This month on Twitter, @sotachetan hosts #BrandedInSongs – which is a head-on collision of my personal world of music and my professional world of branding and advertising. The challenge is to simply pick a song with a brand name in its lyrics or title. I added one more criteria to my picks, which is this: the songs themselves must be as iconic as the brands they mention. No filler here.
I can still remember the first time I heard “Little Red Corvette”, which has the distinction of being the first Prince song I heard. I was watching MTV and the video came on. The video ended up playing incessantly on MTV. I thought Prince was a little cheesy. But I was also way too young to realize how innovative this legendary musician really was, smashing elements of rock, pop, soul and R&B together like no one else before him. “Little Red Corvette” is a shining example of this.
Much has been said about Prince’s guitar playing prowess, and the guitar work on “Little Red Corvette” is really, really good. It comes out in spurts, but when it rears its head, it dominates. The syncussion is very Prince-esque, but the most distinctive aspect of the song are the metaphoric lyrics. The brilliance of the song is that it has nothing to do with an actual Corvette. When Prince died in 2016, the song recharted. A true testament to the song’s place in music history.
“Little Red Corvette, Baby, you're much too fast.”