Posted 10:41 PM by sport

What is it… Detrol?
Bladder control drug.
Anyway, it's the ad with that jingle: "Gotta go gotta go gotta go right now! gotta go gotta go gotta go!" I'm sure many people find this annoying as hell, but I applaud the song. While we're all not beset with bladder control problems, we all know that feeling, and boy oh boy does it suck! So how does one convey the urgency of this universal problem musically?

Here, the composer chose a Gene Krupa / Courageous Cat approach. Frantic tom toms and a bass that walks in place as if it's "holding its own" against that insistent drum boogie. A double tracked female voice delivers the infernal lyric line, not viva voce but confidentially… breathy, suggesting severe tension… that "bottled up and ready to burst" panic that could not come across if the lyrics were delivered too freely. Where "I'm crazy 'bout a Mercury" trades on standard gospel-derived exuberance, this is the sound of a personal emergency of the most private, physical kind and a mental torment nigh unto madness. The voices taunt with a dead-serious undercurrent rare in jingledom. Even the trumpet playing under the narration contributes, blowing a wild jazz line reined in by a mute.

What happens to a whizz deferred?
Well, nothing… it won't be. Seconds tick… the unthinkable looms. It's unbearable. Gotta see a man about a horse… and it's a bucking bronco on jimson weed. We feel terror and acute discomfort. This jingle isn't fucking around. The key is indistinct, but a minor mood prevails.
A minor mode mood that means major business…key of P …sharp.
And still the drumming, the incessant drumming. A "Sing, Sing, Sing" Sing-Sing of the soul ...and the sphincter ...in which nothing in life matters anymore except this NEED.

Payoff: the character depicted in the ad has discovered the product and - unburdened by the call of the floating kidney and all the threat it implies - goes about her business confidently. The jingle shifts to a gentle swing and the singer - as if liberated by the "pause that refreshes" but really just indebted to this drug that lets her hold her water - trills her victory song: "…and I don't hafta go right now!" This time she's not whispering the lyric, she's singing blithely and sweetly but full voiced. The melody, in a major key now, is almost reminiscent of "nya na na na naaa naaaa!" in its primal, childlike satisfaction, but she's not teasing us. She's skipping along, declaring her new freedom as guilelessly as some Holly Golightly of the nether plumbing. She'll go when she wants to, and she'll enjoy it too… but right now the sun is shining and the world is a glad place. Turn on all the faucets… drive over a bumpy road… tell the funniest joke you know… it's all just fine with her and her urethra. She invites us to share her newfound pissless bliss, and how can we resist the offer?

Whether or not we shared that "Urge For Goin" (to quote songster Tom Rush) with her, the jingle sure made us feel as if we did, and her cabaret ease here finds us "relieved" in the deepest sense a jingle for anti incontinence pills can manage to inspire.

Here is one fine, fine example of the jingler's craft. Thanks for your time… gotta go now.