Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Inside the Box

Am I the only one who — upon hearing the NPR sponsorship blurb for Reputation.com that says "Helping doctors, lawyers and business professionals protect their online reputations" — instantly gets the song "Little Boxes" stuck in my head?

As Malvina Reynolds put it:

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there's doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
I know the wording is not identical, but the rhythm of "executives" and "professionals" makes it feel the same.

(Full lyrics here.)

1 comment:

Marie said...

Ha! Yes! Just this week they just changed their NPR ad to say something different, and so I went searching online to see if anyone else had noticed the similarity between the former ad and "Little Boxes." I'm sad they changed it. It gave me such joy to think that marketers targeting upper-class snobs had no idea that their lame ad was causing a good chunk of the Dr. Demento generation to break into a WASP-mocking counter-culture ditty.