An Anti-Folk Song
November 29, 2023
SINCE we’ve been discussing folk music lately, I’d like to examine this famous ‘Hilltop” Coca-Cola ad of the 1970s. It features a great example of what might be called anti-folk music, created with the specific intent of destroying the distinctive, life-giving traditions that create folk music. (Thank you to a reader for sending this and noting its significance.)
But first, what are “folk?”
Briefly, the folk are living and breathing communities, extended families, peoples, existing over the course of successive generations and over enough time to create their own traditions and their own communal spirit. In Latin, they are gens — clans, tribes, peoples and nations connected by blood and place. Folk are always changing. They are never stable and yet there are threads of consistency made up of ideas, experiences, and historic events, but also of the inherited, collective personalities of different peoples based both in biology and the supernatural as experienced collectively. That’s why we can speak of the folk as possessing a soul.
One of the oddest things about modern advertising is that commercials often have seemingly little to do with the products being sold. What in the world does this sentimental anthem sung improbably on a hilltop have to do with a sugary soft drink?
Let’s think about that.
The video with its repetitive, slow-moving melody features people of different folk in traditional dress — clothes which have been replaced in the real world by the universal, Marxist uniform of denim and T-shirts. They wear dreamy smiles and vacant looks, as if drugged. Unsurprisingly, young and beautiful whites take the lead. They are naturally at the forefront of the song’s utopian dream — a dream of “perfect harmony.”
Apple trees and honey bees and snow-white turtledoves …
How cleverly these words imitate real folk music. They are not used, however, to evoke everyday life, but a one-world paradise.
The song takes things fundamentally good — the natural affinity of different folks and the worthy ideal of peace among them — and twists them, promoting a dream that ironically results in the destruction of different peoples.
Dr. Jop Pollman wrote in the outstanding little songbook, Laughing Meadows (Grailville Publications, 1947):
“Folk music is traditional by its very nature. In a flourishing culture, songs are passed down from generation to generation, acquired without written or printed sources, just like the language of the people. Obviously, in the countries of the western world, this healthy living tradition no longer exists.”
Our living traditions in folk music no longer exist. Television, for one, has replaced traditional communal activities. Not that TV is all bad or that people who watch TV are horrible, stupid, no-good people, but the image has replaced song. And the highly sophisticated, manipulative songs produced by advertisers have filled the people with utopian drugs. The ultimate effect is not peace and vitality, not blissful people in traditional costumes and idyllic nature, but a world of soulless and compliant consumers led by political puppets who could care less about preserving their traditions — a world of isolation and industrial anonymity.
The video ad was created by Jewish advertising “legend” Harvey Gabor and therefore is an illustration of the Jewish dream of tikkun olam, of universal peace in which religions, nations, races and even families are abolished, transcended and furnished, as the song says, with love. Gabor, a man of undeniable talent, is what the writer Lawrence Auster called an “archetypal” Jewish multiculturalist. Advertising is often used by Jewish multiculturalists as social engineering and therefore, the selling of the product isn’t always the point.
Who can object to apple trees and honey bees? Here’s a world where no one will ever be alone:
I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.
I’d like to buy the world a coke and keep it company.
While folk music celebrates and laments everyday reality, anti-folk music removes people from reality and a fallen, imperfectible world of struggle. Why does the Coke song say, over and over again, “It’s the real thing?” Multiculturalism is not the real thing, that’s why.
The drink isn’t even the real thing. It’s the fake thing. It’s not one of the countless homemade and inexpensive drinks that people made for thousands of years and that often gave them health, instead of damaging it. No one makes those drinks anymore. They were made at home, just like the traditional dress worn in the video.
The updated “Hilltop” literally let consumers “buy the world a Coke” from their computer or smartphone, and connect with others across the world through the magic of Google’s display ad platform and specially engineered vending machines.
In the spirit of the original work, someone in Cape Town could record a message and send it along with a free Coke to someone in Buenos Aires, who can complete the connection by responding with a text or video message. (Source)
A world stripped of communities creates loneliness. A utopian dream is all we have to console us.
It’s no accident that young and beautiful whites lead this anthem on a hilltop. The dream of multiculturalism is one which only whites and the European folk, of all the different races and peoples, are gullible enough to believe. Their worthy compassion, charitableness and interest in other races, all of which are not reciprocated to the same degree, have been grossly distorted by lethal utopianism and gullibility.
— Comments —
Caroline writes:
I don’t remember that commercial, but I do remember as a child in third grade singing that song in music class, along with “Billy Don’t Be a Hero”(Vietnam War was on); “Hey There, Georgie Girl”; “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and other such schlock. What horrible sentiments with which to inculcate young children.
I also remember listening to “Inagaddadavida” (sp?) by Iron Butterfly in 6th grade art class and being asked to paint my feelings on paper. And while I’m remembering, we also analyzed Bob Dylan songs in Freshman English. Such an inversion of the folk tradition of folk songs. Funnily enough when I went to school in Germany (7th grade) we did learn wholesome real German folk songs. I can sing some of them to this day.
To your larger point, folk songs are a wonderful, folkish way of passing on traditions, stories and culture. Here is a a good resource.
Laura writes:
You are a survivor of shlock-based trauma.
“Inagaddadavida” — I commend you for not looking up the spelling of this atrocious song and wonder what possible feelings a young person could have about it except the feeling that something vital has been stolen from him — is a musical lobotomy. The fact that you are not catatonic at this point is miraculous. : -)
I bet if you were to put people in a room and play “I’d like to Buy the World a Coke” 100 times, they would emerge with early-onset dementia.
Kathy writes:
You are exactly right, this is an anti-folk song. No old folks, no children, only idealistic, utopian dreamers and worker bees for the new communitariat. No useless eaters, no mentally retarded, disabled, no crying babies or distracted mothers, hardworking fathers. Just a bunch of vapid, deluded “young people from all over the world” who are presumed to all share the same values and goals, singing a treacly, feminine, nauseating anthem to Communism. The admen have advanced their agenda, and today there would be no whites, and men would all be relegated to the rear.
