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Brand Name Loyalties

I walk into any electronics store and I buy Sony. It’s an affliction, really. Something I can’t help. Their products are sexy and feature rich. Vaio notebooks come with built-in cameras, for God’s sake. I’m an unemployed writer. I need my laptop to have a camera. Fuck the full-sized keyboard. Who cares?

I have Sony stereo components, telephones, VCRs.

No more.

You know how you date someone and at first you get wet just watching her/him eat sushi in a restaurant and you think about nothing but the moments when your skin gets to touch his/her skin, and then one day you’re sitting together in the car at a stop light and you look over to see a forefinger shoved knuckle-deep into her/his nose? And, you think, that finger’s sure as hell not going to be inside me again.

That’s how I feel about Sony. Everything was going great until I saw Sony shoving a big old finger right up its corporate nose.

It’s the ads. Years ago, I saw a TV commercial for a Sony big screen TV. My TV, a Sony Trinitron, was filled with the image of the Grand Canyon. The camera pulls back to reveal the edges of a big screen television showing the Grand Canyon and sitting, with Magritte-style surrealism, on the edge of the actual Grand Canyon. A family rushes up to take in the breath-taking view but they look, not at the actual place, at the TV. Oooohs and aaahs on the audio track.

I thought that was pretty obnoxious. But it was kind of like glimpsing the instrument of your lust picking his/her nose. You want to think you didn’t see right. That it just isn’t true.

I didn’t see the ad again and I thought maybe it wasn’t what I thought. Maybe I was wrong about the beginning of a new — Sony is realer than real — ad campaign.

Last night, leafing through the new Rolling Stone I see the ad that is, no denying, the knuckle-deep plunge into the left, and then the right, nostril.

This print ad is the face of a classically beautiful woman. Jaw line, clear eyes. That kind of beautiful. The tag line — in hypelink blue and using some strange cyborg font — says “Sony Portable Music. Let your mind play.” Between the two sentences, in blue, the play arrow that appears on all CD players, VCRs, AM/FM/Cassette in-dash stereos. That button is also on the beautiful woman’s forehead.

Sony isn’t just telling us, now, that their images, their reproductions are better than the real thing — like in the Grand Canyon ad. They’re telling us their technology is better than our brains. It’s a creepy ad. Like a nightmare or an everybody’s-been-taken-over-by-super-intelligent-aliens movie. Not a bad movie, a good one. The kind that gives grown-ups bad dreams and leaves them a little nauseous after they put on stereo headphones to jog.

Sony, I’m breaking up with you. I’m going to find someone else’s technology to jones after.