Arnold Zwicky's Blog

It appeared a few weeks ago, and then was often repeated on tv stations I get. At first, I heard it out of the corner of my ear, got the brassy women’s voices  singing what was not quite “We Built This City”, but was instead, “We Quilt This City”. So a commercial for something. Quilted puffy jackets for the coming fall weather? Beautiful bedquilts, pieces of folk art? Well, something quilted as in this NOAD entry:

adj. quilted: (of a garment, bed covering, etc.) made of two layers of cloth filled with padding held in place by lines of stitching: a blue quilted jacket.

Then I listened a bit more closely and pieced out:

We quilt this city on a comfy roll. 

Whoa, Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. What kind of rolls are quilted? Oh… So the song goes on:

Say it doesn’t matter, say it’s all the same,
But we are here to change your toilet paper game.

Ah, quilted toilet paper. It’s 3-ply — so, though it doesn’t fit the NOAD definition of quilted, it’s analogous to quilted stuff as in the NOAD definition. It’s a natural metaphorical extension.

What we have here is a sales-pitch parody of Starship’s “We Built This City”, in fact a whole production number built around that parody. In a one-minute music video (first used on 7/29/24) that opens with the three Quilted Queens — three women of varied age and racioethnicity (most toilet paper is bought by women) — taking over a grocery store in “Keep It Quilted” puffer jackets; the store then turns into a neon-colored set, while the three sing their sales pitch. (As it happens, I find the Starship original really annoying — probably a minority taste, but there it is — so I find its being hijacked for a paean to toilet paper refreshing.) You can experience the whole thing on a YouTube video here.

Now, various pieces of business. First, a package of the material that the commercial lionizes:

Then, the full official lyrics for the song (the company is fond of capitalization):

We Quilt this city on a comfy roll.
Say it doesn’t matter, say it’s all the same,
But we are here to change your toilet paper game.
Quilted Northern’s comfy and comfort is your right,
Making this world a cushier place, that is our fight.
So cushy and so plushy, just give it a try,
Feeling is believing, the Quilted Comfort of Quilted Northern.

Next, the band for the original song, from Wikipedia:

Starship is an American rock band from San Francisco, California. Initially [in 1984] a continuation of Jefferson Starship, it underwent a change in musical direction, the subsequent loss of personnel, and a lawsuit settlement that led to a name change.

And the original song itself, from Wikipedia:

“We Built This City” is the debut single by American rock band Starship, from their 1985 debut album Knee Deep in the Hoopla. It was written by English musicians Martin Page and Bernie Taupin [with Dennis Lambert and Peter Wolf], who were both living in Los Angeles at the time, and was originally intended as a lament against the closure of many of that city’s live music clubs

(You can watch the official music video here)

Finally, why does my title have commercials music ‘songs used in commercials’, with a plural noun form (commercials) as the first element of a compound (when normally the first element is unmarked for grammatical number)? (See the Page on this blog on plurals as first elements of compounds.)

The obvious alternatives without this feature would be commercial music and ad music. Unfortunately, both of those are in widespread use as technical terms: commercial music (with adj. commercial) for, roughly, ‘music designed to sell in the current mass market’; ad music for ‘background music / sound tracks for commercials’. The intended referent of commercials music, on the other hand, is much clearer.

This entry was posted on August 30, 2024 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Compounds, Furnishings and tools, Language in advertising, Metaphor, Music, Parody, Technical and ordinary language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.