American Brandstand

Brand consultancy Agenda every year compiles a chart tracking the number of times brands are mentioned in the lyrics of the top 20 best-selling singles.

They call it "American Brandstand."

Clever, what?

Last year's winner?

Cadillac, with 70 mentions.

The 2004 top 10, in order:

• Cadillac

• Hennessy

• Mercedes

• Rolls Royce

• Gucci

• Jaguar

• Chevrolet

• Cristal

• Bentley

• Maybach

What? No bookofjoe?

Hmmm.

Back to the drawing board....

Richard Tomkins, in an extremely amusing column in today's Financial Times, pointed out that brand patter like this isn't insignificant.

Cadillac's

Escalade

has sold like hotcakes since it's become the vehicle of [rap] choice.

The highlight of his piece, though, wasn't his take on how brands can become subverted by acquiring a kind of "negative cachet" should the wrong set take them up.

No, it was his use of a term of art new to me to describe the look of a certain subset of English women who hail from "the desolate south London wasteland."

He wrote, "The female... is known for scraping her hair back into an ultra-tight, skin-tautening ponytail dubbed the Croydon facelift...."

What a great phrase: "the Croydon facelift."

I'm tempted to lose bookofjoe and rechristen this blog "The Croydon Facelift" - that's how much I like the term.

Richard Tomkins, as I've told him previously, is welcome to take over this space

whenever he likes for some guest posting.

Oh, yeah, the word "tautening": get over it.

Maybe he went to a better school than we did.

You don't like it?

Fine.

Take it up with Tomkins, or whoever taut him.

[via Richard Tomkins and The Financial Times]