The current political situation in the United States has left many people upset and disillusioned, with just about everybody and every brand getting political. The Women’s March back in January was a gigantic protest event that truly rocked the country, with one out of every 100 Americans taking part. During the Super Bowl, one notable Budweiser commercial told the story of founder Adolphus Busch, which explored his early years as an immigrant with a subtext critical of Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant stance. Even Pepsi has taken a stand in their most recent commercial featuring Kendall Jenner, yet this was pulled almost as quickly as it was released.
If you haven’t seen it yet, the commercial features Kendall Jenner, half-sister of Kim Kardashian, leaving behind a modeling shoot to join a vague protest march. By handing one white police officer a Pepsi can, she’s able to bring everybody together. In the background, Skip Marley’s song “Lions” plays. The song references the Lion of Judah, a symbol in Rastafarian ideology meant to save Africans and the diaspora from the colonial powers (i.e. rich white people like Kendall Jenner’s family).
One thing that’s always fascinated me about commercials is their ability to create unique worlds and events, if only for about 30 seconds to a couple minutes at most, that in the real world would never happen. This new Pepsi commercial is definitely one of those, yet it’s also kind of tone-deaf. The protests to which this commercial pays homage started out against Wall Street and the inequities of capitalism, exemplified by gigantic corporate giants (like Pepsi).
It might seem like a complete lack of self-awareness that Pepsi would try to make itself a champion of the protestors, yet at the same time this follows one of the basic tenets of advertising: go where the money goes. It follows a trend that various other big brands are going: Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Burger King and even the Fearless Girl statue set up by the State Street fund. For those who are concerned about the direction of big business and our country as a whole, such moves can seem refreshing; a way to say “we’re on your side”. But at the same time, it’s difficult to decipher whether or not they’re sincere, and whether or not these big corporations are doing the same thing they’ve always done: try and make more money, just this time with a different tone.
All the patients that took part in the music therapy reported less pain and discomfort, along with decreased levels of stress. Astonishingly, the effects go deeper than their own responses. The scientists found that the patients exposed to music therapy were showing signs of decreased fatigue, and increased peripheral blood flow. Medical jargon aside, these results mean patients were more alert and in less pain.
many of these services offer their selection of music for little to nothing when compared to the price of acquiring all the necessary albums. However, Aurous lacks the influence to motivate advertisers into joining them, and their library of songs is gathered from pirated files on Russian websites.
In recent studies, Neuroscientists have discovered that listening to music has a quantifiable reaction in the human brain. Activating the reward centers of the listener’s brain, music can and will heighten positive emotion, and release dopamine to elevate our emotional levels to that of near elation. Conducting scans of patients’ brains while listening to music also revealed that almost no centers of the brain are immune to music’s touch. It should come as no surprise that culturally, music has been used in tribal rituals as a gathering tool and for healing. The thrumming power of live music has an entrancing effect, connecting whole swaths of people in joy-fueled reverie. Modern medicine, adopting the tricks of ancient tribes, have begun flirting with using music to aid in the recovery of certain procedures.