Everybody’s Fool
Music is many things. It is a hobby or profession for some and an enjoyable way to pass the time for others. As a medium primarily meant for entertainment, the lyrics of songs have immense power to influence the minds of the masses without them even realising it.
An internet fad doing the rounds on social media of late is the 30 day song challenge. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it has different prompts everyday to share songs that mean something to you. This is a great way to discover more music and find out that one of your friends has a similar in taste in music as you. While it was aimed at quick, low effort consumption, I felt it could have been so much more.
Inspired by the idea of the challenge, I decided I would do something similar. A series of small articles talking about some of my favourite songs with social, political or cultural messages or anything that I feel conveys a lot of meaning. If you know any other songs about the same, please feel free to share.
This is part five of the series and for those of you who want to read the earlier parts, I’ll leave the links at the end of this article.
Advertising is the foremost source of revenue for most internet based entities and naturally this means that advertisements are now all around us. They’re so prevalent in everyday life that most of us no longer realise when we’re being sold to. While advertising is for the most part just an annoying accompaniment to our daily entertainment be it TV or YouTube, sometimes advertising can be invasive, dishonest and a real morale killer.
The second episode in the first season of Netflix’s Black Mirror, “Fifteen Million Merits” gives us an insight into a dystopian world where advertising is forced upon people. If you haven’t watched this particular episode, or the show as a whole, I would recommend watching it.
While we are not quite at that stage yet, the reality is we aren’t very far from it either. Due to cut-throat competition in every industry, advertising campaigns are becoming more and more aggressive often attacking the psyche of certain types of people.
An almost cliche example of this is advertisements for fairness creams which initially targeted dark-skinned women and in recent times evolved to include dark-skinned men, conveying the message that fair skin is more attractive and consequently that those with dark skin were undesirable or unattractive.
Similarly, many campaigns for a myriad of products have become prevalent that first create insecurities in those watching them and then prey upon those insecurities.
Another aspect of advertising that has caught a lot of negative publicity is the use of un-realistic models who follow unhealthy diets and are further airbrushed and graphically enhanced with the end result being an unattainable physical standard. I want to add here, if you naturally have such a physique and you are happy and healthy then ignore this. The focus here is not the body type, but the extreme lengths to which advertisements go to sow the seeds of insecurity.
The end result is that the people watching this who are already insecure about their bodies, and most humans are about some aspect or the other, try to undertake similar unhealthy diets just to match some surreal standard and to be more like their favourite actor or actress.
Now, in response to this, some have launched campaigns using plus sized models which again I can’t fully get behind, with the same caveat as before, health and happiness first. Speaking as someone who is personally overweight, being overweight is normally unhealthy and not something that should be promoted.
Not only does it affect physical and mental well being as described above, advertisements also affect your economic well-being(this seems obvious, but there is a deeper level). While the primary purpose of an advertisement is only to inform the public of the existence of a product and what it’s used for, in order to increase sales, they now attempt to instil an inferiority complex in viewers. By making several superfluous products seem like absolute necessities and trying to establish these products as status symbols, it forces consumers to buy products they would’ve never bought otherwise.
I’ll give you a simple example here. Why do we buy watches? We no longer go anywhere without our phones which come built-in with clocks that can tell you the time almost anywhere in the world. Yet, watches are one of the most purchased accessories. It’s nothing more than a status symbol at this point and they are marketed appropriately using buzzwords such as class and elegance.
In conclusion, these advertisements end up hurting everyone except the money-minded giants behind them. It leaves people with normal, healthy bodies questioning their appearance and makes people purchase items that have no practical purpose just to fit into a certain standard set not by society alone, but by these corporate puppet masters.
Additionally, it leaves people wishing they were like their favourite celebrity without knowing the struggles that they face and what exactly that entails. The life of glamour comes with it’s own difficulties as well and while just like in any other walk of life there are celebrities who had everything handed to them, there is also the majority that worked extremely hard to get where they are sacrificing their own physical and mental health. Additionally, many celebrities are targeted by people who call them out for not maintaining the exact appearance every single day. Some are shamed for losing or gaining weight while others have their appearance without makeup ridiculed.
“Everybody’s Fool” by Evanescence is a song that describes the life of a model who is being haunted by her life on screen.
The video sets the tone right from the beginning where the lead singer Amy Lee acts in an advertisement for “Lies Pizza” whose slogan is “There’s nothing better than a good lie.” The song brings out both sides in a powerful manner, exposing the deception in the advertising industry as well as highlighting the struggles of acting in advertisement after advertisement.
“Perfect by nature, icons of self indulgence, just what we all need, more lies about a world that never was and never will be” is pretty much a summary of everything I tried to convey above.
As long as we continue to be - as Amy Lee so succinctly put it - everybody’s fool, these advertisements will continue to earn companies millions while our quality of life drops further and further. Don’t let anyone question your happiness or how attractive you feel in your own skin.
P.S. Another song which I feel carries a similar message is Beautiful by Eminem. Though it talks a great deal about his personal struggles, the take away is the same. Don’t let anyone tell you that you aren’t beautiful and don’t blindly wish you were someone else or ridicule or belittle them either because you don’t know what they’ve been through since you haven’t been in their shoes.
Part four — Another Day in Paradise
Part three — Zombie
Part two — Words as Weapons