Sunday, December 6, 2015

Brush Your Teeth! (The Anthem)


It's interesting to think about where household anthems come from. Sometimes they come from expected places, like my kids loving this rap song about George Mead's horse Baldy from this kindie album. Other times they come from songs parents like and kids adopt, like when I find my a daughter playing alone and singing "wake me up when September ends."

Our most recent household anthem contender came from a much less likely source. If you watch sports online like I often do you may have come across a commercial for the Samsung Galaxy Wireless Charger. It features a song that seemed like something my twenty five-year-old brother might like. Or he might hate that his friends love it. It's hard to say.  Anyway, it's not a terrible song. It's catchy, which is probably why it's in a commercial. The thing is, as anyone who has watched a lot of programming online might know, the selection of commercials run during an online program are sparse so you see the same ones over and over. The Samsung commercial has been running on the online broadcast of Sunday Night Football and it's been driving my wife and I up a wall. It's become a running joke for us as a stand in for anything that seems annoying, anything we don't understand, or anything that makes us feel old.

Tonight I told her I was going to find the whole song and play it for her whenever she did something annoying. "It's not a real song," she retorted, "it's just a commercial." Yeah, bet. Hip tech commercials don't use jingles anymore. Apple crushed that with the iPod commercials. It's all real songs from hip artists these days, which why I don't know any of them. It turns out it's really easy to find things like this. But here's the surprise, it's a fun song, and the chorus is likely one that will be repeated around here for a while.

The song is Queen's Speech Ep. 4 by Lady Leshurr. Her style is interesting and her lyrics are fun and when they're not kid friendly they're at least obscure. One my favorite lines is, "I got a dark-skinned friend who looks like Rachel Dolezal/And I got a light-skinned friend who looks like Rachel Dolezal/Which one's which? Not sure." But the part that made it a new family favorite is the chorus, which involves repeating the phrase "Brush your teeth" ten times. Brush your teeth! Brush your teeth! Brush your teeth! How many times do we say that each week eh fellow parents? Having a song about it might help.

So I've come around on Lady Leshurr and her annoying Samsung ad. The ad isn't her fault and her lyrics are clever. Link to the song is below, enjoy it with or without your kids. Just remember to brush your teeth.



(I should have figured out how to get Samsung or Apple to pay me for this. Dang.)

1 comment:

  1. Sometimes your newest household anthem comes from an unexpected source. In this case, a song my wife and I hated might end up being sung twice a day at home.

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