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.
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