COUNTRY MUSIC
That country is emotional seems self-evident. Heartbreaking stories sung to melancholy melodies create a cocktail of emotion that’s hard to resist. But surely rock has its fair share of tragedy and minor keys? Well, that’s where Gladwell disagrees – it’s the nature of the storytelling that sets them apart.
Most musical genres tell stories of love, violence, illness, loss, grief, marriages going to hell, addiction, redemption, suffering, pain and the like. But in country music, those stories are painfully real. They are often actual experiences of a real person told in their own words, in great detail, often with deep significance for the singer. The stories deal in the specific and not the generic and, as Gladwell says, “we cry when melancholy collides with specificity”.
You don’t believe me? Listen – really listen – to He Stopped Loving Her Today sung by George Jones, or indeed D-I-V- O-R- C-E, sung by Tammy Wynette, and tell me you’re not welling up.
Not so rock – that is all too often content to skim along the surface of the generic and clichéd when it comes to storytelling. Girl meets boy, girl falls in love with boy, girl and boy have fun, girl and boy split up. Which brings us to advertising. What country music shows us is that real emotional connection comes from the specificity of the stories we tell, not from the execution. Execution sharpens and amplifies emotion, but we are kidding ourselves, clients, agencies and researchers alike if we think that casting a few cute kids or picking out an acoustic guitar track by an angst-ridden singersongwriter is the secret to our hearts.
It’s the quality of our stories that matters. Stories that resonate because they speak to real people and come from real people and not from the faked world of adland cliché that pollutes most of the work we make. The endless parade of stock storytelling that is as authentic as a child’s drawing of a house with four windows, a red front door and curly smoke emerging from the chimney. The fact is that most advertising fails to connect because it’s allergic to the real, to the particular and to the personal.
Not so McDonald’s. Here is a brand that consistently embraces the specific in its storytelling. No more so that in “Nah You’re Alright”, which documents the tentative relationship between a kid and his mum’s new partner. We may be watching actors but that story, much like the best McDonald’s work, is authentic, detailed and persona. It comes from a place of genuine experience. It deals in the specific. This is advertising, country music-style. The power of the specific might also explain why, out of the incredible body of work John Lewis has created in the past decade, the standout story for many of us is “The Long Wait”. Yes, there is a cute kid and, yes, the music is as soppy as you like. But the story feels authentic, honest and real, like it could have been your experience or that of your kids. No CGI, no merch – just acutely powerful storytelling.
So why do we tolerate the generic and clichéd in our work? Family life that feels like it’s set in New Zealand in the 1950s. Girl-meets-boy stories where people are forever marrying their childhood sweethearts. Work life that’s entirely divorced from any understanding of real places of work. And ads that cast black and Asian actors but avoid telling authentic stories of people of colour. It’s because we avoid the specific. To start building emotional connections again, we need to write work from our experiences, our lives and our hearts, and not from the big bad book of adland cliché. We need to call it out more often when work descends into the bland and familiar. And, most pressingly, we need to fuel our agencies and their work with fresh talent bearing distinct experiences and a broader palette of stories to tell.
But, most of all, we need to embrace the specific and learn to be a little more T-A-M-M-Y.