This month on Twitter, @sotachetan hosts #BrandedInSongs – which is a head-on collision of my personal world of music and my professional world of branding and advertising. The challenge is to simply pick a song with a brand name in its lyrics or title. I added one more criteria to my picks, which is this: the songs themselves must be as iconic as the brands they mention. No filler here.
Some of the most impressive songs I know are ones characterized by dimension. These songs are like pieces of clay, stretched in different directions, taking on various tempos, chord progressions, instrumentation and genres. They give our ears a lot to listen to and plenty to think about. There are few bands that do this as well as Queen. Many of their more well known songs are epic pieces consisting of varying movements. One of the best examples of this appears on the first side of Jazz: the sing-songy “Bicycle Race”.
“I want to ride my bicycle”. Sounds simple, but then Freddie Mercury gets to the call-and-response verses and the song becomes a social commentary of the times. Like “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” and “We Didn’t Start The Fire” did for the 80’s, “Bicycle Race” made certain we never forgot about the 70’s long after they passed us by. But unlike the R.E.M. and Billy Joel songs, it employed more musical dimension in the process. You might love “Bicycle Race” or you may hate it. But one thing we can all agree on about the song is this: It’s never ever boring.
“You say Rolls, I say Royce. You say God give me a choice."