Never had anything against Starbucks…
March 4th, 2005 | by Brian |until now. I don’t drink coffee, and consider corporations innocent until proven guilty. Still, I don’t go to Starbucks, as I prefer the atmosphere of other places, but I don’t get self-righteous about it. Certainly there are more important things to get self-righteous about, like punctuation (Ironically, as pointed out my an Amazon reviewer, the cover of Eats[,] Shoots, and Leaves is missing a hyphen: “zero-tolerance”!), turning out lights, or the students environmental activists in Boulder this week singing uncritical praises of recycling, as if there were an environmentalist heaven and recycling was always good.
But I digress. My friend Charles, who has admired my song parodies, sent me a link to this story of a song parody performed at the Starbucks Licensed Stores Awards ceremony. (See the Feb. 24 entry.) I’d listened to the song before knowing the context, and thought it to be cute at best, but lacked any edge. I mean, how can it be funny if it’s not at anyone’s expense? Perhaps I’ve seen too much Family Guy, and had recently seen Team America: World Police, where I really did “laugh ’til it hurt.” Then I read the story about it. Ugh. The chorus is “Don’t you remember? … We built this Starbucks on heart and soul!” How can I forget?
P.S. Sure, I am guilty of a corporate song parody, Optics Queen, but that was “peformed” (with two guilty coworkers) in the style of a roast, and we knew it was ridiculous.
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