When I was in college, we had a South African singing group called Ladysmith Black Mambazo play a concert for us, and in that show, I became pretty familiar with their sound. Fast forward to 2000, when Mazda started using the “Zoom Zoom Zoom” song in its ads. The song was supposedly recorded by someone called Jibril Serapis Bey, and it sounded to me very much like Ladysmith Black Mambazo from back when I was in college. (I’m sorry if that makes me seem like a Philistine: it had been awhile since I heard them, and this song has been remixed quite substantially, so you have to give me that much.) The song is great, and maybe it has some other meaning in South Africa, but if “zoom” means the same there as it does in America, then it is an entirely backwards interpretation of the idea. This song is so laid back and mellow sounding, it completely negates the idea of “zoom”, as in going fast or energetically speeding, as it would apply to a racing car. Seriously, this song feels like someone relaxing in a hammock and drinking iced tea! Yet even so, this is how they use this song, and the echos of it, in the Mazda advertising: to indicate speed and sports car pizzazz. And it’s just ridiculous!
Now let me be absolutely clear when I say that I like this song and think it’s great on its own terms. But to apply it to a fast car is absolutely wrong-headed and hilarious. It’s like having slow reggae be the official music of NASCAR, or letting the band Air Supply write the theme music for WWE Wrestling: it simply doesn’t work. But still, even so, they’ve continued to use this absolutely inappropriate song being applied to fast sports cars over and over in their advertising, and it’s just an absolute joke to me. Maybe this is just another example of something being “lost in translation”: after all, Mazda is a Japanese company, and maybe they heard the word “zoom” and applied it to fast cars, but the way it sounds completely belies the speed and performance of the cars in the ads. It’s like if someone used the audio of someone whispering “bang” very peacefully as the sound effect to go with an aggressively blaring shooting gun in a movie: it’s just completely inappropriate to the point of irony! (The word “inappropriate” being used in its originally intended meaning for once, as opposed to, say, to chide someone for a sexually suggestive comment.)
It’s just the feel of this thing that doesn’t work for me, you see. Just saying the word “zoom” doesn’t make something sound fast, and then having some little kid whisper it only makes it worse! (Perhaps they should have the boy excitedly growl "zoom zoom" in such a way as to make it sound like a revving engine: now that would work very well, along with the very familiar notion that young boys tend to love sports cars. But the way the kid does whisper "zoom zoom" makes it seem like he's trying not to wake the cars up!) Some of Mazda’s ad work has been quite good, but the idea of using this extremely laid-back sounding “zoom” as their aural logo has in my opinion been a dismal failure, and the fact that it has gone on for so long can only indicate to me bad judgment on their part, or an extremely ironic hipster sensibility at their ad agency combined with an extremely magnetic ad executive to sell them on the same lousy, ineffective idea again and again for years. It simply doesn’t work for anyone who knows what the word “zoom” means: it’s as simple as that. And that's why this ad campaign's use of this "zoom zoom" shtick has been a pet peeve of mine for years!
So here’s what I’m talking about (Seriously: tell me speed metal or hardcore punk {like the band Zeke, especially} wouldn’t work better here to indicate speed than this world music song!):
