To the repository of cultural treasures taken from us far too soon, we must add Pepsi’s latest commercial, The Woke-ing of Kendall Jenner. Released on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, it seemed the perfect marriage of model and material.
Wherever we were before it made the civil rights movement look like a totally transformative hair serum, we are now back there again, somehow knowing the place for the first time.
The day after its release, Pepsi pulled the ad, tacitly conceding that its attempt to “project a global message of peace, unity and understanding” would be scaled back in order to concentrate on its core business: selling soft drinks. It was a hugely courageous attempt at market entry, but the global injustice space is notoriously competitive, and Pepsi found that out the hard way. The hardest way, if you don’t count being shot dead by a police officer. And I sense they don’t.
Look, I’d love to be able to say with confidence that the final straw for the ad was a tweet from Dr Martin Luther King’s daughter, Bernice King, which featured a picture of her protesting father being restrained by police, with the caption: “If only Daddy would have known about the power of Pepsi.”
But looking at the apology Pepsi issued, Lost in Showbiz detects the influence of someone else’s parent. After some opening lines in which they blather about “miss[ing] the mark”, the firm gets down to the serious business of damage limitation, concluding pointedly with the words: “We also apologise for putting Kendall Jenner in this position.”
Mmm. In some ways, I’m glad Bernice’s daddy never knew about the power of Kris Jenner. Either way, to read that final sentence is to detect a sulphurous whiff of Kardashian materfamilias Kris, who will have regarded the furore engulfing her daughter as a major injustice. As for Pepsi, they clearly deem it entirely unnecessary to apologise to Black Lives Matter – or anyone who might feel their imagery was co-opted in the cause of shifting aspartame. Yet it is a matter of the utmost commercial and political importance to grovel as far as the Kardashians are concerned.
Think of it this way: Black Amexes Matter. We are now back in a realm wherein anyone with any power in this saga will feel much more comfortable: a place where extremely rich white people argue via lawyers about the level of financial reparations now due. And reparations are certainly on the table, considering Kendall would have been paid every time this ad aired.
According to various reports, Kris is more than unhappy about the horrendous position in which Kendall has been placed by her decision to accept unspecified millions of dollars to participate in a Pepsi advert whose concept she will have approved. Her mother fears this unfortunate association has rendered Kendall less attractive as a brand-face to other firms – and may even cause firms with whom she already has contracts to consider not renewing their association. It wouldn’t be anything personal; it’s just whether or not they want the image of silly Kendall solving racism with a fizzy drink drifting into consumers’ thoughts at the point of purchase.
Alas, owing to TV scheduling, earthlings only really understand the 30% of their culture owned by the Kardashian family on a timelag. It was months after the event by the time Kim was shown discussing her Paris robbery on Keeping Up With the Kardashians, and it will be many moons before the family are shown going through Kendall’s Pepsi horror show to the requisite level of detail.
Still, if you truly can’t wait, just picture several minutes of the family staring in mounting shock and fury at their phone screens as the row develops. In the end, a large part of any given KUWTK episode involves watching the Kardashians react to things they’re looking at on their phones. It’s like a showbiz version of Sky’s Soccer Saturday, where, instead of watching Paul Merson losing his shit about a disallowed goal at Turf Moor that you can’t see, you watch the ladies’ faces lit up by bad news from the internet that you can’t see. Anyhow. Elsewhere in the intersection between canned soft drinks and global injustice, there is more news of Lindsay Lohan.
It wasn’t so long ago, you might recall, that Lindsay was herself coming under fire for glib deployment of soda, following reports that she had been handing out cans of the energy drink that sponsors her to Syrian refugees, on visits the firm had organised to a camp in Turkey. The brand drew itself up to its full height to deliver a response: “Lindsay, as brand ambassador, of course has a certain quantity of cans at her disposal. She is free and welcome to give those cans to refugees she is meeting.”
Oof. The beverage also retails at the Athens nightclub bearing Lindsay’s name, at the opening of which madam was keen to stress the snowballing synergies her involvement brings.
“There’s bigger things to be done with the LOHAN club,” she told reporters. “There is spas, there is refugee camps … ” You know, the full range of venues.
“We have to help people,” she goes on, “and if we can do it with a nightclub, or with a spa, or with refugee camps, or with containers … ”
I never did find out what containers she was on about – and, it must be said, things have gone a little quiet on the refugee camp front, too. Instead, Lindsay is very much ramping up the Islam-curious aspect of her output.
Not only did she claim to have been “racially profiled” at Heathrow recently – she was asked to remove her scarf – but she has posted a headscarved photo of herself promising a “new fashion line”.
It all seems loosely connected with Lindsay’s long-mulled conversion to Islam. This week has found her posing for a full series of pictures on a Thai beach while wearing a burkini. What does it all mean? I haven’t the foggiest. But the minute Lost in Showbiz has clear eyes on Lindsay’s spiritual, political and commercial coordinates, so will you.
- This article was amended on 6 April 2017. An earlier version incorrectly stated that Pepsi’s latest commercial was released on Martin Luther King Day.
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