If you’ll allow me a moment to be that friend who thinks their high thoughts are meaningful to anyone but themselves, I want to talk about a Taco Bell commercial from 1996.
A few years ago, I was in a funeral pose on my sofa when I stumbled upon a half-hour compilation of commercials from the mid-90s. Needing to make a choice before my brain atrophied (/positive), I clicked play, and, unbeknownst to myself, made a choice that would break my psyche beyond repair.
One of the first commercials featured was a western-set ad for Taco Bell. From the first frame, I experienced a mental and emotional jolt whose instantaneous effect on my body was legitimately terrifying.
“Forget typical
And say goodbye to the usual, too”
The typical and the usual? Found dead in a ditch.
The first image, a somewhat overexposed shot (although that could be video degradation) of a woman in a billowy dress painting a desolate western mesa when a semi speeds by, knocking off her hat. We’re then knocked between scenes of a speeding car, horses galloping across a desert, blissed-out motorcyclists speeding down the highway. We catch up with the artist’s wide-brimmed hat as it floats across the sky, carried by a wind, a visual metaphor for the bracing and soul-enriching thrill of an adventurous life.
And then, tortillas.
“Take the road less traveled” the singer urges.
Then, the song hits its chorus.
“There’s nothing ordinary about it
Taco-o-o Bell”
The song itself is a relic of a popular mid-90s sound. There’s a certain ease and distance to it, like it was made to exist in memory. Low notes, acoustic guitar, and a mix of blues, country, and rock. I hear the same effect in the music of Melissa Etheridge, or Blues Traveler, or even Des’Ree’s “You Gotta Be,” and, it must be said, in Oprah’s self-recorded title theme. You know, Whitney Houston’s favorite song.
Seeing this commercial again after so many years unlocked a core memory. Each lyric felt as familiar as a song I’d heard earlier that day. But it was the images that made my soul start buzzing. There was something about those first few shots. The way the sun bled into the frame. The orange of the rocky cliffs. The intense blue of the sky.
Déja vù is one thing, but total recall is another. The former is an eerie feeling that could be the result of something truly remembered or an approximation of a memory, manufactured from the debris of a cluttered head. I do not have a cluttered head. Foggy, maybe. Dense, certainly. But it’s mostly empty. Déja vù is ephemeral. Total recall is more concrete, like uncovering and dusting off an old book you used to know by heart.
This was an ancient text. One that a childhood spent in front of a TV screen had tattooed on my brain’s ridges. Like the cicada, this formative media product had hidden itself from me for seventeen years, and now, it had to scream. I realized this commercial probably informed some of my earliest ideas about what looked beautiful on a screen. And if you know me, you probably know things looking beautiful on screen is a major preoccupation for me.
In the three years since I revisited this commercial, it’s never too far from my mind. My fiancé will sometimes sing the chorus randomly. They think my little epiphany is a cute little quirk. A little glitch in the brain matrix that’s been colored by nostalgia.
That may be.
Why is this even worth writing about? What does Taco Bell’s 1996 “Nothing Ordinary About It” campaign mean to anyone who doesn’t share the same unique cocktail of memory and emotional development as me? What is a brain but a salad spinner of gray matter, first-hand experience, and individual emotional traumas? I don’t know. I’m not a neuroscientist.
If the carousel episode of Mad Men taught me anything, though, it’s that ads are as much about the viewer as they are about the product. Multimedia and capitalism colluding to create lasting images tied to commercial products, to make us feel as if the things we buy are as important and worthy of treasuring as the people we love. The fact that I don’t love Taco Bell—in fact it’s decidedly not for me—doesn’t mean anything here.
But I don’t think the takeaway is as bleak as “capitalism bad and also manipulative.” There’s clearly something here that meant more to me than the explicit raison d’être—shilling hard shell tacos and Baja Blasts1. (I just love the term “raison d’être” and so rarely get to use it in a sentence.)
This commercial, I came to realize, occupied a key spot in my pop culture memory. It lives in the same neural neighborhood as images from Psycho, the original Twilight Zone, the last scene of The Quiet Earth, the opening of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the house from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, things I saw when I was first developing personal taste.
We don’t return to commercials the way we do the movies and songs we love. They’re more ephemeral and immediate. Finding the Taco Bell commercial again was a happy accident. It’s unexpectedly majestic, even epic. Considering it’s a 30 second ad for a Mexican fast food restaurant that specializes in something called a Crunchwrap Supreme, that’s an artistic accomplishment I can celebrate.
I can’t help but attach a big picture narrative to this commercial, so here it is. A comment on the YouTube video capture of the “Nothing Ordinary About It” posited an interesting theory. This commercial didn’t last in the cultural memory because it was about to be subsumed by an actual phenomenon: the Taco Bell Chihuahua.
The Taco Bell Chihuahua campaign began with a September 1997 ad. “Yo quiero Taco Bell” became something you said to your friends at any given opportunity, for any reason whatsoever. It was a meme before that term left the academic sphere. It’s not beautiful or majestic. Like Jake from State Farm, the Progressive Girl, and the Old Spice Guy, it’s a humorous little bite. The Taco Bell Chihuahua campaign is a fast and digestible ad for a world that’s making exponential leaps in what we can do in a shorter amount of time.
I don’t know if the Taco Bell Chihuahua buried this campaign so much as it just came at the right moment and hit the right note of hilarious and bizarre. Commercials aren’t typically designed to last. They catch our attention long enough to make the sale, and then let us go. That 50% off deal doesn’t last forever, after all.
Where the creators of the “Nothing Ordinary About It” campaign based their work on a poll that concluded people craved escapism2, the prevailing media that followed doesn’t necessarily reflect that. 1996 was the year of Scream. We were at the beginning of mainstreaming this irony disease we’re still suffering through (Marvel’s wink-nudge, “isn’t it funny we’re in tights?” humor being a prime example).
Outside of the occasional car commercial, majesty and earnest feeling is not necessarily a creative aim of a modern ad. When it is, the result is exaggerated sentimentality. “Isn’t it sad your child is growing up and going to college? Let us, the people at Nissan, take care of things from here.”
It’s blunt, but effective. And at least there’s some effort.
I’m not trying to suggest there was some far away era where commercials weren’t just sales pitches or the occasional celebrity pretending they do their own laundry. And that’s not all bad either. Even this dry approach could yield some fascinating and camp results (“I can do without caffeine… so can you. But flavah, nevah”). For every “Nothing Ordinary About It,” I imagine there were at least 20 “Help, I’ve fallen, and I can’t get ups.”
There’s an aesthetic moment this commercial belongs to that is just before the digital really takes hold. For me, Madonna’s “Don’t Tell Me” music video from 2000, is an adjacent cultural item from just after the new era begins.
“Don’t Tell Me” is a western-themed video which intersperses footage of mechanical bulls and western pastiche with Madonna lethargically strutting in front of a green screen filled with a digitally captured desert scene. It’s typical of Madonna. Striking visuals, tongue-in-cheek humor, and a great song. But when I look at its western scenes, it feels sterile in comparison. The blues and oranges don’t pop in quite the same way.
Obviously, there are different creative decision, methods, and motivations at play here. We’re talking about a music video vs. an ad for tacos. But given the similar setting and inspirations, it’s hard for me to square the two.
The video, directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, acknowledges this in its own way. Up top, the camera pulls out to reveal Madonna walking on a treadmill, silhouetted against a screen. The desert highway is merely a projection. There’s a level of fakery it’s acknowledging here about the 2000s that Jim Farber, former chief music critic for the New York Daily News, surmised was “implicitly questioning whether there's any difference left between authenticity and fakery in a media-driven world.”3
That’s a meta comment that I think can be carried into the overarching feelings I have about the Taco Bell commercial. I can’t help but think of how antiquated the pastoral setting and visual poetry of the “Nothing Ordinary About It” ad would feel if sandwiched between late 90s ads for Dell computer and Radio Shack. It may be a sales pitch, but there’s effort and art to it. In a strange way, it respects us enough to fool us.
I think modern ads are contemptuous of us. They openly admit they want you to buy the thing. There’s—ostensibly—no pretense about that. And they know you will buy it anyway. “This is funny. You like funny things, don’t you, you little piggy? Buy the phone.” It’s the open contempt that gets me down.
I find something crass about companies lifting the veil this way. It’s similar to how fast food restaurants now run their social media like fan accounts. You are not leveling with me. You are still selling me something, whether or not you admit it. You are still making money off of us, and you deploy social media interns to pretend to be one of us. I find that so much more dishonest and cynical than the “Nothing Ordinary About It” campaign or that God damn “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” Coca-Cola ad from the 1970s.
You want my money? Dazzle me. Fool me a little. Let me decide if I’m being had. In the meantime, give me something artful. Give me something that some kid will see and someday say, “Whoa… that looks amazing. I want to make art.”
Maybe it’s not that deep. Maybe I shouldn’t be looking to commercials for aesthetic pleasure. And generally I don’t. But seeing this Taco Bell commercial I’d forgotten about reminded me of how artistic inspiration can come from the most unexpected places.
We’re going to be inundated with ads anyway. Let them be pretty.
There’s another shot, shoved between images of smiling people passing Taco Bell bags and platters of stiff, upright, gravity-defying hard shell tacos, that I had forgotten. Two people dancing on top of a pickup truck. A beam of projector light casts their shadows onto the screen. Fakery and poetry.
Then, tortillas.
What I’m Reading:
I’ve been doing a book club with a friend, and we’re on Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons. Psychics, conspiracy, and world domination. Good so far.
What I’m Watching:
I’m not watching Eurovision this year because they’re still allowing Israel to compete, but my body seems to know it’s almost time. I’ve been delving into YouTube videos by TheReorderBoard, a YouTuber who edits past Eurovision contests with modern scoreboard technology. There’s something very satisfying about listening to Europeans cope with technical difficulties and regional dialects and accents as they repeat numbers and country names in English, French, and sometimes even the local language.
Also, my Letterboxd here.
What I’m Listening To:
See above, but some fave Eurovision classics.
What I’m Doing:
Could potentially have some playwriting things coming up, but recently, I’ve started eying a foray into YouTube. So if you like Clue, murder mysteries, and The Sims, watch this space.
If you’re so inclined, buy me a cup of coffee at Kofi for a one-time donation of $3.
The Red Sweater will be updated once per… let’s just say it’ll be updated once, periodically, until the end of time. It will cover developments in my life, work, and all the stupid little things I care about.
Baja Blast was not available at Taco Bell until 2004. I understand and acknowledge this, but I made an artistic decision.