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Victoria Dylan

So last night around 9 p.m. I mixed myself a drink and went downstairs, thinking that I would veg out watching some television. Xy was doing schoolwork and watching ER, not my favorite show, but then again there’s nothing better on, so I didn’t complain. I scooped a cat onto my lap, turned off my brain and settled down into a comfortable chair.

Just as the tube and the alcohol were producing the desired sedative effect, a lingerie commercial came on. It was the typical mildly titillating stuff you expect to see on such a commercial: supermodels in lacy undergarments slinking around Venice. Sounds like Dylan on the soundtrack, which is a little disturbing, but hardly a surprise in an era when Rage Against the Machine is used to sell cars.

And then I saw something which shook me from my stupor and threatened my very sanity. Stepping out of the shadows, there’s a man who looks very familiar. Why, he looks just like Bob Dylan. “Is that Bob Dylan?” Good God, it is Bob Dylan!

Has the world gone mad? What the fuck is Dylan doing in a Victoria’s Secret commercial?

Noting the date, I wondered briefly if this was an April Fool’s prank. But it’s not. It’s a strategic partnership that includes selling Dylan CDs at Victoria’s Secret.

Dylan fans will decry this as a sell-out, and I suppose it is. But that’s not what bothers me. He’s a counter-cultural icon, for Christ’s sake, a symbol of the anti-establishment 60s. Using him to sell sexy lingerie strikes me as a remarkably bad idea. Dylan is not sexy; he’s repulsive. Perhaps he was sexier 40 years ago. If the man has any sex appeal left, it’s an earnest, earthy, grungy kind of mojo. Victoria’s Secret, on the other hand, represents glamor and artifice and gloss and bulimia.

To see Bob Dylan shilling for Victoria’s Secret — well, it’s just plain wrong, and it almost snapped me back into sobriety. Thank God commercials are short.

Published inRadio & TV

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