“Pushin’ It”

Abstract

Formative scholarship on musical appropriation has tended to focus on how dominant groups borrow subaltern signifiers to elevate their hipness. However, in contemporary American advertising campaigns, marketers often deploy humorous devices that place stereotyped signifiers of distinctive groups in opposition to one another to magnify their perceived differences and create comedy for the spot. This chapter investigates this practice by examining a 2014 Geico insurance commercial that features the pioneering female hip-hop crew Salt-N-Pepa performing their 1988 hit “Push It.” The commercial aims for humor by re-envisioning the trio’s suggestive music video as a means for cheering suburbanites through mundane tasks. But the incongruence of old-school hip-hop sounds and imagery against those of the modern-day, white-washed lifestyles onscreen reveals a more obvious message: The urban, Black trio and their one-time hit song about female sexual empowerment do not belong there. Musicological inquiry is thus paired here with cultural studies of hip-hop, hipness, advertising, and humor to reveal the process by which signifiers of Salt-N-Pepa’s iconicity are placed in opposition to the pictured residents in ways that reaffirm hierarchies of race, gender, and class.