Aboriginial Coke ads?

[totoro@charm.net (Milky Way)]

In article <9409271727.tn11206@aol.com> , Silo@aol.com writes:
>Please excuse my spelling today..
>
>Has anyone noticed the new Coke ads which have the same motif as the
>frutopia ads?  One starts with diggaradoo and aboriginie throwing Coke
>bottle into the air.  Were these Kate inspired?  Did she do the music
>for these too?
>
>Another has clay-mation of a bonzi tree type of thing.
>
>--Mike Knight
>silo@aol.com

Perhaps our friends in Australia can shed further light on this, but we
remember reading about an Aboriginal coming of age rite practised by a few,
not all Native Australian groups... We are referring to the line "Split the
Banana" from ETM   ;-)

On the serious side, the experience of the Aborigines as a race is probably
similar to that of Native Americans in the U.S. We have a CD by an
Australian Abo singer/songwriter named Archie Roach.  His voice and lyrics
are haunting, powerful...He sings in English without any of the stylings
that scream NATIVE in so many World Music recordings. In fact, he sounds
like a traditional folk/blues singer, but he sings about alcoholism, about
a misguided white government policy in which Abo children were taken to
live in cities away from their families, things that happened here within
the past 50 years to the Sioux and other Indian tribes. In fact, and please
correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that Coke wouldn't dare show this
commercial in Australia. Remember the flak Nissan got in the US when they
appropriated the Navajo name for their 4 wheel drive vehicle, then used
SouthWest Indian imagery in their commercials? Imagine if the happy dancing
Aborigines were replaced with happy dancing Pow Wow participants?

When Kate uses non-Western-European imagery and sounds in her music, she
pays great respect to these other cultures. To the best of her ability, she
tries to avoid appropriating these elements in a way that would be
condescending to their origins.
Hurray for Kate!  The Coke Co. ad creators who showed incredibly good taste
in choosing the right music for Frutopia SHOULD KNOW BETTER!

Hiroshi Amano
NHK Hi-Vision Coordinating & Research Office
16 W. Hill St.    Baltimore, MD 21230
voice 410-752-5748,  fax 410-752-5850