Forget what everyone else says. Bostonist loves the new Old Navy tunic ads (pictured at right), and not just because they use "Bust a Move," that classic rap song from our youth. We may be crazy, but we think the lyrics include a subtle, Boston-friendly bit of vocabulary.
Bostonist has a complex relationship with mass-media offerings that try to pander to our fair city: most attempts to play up Boston-ness feel heavy-handed and contrived to us, but when the Masshole spirit is well-captured, it warms our heart. In the first category, file Boston Legal, the dreadful David E. Kelley creation (now thankfully displaced by slightly-less-dreadful Grey's Anatomy) in which James Spader and William Shatner portrayed big-time Boston lawyers who liked to end their days by smoking cigars on a balcony high over Boylston Street, marvelling at the wonder of the Sox being world champs. We're sorry, but we can't suspend our disbelief enough to watch fat old Captain Kirk pretend to care about the hometown team. Similarly, although we didn't grow up here, we know a fake Boston accent when we hear it, and listening to Tim Robbins (whom we usually love) butcher the local vernacular for two hours was painful, even in a really good movie like Mystic River. In contrast, we really like the ad where a guy waiting at a red light briefly breaks into spasms of delight because he has just reminded himself that yes, the Sox really won. (And the bald Johnny Damon ad is fun too, just because he looks more cro-magnon than ever.)
So what does the typically campy Old Navy offering have to do with the Hub? No, there are no Sox cameos (unless that traffic guard is actually Jay Payton); it's something much more subtle than that: According to AdWeek magazine, the rap (performed by none other than old-school hip hop star MC Lyte, although that's not her dancing in the ad) goes like this: "This is a jam for all the ladies out there/ lookin' for something you can wear/ on the beach so the fellas will stare/ Wear it over that tiny bathing suit/ and look pretty cute." In fact, the rap in the ad is a fair bit more complicated than that and we haven't managed to write down all the lyrics, but we're pretty sure that at the end it says, "flow with the tunic and look wicked cute." Could it really be that Old Navy had MC Lyte come back into the studio to record a different version of the ad for local markets? (If so, is there a "hella cute" version for the Bay Area?) Or did Old Navy use a Mass-specific adverb in all the ads just to bolster business at the 30 stores in our state? Dear readers, Bostonist needs your help to unravel this intriguing mystery.
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