On Dan Harmon’s weekly podcast Harmontown earlier this week, Dan and his friend and guest actor DeMorge Brown were discussing the phenomenon of commercials targeted at the African-American audience. You know, ads directed at black people in which everyone in the ad is black. Turns out, Brown himself won the lead role in a pretty backwards-minded KFC campaign directed at black audiences but then turned down the job. The commercial required him to say the words “kitchen fresh chicken.”
Brown’s entrance on Harmontown (they start discussing the ridiculous KFC commercial pretty much right away) occurs around the 1:12:30 mark of the most recent episode.
The existence of “white” and “black” ads by the same company to sell the same products is one of the more insidious and scarcely visible markers of a racist society, far less pernicious than redlining, police murderers, or the war on drugs and yet still a depressing sign of how short a distance we’ve come. You could put a positive spin on it and say that such commercials are celebrating “difference”—but only when there’s a profit to be had. You can’t use the purchase of a Chicken McNugget to express your “heritage” or your “individuality,” after all.
The actor reminisced about watching a commercial starring his namesake James Brown for McDonald’s that might take the crown as the awesomest commercial ever directed towards a black audience—he remembered watching it in the 1980s during a broadcast of the Grammys, and he saw it only the one time. He promised would “go viral” if someone were to uncover it, but in fact it’s been available on YouTube since 2013 without spawning any undue sensation. It definitely aired more than just the one time—the date given on the YouTube page is several months after the Grammy telecast for that year.
In Say It Loud! My Memories of James Brown, Soul Brother, Don Rhodes discusses the McDonald’s ad briefly. The lines he quotes Brown saying do not appear in the commercial, but then he doesn’t say they did.
As he and I stood outside the van in the warm night air, the speakers began blaring Brown’s unique, musical sound with his unmistakable voice boasting, “Every time I think of two, all-beef patties with special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on sesame seed buns, I get on my good foot, and I do that James Brown all the way down to Mick-a-dees—Big Mac! Tastes so good!”
Brown told me that “Mick-a-dees” is what many people, at that time only in northern states, called McDonald’s, and that he had filmed a national television commercial for McDonald’s in Chicago with the commercial showing a bunch of his fans running into him in a McDonald’s restaurant.
Hey, it’s always a good time for the great taste of James Brown dancing his ass off….