Ace of Base

Ah, 90s Swedish pop. Nothing says grunge backlash like rave-soundtrack European techno. Turn on one of their many hits and you can actually see the glowsticks waving. If the word Eurotrash had yet to enjoy significant circulation, Ace of Base certainly played a major role in inserting it into mainstream vocabularies. It was bad news for any of you out there aching to don a cropped turtleneck and a leather vest, play synthesizers, and produce dramatic slow-motion sepia-toned music videos. Ace of Base had already cornered that market.

There's something to be said for a band that can achieve international fame while filed under the Eurodance category at record stores. Ace of Base's upbeat, club-friendly songs created a new link between the Swedish and American pop music in the early 90s. Determined to prove they were more than just an ABBA knockoff, Ace of Base churned out English-language single after single to the international music market.

Ace of Base songs were incomparably catchy. God forbid you ever heard one on the radio, because your brain would probably never rebound from the strain of constant and continuous internal play. Their heavy use of synthesizers in lieu of what some may refer to as legitimate instruments pounded residual reggae-inspired technobeats into our ears for hours after the cassette tape had clicked off. If any of you out there were at any point exposed to Ace of Base (you can test yourself for potential airborne exposure using the videos below,) there is no doubt that the opening techno bars will bring back floods of un-expellable lyrics.

The group didn't only have extremely captivating, beat-heavy songs; they also produced what can only be appraised as the quintessential 90s pop music videos. Their videos frequently utilized exceedingly dramatic cutaway shots, black and white photography, and the most advanced special effects the 90s had to offer us. In many cases, it seemed as if their video producers had sat down at the editing booth and applied every available piece of special effect technology to the videos. Hazy smoke over every shot? Why not? People floating in bubbles? You got it! Rotating ankh computer graphics? Sign me up!

In case you have not been sitting around watching old Ace of Base music videos for the last 15 years, I'd be happy to point out some of the finer points of their more popular videos. I invite you to come with me on a chronological whirlwind tour of cheesy 1990s Swedish pop music sights and sounds:


All That She Wants (1993)



Is it just me, or is she playing with some Star of David jewelry in the first shot? Well, never mind the potential religious jewelry implications. The real focus is on the wonderfully literal storytelling technique the band employs to illustrate the major plot points of their song toward the beginning. She literally opens up her eyes and it's safe to say that she's thinking, "Oh, what a morning!" Thankfully they were able to leave some segments en metaphor, or else we may have had our lead characters dressed as hunters and foxes, talking gently to one another.

There are a few shots that don't quite add up, however. Despite their compelling descriptions of this woman as a maneater, in most of the shots she appears vaguely bored. It's possible that she's just concentrating on trying to hear the whispered, "All that she wants...", but this woman doesn't seem particularly vicious. Are we to assume that her application of Cleopatra-esque undereye-liner is emblematic of her desire to use 'em and lose 'em? And the way she blows out that candle. What a trollop! I'll concede to the video's credit and/or legitimacy that in the end she does pick up that guy at the bar, but I'm not yet convinced of her deviance by candle symbolism alone.


The Sign (1994)



Oh my God, it's the Sopranos! I knew they had to have ripped off their signature poster design from a 90s Swedish pop group, I just knew it!


Here's where the aforementioned random special effects montage comes into play. "Oh, so you can make a fire background, show a silhouetted person swirling around, superimpose the band members over images of themselves, and twirl ancient Eqyptian style ankhs? Management team, what do you guys think? Throw 'em all in? Alright, great! And if we could just remix them continuously throughout the run of the video, that would be super." If you had yet to notice from the first video, it's clear that the lead female vocalists were major contenders for the Overgroomed Eyebrow award. They don't give you much time to speculate on that, though, as they're always quick to cut away to interspersed shots of random people making out with no reasonable explanation to back up these visuals. If you gain nothing else from this video, I hope that you can take with you Jenny and Linn's increasingly comical calculated hand-gesture-dances for your next trip to the club.

Regardless of its social relevance on any other level, I've yet to hear this once-immensely popular song (now relegated to muzak in grocery stores and elevators) without thinking of the following Full House episode:



Don't Turn Around (1994)



If you've yet to catch on, there's sort of been a general theme tying together these videos. While the special effects employed may vary, they all cut back and forth continually between the female lead singers and the actors portraying the song. At least in this one, we get a glimpse at why the men in the band are at most marginally necessary, as this is probably the most we've heard from them in any of the singles to date. Their little rap interlude proves that Buddha and Joker (those are their actual stage names, I did not just make that up) are not the mute eye candy we may have assumed them to be in the two former music videos. This video is also fairly high into literalism, though to their credit Eurodance music is not renowned for its subtlety. See how the girl enters the same beach as her former flame, but sits several yards away? That's her not letting you know. No, she won't let you know.

The whole situation is pretty awkward, really. I mean, these two are obviously trying to avoid each other, and where do they find themselves but on the same secluded beach? Well, she really told him off by walking into the water like that at the end. I'm not sure if that's some sort of purity symbolism or if maybe he's just allergic to moisture, but he seemed to get the message.


Beautiful Life (1996)


When I yawn, sometimes I randomly emit enbubbled people, too. That special effect is completely necessary, and not only because it conveys the general whimsy associated with life's beauty (not to be confused with the movie It's a Beautiful Life, which is something else entirely. I never saw it, but I imagine it doesn't too heavily feature people floating carefreely in soap bubbles.) The nonsensical montages in this particular video are certainly inspired, though by what we may never know. It has sort of that "Look, we're flying near but not directly over mountains! Now we're wearing sunglasses and cruising through a tunnel! Now we're hovering over violent car crashes!" feel to it. That pool table sequence toward the end ain't bad either.

Again, we get to hear a few snippets from the guys in this one, though they are rather brief. Would you believe me if I told you that it was actually the men who started this group and eventually solicited the help of a band member's sisters to get things off the ground? Further examination into a live performance indicates that they possibly rock the keytar and guitar respectively, but their presence in these music videos is generally fairly unnecessary.

Ace of Base also did a spectacularly 90-fied cover of Bananarama's "Cruel Summer" and some other follow-up work, but they were pretty MIA in the US in recent years. Don't fret about the fate of our Europoppers, however, they're still all the rage in places like Denmark, Estonia, and Lithuania. Who says fame is fleeting? Perhaps it's just nomadic.

Despite their more recent and undoubtably admirable achievements, the Ace of Base of our collective memory is 90s through and through. Though other Swedish acts such as Robyn and The Cardigans gained 90s fame in the US, they never quite reached an Ace of Base level of Hype. So to any of you who still own your early-90s-era Ace of Base cassettes and can find somewhere on your premises the means necessary to play them, I say enjoy them. Despite their earlier warnings against it, I'd say it's pretty safe to turn around at this point and look back on your favorite artists of seasons past. If all else fails, it's also available on Itunes.

Got Milk?

Without the helpful input of highly compensated celebrity endorses, how would we ever know what to like? Certainly we as consumers can't be trusted to make these sort of decisions for ourselves. Just imagine all the crazy things we would get into without the ever-sage guidance of paid spokespeople. No, we need to be told what to do from people we know from movies, sports, music, and television. They're pretty much our only reliable sources.

In 1994, the dairy industry had fallen upon hard times. Kids had tasted the forbidden sugariness of soda and it seemed that they had reached the beverage point-of-no-return. The once-ubiquitous cafeteria milk cartons had been replaced by Coca-Cola sponsored vending machines sure to fund our schools and cavitate our teeth. Our bones were brittle, our blood sugar was high, and we knew little of the beloved milk of our forebearers. Milk producers knew it was time to take action.

Milk producers knew they needed something a bit punchier than "Milk: it's Cool" Cafeteria Milk Machines

The bottom line was that kids were not convinced that milk was cool. I know what you're thinking, kids weren't won over by the glamorous lives of those in the dairy industry? Next thing you're going to tell me is that they were careless about maintaining their calcium levels. Hard to believe, yes, but milk's image was on a downswing. It was as if milk was some washed-up celebrity past her prime; once cast in great roles, she was now generally relegated to grandmother and old-version-of-young-starlet type parts. Milk producers knew they had to act fast if they were going to bring their former key player into the spotlight again after 30 years of poor management and competition from sexier thirst-quenchers.

Milk was down, but it was not out. Advertisers knew that if they could just convince the youth market that milk was hip and happening, kids would drink it up. Ripped straight from the dark imaginations of focus groups, the initial campaign focused on the horrifying consequences of finding oneself in a situation that demanded milk but where none was available. Frightening, I know. Just imagine, a mouthful of cookie with nothing to chase it down. A dire crisis, indeed. Marketers even referred to this as the "Milk Deprivation Strategy," to give you an idea of the seriousness with which they approached their dalliance with dairy.


Milk knew it needed to get by on more than association alone. Sure, cookies had reasonable child street cred, but they could only take milk so far. Advertisers knew they needed to up the ante a bit and inject some humor to hold people's interest and draw attention to their campaign. Continuing on their general milk deprivation theme, they released this television spot:



We can all relate to this situation. How many times do you find yourself, a devoted Aaron Burr historian and enthusiast, faced with the most simple question in your major area of study yet unable to answer due to unfortunate peanut butter stickiness side effects? Too many to count.

Soon, the phrase "Got Milk?" was everywhere, and as you can imagine, it did not dwindle in its humor or become even minutely annoying the 467th time you saw a t-shirt emblazoned with a "Got _________?" slogan. Endlessly hilarious.




The true heart of the campaign was in the print ads we all so know and love. Originally christened with such creative and demanding slogans such as "Where's your mustache?", these teen-attracting ads were soon absorbed under the larger Got Milk? ad campaign umbrella. Celebrity models sported somewhat unfortunate-looking milk mustaches as marketing teams superimposed witty first-person copy clearly not to be attributed to the person pictured in the ad. Regardless of the falsified text, preteens adored these ads. Young girls plastered the walls of their rooms with them, as if these omnipresent magazine advertisements were rare and collectible. There was even a book published full of these ads featuring behind-the-scenes information about the mustachioed celebs. I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that I owned this book and possibly read it cover to cover, seeking the goodness of milk in light literary form.

These ads were well-targeted and smart. Marketers knew that 90s children pledged essentially undying and unwavering devotion to their celebrity role models. Despite the fact that these celebrity teen role models were generally unqualified to preach anything and would go on to make all sorts of unfortunate life choices, in the 90s their innocence was still intact:




Aren't you glad we listened to these wise, learned teen stars and drank all the milk we could get our hands on? At the time, we wanted to grow up to be just like them. Unfortunately, at the time these ads ran, these adolescent celebrities had yet to grow up themselves. The versions of them that we looked up to had yet to reach their milk-inducing potential. Nowadays, these all-grown-up former teen sensations may not be the picture of wholesomeness and stable health, but at the time we saw them as pure milk success stories.

Sure, the ads also featured real role models like triumphant Olympic athletes, but if you weren't into sports it seemed the best you could wish from milk was to end up like Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan. Now aren't you glad you listened to these good mustachioed people and drank your milk?


Check it out:
Official Got Milk? Website
MooMilk: A Dynamic Adventure into the Dairy Industry
Got Milk? Ads Photostream

Drug PSAs

Drug Public Service Announcements: love 'em or hate 'em, they're here to stay. Drug-centric PSAs skyrocketed to popularity in the late 80s and early 90s based on research that kids, well, enjoy drugs. Luckily, adults were here to put a stop to all that to-be-expected teenage experimentation by use of scare tactics and what can only be characterized as unfair equivocations. For instance, a logical human being may not immediately associate a single puff of a joint with a future of relentless crackheadery, but alas, there was a reason they hired the "creative" types for these ad campaigns.

The themes and approaches of 90s drug PSAs were all over the place; this was certainly not a well-thought out, focused approach. No, that kind of reasoning would be too effective. Instead of banding together to fight a common cause, anti-drug groups felt it better to create a free and unfettered marketplace of anti-substance ideals in which any organization could put out any ad as they saw fit. Never ones to be outdone, all sorts of people in the entertainment industry came out of the woodwork eager to put forth their own PSAs, such as in the following Ninja Turtles' sponsored Anti-Drug Ad. We can only assume that Leonardo really pushed for this as a positive career move for our half-shelled friends, as the notion that any actual human writer with limited functional brain capacity would ever conceive of the following ad is too much to take:





Oh no! Joey's in a jam! Joey's in a jam, indeed. You have to love the way that every anti-drug ad explicitly depicts drug users as overly eager to share their expensive and limited supply of drugs with uninterested others. The way the agressor states, "I've got some stuff you've just gotta try!" you'd think he was begging someone to take these joints off his hands. This kid looks all of 12 years old, so I'm not exactly sure what his major source of income is, but I think it's pretty safe to say that he wouldn't be overly eager to share the fruits of many weeks of allowance-saving with a casual acquaintance who clearly wants no part of it.

I also love the way that they cut to the Ninja Turtles doing a Q&A postmortem on the peer-pressure scenario video segment with a random elementary school class. Usually, when I'm in jam not unsimilar to Joey's, I use my Zack Morris "Freeze!" power to assemble a bunch of random children to talk out my problem with the TMNT themselves. At least the turtles keep it light with their pizza jokes. Get real, Michaelangelo. You also have to love the eagerness with which that kid in front shrieks, "Get out of there!" With enthusiasm like this, it's fairly certain that there are no marijuana users in this classroom.

So way to go, Joey. Call him a turkey! Take that, bully five times Joey's size! And as the turtles say, drug users are dorks! Who better to trust than martial-arts trained sewer-dwelling half-masked pizza-loving mutant turtles? Who, I ask you?

If that one didn't quite jive with you as a child, there was always this more, er, subtle approach:




Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Backtrack a second. I see what you're getting at here with your extended metaphor and all, but...really? I have quite of few points of contention with this ad, the foremost of which being that it's obviously and blatantly insensitive. Of course, though, it doesn't end there! Why does the narrator insist on referring to native Africans of 400 years ago as "African Americans"? They weren't African-Americans when they came here, they were Africans. What a total shot in the dark attempt to be PC in an utterly un-PC commercial.

Oh, voiceover, what gem of wisdom will you share with us next? Oh wait, if I am of African American descent and use drugs, I'm directly dishonoring my ancestors and reenslaving my people? You were always one for subtlety, disembodied voice.

If you still weren't off drugs forever after watching that sobering ad, you could always wait a couple of years to be influenced by this one:




N*Sync, your light and playful tone will surely deter heavy drug use, especially among alternative kids. I don't know if it ever occurred to somebody that N*Sync fans may not be the population most heavily correlated with drug use, but here they are telling us what they're into. And boy, do they have some hilarious fake hobbies! Oh, scriptwriters, have you got these boys pegged. As a former synchronized swimmer, I may have to take some offense to JC's jab, especially because the other lines they give him ("baroque minimalism!") implies that synchronized swimming is in some way wacky and insane (if you are unaware, it's not). You have to enjoy the pre-outed Lance Bance shrieking effeminately, though. At least they had the wisdom to throw some foreshadowing in there for good measure. Oh, and to have him say he's into acting. Touche, scriptwriters. I guess those girls are in the ad to illustrate how desirable N*Sync is. I can't really fathom any alternate explanation for their presence. If anyone was yet to question N*Sync's crediibility and/or masculinity as musical artists, I think this ad probably sealed the deal.

Of course, there was also the more serious (some may say, depressing) approach:




Cue up the maudlin music and watch an adorable inner-city black kid with the hi-top fade haircut dodge the drug pushers. As in the first ad we saw here, it's fair to assume that all drug users are out to force their expensive fare on us. They will not rest until every pocket-moneyless child is forced to try their limited supply of drugs free of charge.

Unfortunately, my favorite-ever anti-drug commercial from 1998 has been forever exiled into the black hole of internet obscurity. Despite an inordinate amount of time spent searching for my once-beloved animated anti-drug PSA, it seems to be completely absent from an otherwise well-stocked video cyberspace. Lucky for all of you, I took a memorization class in gifted summer school in 2nd grade* and have the words forever branded into my once-impressionable childhood brain. It goes a little something like this:

I'd rather eat a big old bug! Than ever take a stupid drug!
Drugs aren't cool, they can mess you up at school,
Drugs are a pain, they can hurt your body and your brain!

A big ol' bug with an ugly mug, is better than any stupid drug!

They make you sad, they make your parents mad,
Drugs are dumb, they make you clumsy, slow, and numb!

I'd rather eat a big old bug...

(Bug interjects:) Don't do drugs!

Than ever take a stupid drug!


There are a lot of confusing elements of this anti-drug jingle, so I'll try my best to break it down for you. First off, are we to believe that the size and age of a given bug are inversely proportional to its desirability relative to drugs? In which case, a young, small bug may not hold the same anti-drug message. Very interesting. And what a kind, selfless bug he is. Even though he knows his life to be at stake with such an anti-drug proclamation, he can tell right from wrong. You just don't see that sort of self-sacrificing sprirt in animated insects these days.

And another thing! Drugs can mess me up at school? My parents will be mad? Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down, anti-drug commercial. I'd never considered any of these outcomes before, I was only thinking of the joys of ingesting plump, juicy insects as a healthy alternative to drug use. Now that you've shown me the light (or darkness, of it may be) of drug use, I will dutifully chomp down on this animated bug sandwich to do my part to deter childhood drug abuse. Thanks, Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

For any of you out there (and I assume you are!) thinking to yourselves, "But what of all my favorite non-drug related PSAs from the 90s? Are they doomed to never see the light of Children of the 90s?" Well, I'm sorry to cause you that brief moment of anguish and withdrawal, but fear not; as God as my witness, those PSAs will be here for your enjoyment in a multi-part series I like to call, "Educational Advertising in the 90s is Completely F-ing Insane." Stay tuned!

And if you don't, the drug dealers from that last videos will most likely hunt you down and force it upon you unprovoked. True story.



*This fact is embarrassingly and unjustifiably true