffs. I was on my way to go hang gliding for the first time. This is a touristy thing to do, but the gliding conditions were good, and I felt excited.

The car had a cheap stereo with a detachable face — the kind people buy when their factory radio gets stolen — tuned to an FM station playing American pop music. A song came with a ukulele and a twangy guitar, then a mellow voice be-bopping across some inane lyrics. Well-a you done done me and you bet I felt it… I knew this song, but not what it’s called or who sings it. John Mayer? Jack Johnson?

Later, I learned it’s called “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz. It’s a generic, mass-produced summer pop song. The Bud Light Lime of music. This is not the kind of music I usually enjoy. It’s boring! It does not rock! But in a slightly scary place, in a slightly scary car, about to do a slightly scary thing, a boring American pop song was called for.

Hang gliding was a kick. Vacation is a free pass to enjoy the tacky. Out of New York, away from my job, not being observed, I felt relieved of the burden of good taste. And so Mr. Mraz was a welcome sound. I’ll always feel good when I hear that song.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Oh my God, I’m in love with this cereal! But somebody at Kellogg’s should have nixed that long name and come up with something shorter. Suggestion: “Box o’ Cookies.” Seriously, these might as well be Oreos. I can’t believe we feed this stuff to children for breakfast!

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

• Brad Paisley. I’m not supposed to like country music. I’m not the target demo. In fact, I’m programmed to hate it. Pre-fab corporate schmaltz wrapped in the American flag hits all my cynicism buttons. But for some reason, I enjoy putting a country channel on when I’m cooking or driving, and lately I’ve grown fond of Brad Paisley songs. The other day I nearly teared up when “Letter to Me” came on. Now at this point in the blog, I should get analytical, right? I should be doing research on whatever Nashville machine manufactured it, or parsing what my fondness for this music says about me. But I’m not. I’m just going to say I enjoy it, because it’s good.
• South Street Seaport. Yes, the shopping mall in Lower Manhattan. The one where dozens of coach buses unload hundreds of tourists every day. The one with a Pizzaria Uno and a kiosk where you can have your name etched on a grain of rice. In other words, the most un-New York place in New York, if not the worst place in the whole universe. However, the Seaport happens to be built on a pier over the East River. And in a stroke of genius, there’s a deck on the far side of the complex with what might be the best view in the whole city (easily in the top five). Few things are as relaxing on a summer evening as buying a Coke in the Seaport food court, claiming a chaise lounge on the deck, and gazing out at Brooklyn while boats go by.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.