Ahh, the 1970s, decade of my childhood. Star Wars and Soul Train, both a big part of my world then. I’ve been having a lot of bittersweet fun hanging on Sirius XM Channel 74, Smokey’s Soul Town, bringing the funk, the soul, the boogie, all that smooth jive from the 1960s through the early 1980s. The sounds of Motown, Stax, Atlantic, Hi, Westbound and King Records which filled my ears heavily as a child. My mom used to shake her butt on Saturday afternoons to Don Cornelius’ power hour of funk and R&B gold, and it left an impact upon me. Same as the exotic “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?” spooling from a transistor radio as Mom got ready for work. I’m talking the true soul sista shove by Labelle, not that atrocity “Lady Marmalade” remade by Christina Aguilera and company in 2001.

Guitars wrenched by foot-tappity wah-pedals, bass guitar being KING of all genres of the Seventies, especially. You wanted to get down, you wanted to groove. Morgan Freeman was just beginning a decades-long tenure of swagger on the original inception of the classic kids’ education show, The Electric Company. For me, the G.O.A.T. of such programming made immortal by the entire ensemble, but Freeman’s recurring characters Easy Reader and Mel Mounds were the epitome of cool along with Rita Moreno’s trademark holler, “Heyyyyy youuuuuu guyyyyyyyysssss!”

To this day, I still say “Right on,” no less then 50 times a week. “Rad” at least 10, but different era, different path of life. It’s part of my DNA, spoken by some white kid in Maryland farmland who, like most of his generation of kids, found the funk. Funk music being an all-time favorite genre, I still marvel how pop culture of the decade assimilated to the new hip factor of Shaft, Superfly, Foxy Brown, Coffy and Cleopatra Jones. So much the comic books I read back then strove not only to introduce more characters of color, but to shift the dialect of most stories set in urban settings to funkadelic speak.

So it didn’t surprise me when I scoured through a bunch of ads for Burger King and McDonald’s from the Seventies most of them tried to huckster forced jive talk that’s comical to see today. Some may call it latent racism. Exploitation to be certain. There was such a term back in the day as “Blacksploitation,” some of it empowering, some of it embarrassing.

McDonald’s had an angle and a jingle for everyone back then. One being “We do it all for you.” Another being “You deserve a break today.” For all of us kids, the fast-food chain’s targeted demographic, we were too busy grinning at the famous clown and the “Rubble rubbles” thumb bitten by his Hamburglar nemesis to care about anything else. Other than we could rely on McDonald’s ads to run with Mounds/Almond Joy commercials during Charlie Brown t.v. specials.

Maurice and his lady here in this ad I’m sure even the McDonald’s corporate honchos shake their heads at, gettin’ down with some cheapo cheeseburgers with the implied suggestion they’ll be gettin’ busy after-the-fact. “Celebrating just being together?” Come on, man. Can I feel where they’re coming from? Gawd, hell no. This is some ancient jive turkey crap if I ever saw it.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.