The Poetry of Sales: Jingles That Rock

Poets are sometimes portrayed as hermetic creatures that seal themselves off from popular culture. But for every Emily Dickinson home-baking her black cake (a variation on British fruit cake), there’s a Frank O’Hara who would like to celebrate “Having a Coke with You.” The truth is, many poets embrace name brands not only in their daily lives, but in the texture of their poems. Some poets even support themselves by working with name brands; thirty years before award-winning poet Dana Gioia became chair of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2003, he was working at General Foods. In the late 1980s, he developed an ad campaign that rescued a languishing brand otherwise destined for retirement, by inventing Jell-O Jigglers.

When I think about what childhood experiences made me want to write, it’s natural to name authors who inspired me: not only Emily Dickinson but Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sandra Cisneros. But poems weren’t the only sources of thrilling language. Any text that used rhythmic phrasing, offered bright images, and bent towards wordplay and rhyme (whether full or “slant,” as Dickinson would call it) lived rent-free in my young brain. That means the history-rich lyrics to Billy Joel’s 1989 song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”; Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff’s 1990 rap that served as the theme song for Smith’s television show, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; and, best of all, the 1988 McDonald’s Million-Dollar Menu Song.

GIVE IT A SPIN

The million-dollar what? If you’re already nodding, great, but let’s recap for everyone else. From 1988 to March 1989, customers could obtain flyers at any American McDonald’s that carried a jukebox image and the promise, “Play McDonald’s $1,000,000 Menu Song.” (I think I also remember them being distributed in the Sunday inserts for my parents’ home delivery of The Washington Post, but that could be wishful thinking.) Centered in the jukebox was a Flexi disc, a lightweight one-sided plastic record, on cardboard square that could be detached and placed on your turntable. On the back of the flyer, you could clip coupons for sandwiches, and use a nickel to reveal scratch-off numbers for a weekly lottery of additional cash prizes.

The Menu Song’s melody was recycled from a 1974 novelty single by Reunion, a studio band, called “Life is a Rock (But Radio Rolled Me). The original lyrics, a mash-up of 1950s–1970s pop music vernacular, adapted easily to McDonald’s purposes. They hired Gary Fry to compose and perform the entire menu catalogue. In television commercials that ran concurrently, a gentleman makes his way to the top of the register line and, when prompted, orders everything, seemingly in one long breath. Employees gather behind the cashier in awe. “I love McDonald’s—good time, great taste—and I get this all in one place,” the customer finishes, triumphant.

“Would you like that to go?” she asks.

When customers play the Flexi disc record, they hear the Menu Song several times. In the first version, a teacher instructs his students on the proper lyrics, verse by verse to completion. In the second version, the class tries to sing it back to him before quickly dissolving into chaos.

“Aw, too bad,” he says. “Because if this class can do the McDonald’s Menu Song all the way through, a listener out there is going to win a million dollars.” He asks them to try again, but inevitably they lose track. At least, that’s what happened on my copies of the record. Odds of winning, by playing the record with a perfect recitation, were one in eighty million.

FILET-O-FABULOUS

Commercial jingles have been around for a long time, going back to the Washburn Crosby company’s 1926 hiring of a barbershop quartet to croon into the radio, “Have you tried Wheaties?” Yet a 2016 article in The Atlantic argues that jingles are now a dying art. Author Tiffany Stanley attributes the trend to the licensing of older songs designed to trigger nostalgia, or new collaborations with major artists who record soundtracks that can double as chartable hits. Though this isn’t a new concept—in 1989, the same year I sang along to the McDonald’s Menu Song, Madonna was using “Like a Prayer” to shill for Pepsi—the proportions have shifted.

But I’m going to plant my loyalties with the jingle crowd. Fry had to survey every required word and come up with a workable syllabic structure while creating opportunities for rhyme, assonance (repeated vowel sounds), and alliteration. Rather than rebelling against what is required, he approaches it as warp and woof, and weaves something strangely pleasing to the ear. This comes down to the details, as when Fry strings together the opening salvo of “Big Mac, McD.L.T., a Quarter Pounder with some cheese,” or when he elaborates on “tasty golden French Fries” as “regular or larger sizes.” The song juggles the bubbling Bs of “Biscuits,” “Bacon,” and “Hash Browns,” but knows to strategically distance “Orange Drink” from “Orange Juice.”

In poetry, we might call this working with a constraint, and that can be where magic happens. I’d venture that Billy Joel (saddled with the proper names of Cold War-era countries and celebrities) and Will Smith (tasked with providing the expository premise for his character’s relocation from West Philadelphia) would agree. For nine-year-old me, walking in circles in my parents’ laundry room as I sang the McDonald’s Menu Song over and over, I just knew that memorizing a bouncy joy-fest of words felt good. I was acquiring a superpower that might win me a fortune, or at least a free side of fries. The next logical step was to shape words of my own on the page.

GIFT THAT KEEPS ON

In sales, we talk about the importance of gifting. The brilliance of the McDonald’s Menu Song campaign is that it met the goal of getting people thinking and talking about their fast-food options by layering gifts several times over. There was the physical satisfaction of detaching the Flexi disc, which was offered for free, and placing it on your record player; there was the anticipation of listening to hear whether (or really, how) the error in the class’s singing would be introduced; and there was the bonus gamesmanship of scratch-off numbers that promised, always, another chance to win. Not to mention the pleasure gifted to budding word-nerds like me who can still repeat the jingle from memory, thirty years later.

Oh, the actual winner? Yes, there was one. Her name was Charlene Price of Galax, Virginia, and she used the winnings to purchase and expand the Hop-In convenience store where she worked, bringing better food offerings to her neighborhood. “There’s never been produce there before….I’m real proud of it,” she told The Washington Post in a July 1989 interview. “The mayor cut the ribbon Saturday morning. There was a country music band and cloggers. We had a real good day.” She changed the name to the Price is Right Grocery.

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