Diet Songs: Special K

Special K is more monotonous to eat than Grape Nuts, but not quite as bad as All Bran, which gives it the distinction of not even being the worst cereal, more like the second or third worst. I associate the brand with everything that I scorn about diet culture, it is assimilationist, apologetic, boring, self-hating, sanctimonious, unfeminist, mediocre, passionless. Anti-life.

The current crop of adverts feature women dancing around their kitchens with different bingey flavours of Special K, ersatz food, where what is being sold cannot match the marketing hyperbole. Those women are desperately hungry, I imagine, because The Special K crash diet plan involves eating only one meal a day and replacing the rest with stingy bowls of cereal. Poor cows.

Anyway, this is the last Diet Song in the series and it's one of my favourites because it was really fun to record. It's the classic 'Can you pinch more than an inch?' campaign, which is iconic in advertising history, and the source of much anxiety and disbelief in my playground when I was a kid.

If you can pinch more than an inch of chub on your side, you need to lose weight by eating Special K. I've generally been able to grab about a good handful of flesh in that spot, and at least a foot or two of fat on my belly, not quite a yard. But that hardly matters, everyone can pinch an inch, including thin people, which is why the slogan is marketing gold in terms of creating a rush of fearful consumers.

Pinching an inch inhabits the same body anxiety genealogy as other home tests of freakhood, such as the pencil test. This involves putting a pencil under your tits, if it stays there, your tits are all wrong. By my mid-teens I could keep a whole pack of felt-tips under my breasts and these days I treat them as an extra pair of hands from time to time, they can keep a towel or a bottle of shampoo handy whilst I'm doing something else.

Pinching as well, can we talk about that? It's so mean! Pinching your body, policing other people's bodies by pinching them. Ow ow ow! The person who thought this up was obviously not very nice.

Here's our version. I do all the voices and Simon had fun making the pinchy sounds on his homemade effects boxes.

Diet Songs: Special K by Charlotte Cooper + Simon Murphy (.mp3, 540kb)

Diet Songs
New Project: Diet Songs
Nimble
Slim-Fast
Tab
Diet Pepsi
Nutrasweet
Diet Coke
Ryvita
Ayds
Special K

Diet Songs: Ayds

It's a box of sweets with added magic lovely and slim ingredient X. This turns out to be an anaesthetic, later replaced with a mild kind of speed of a type that was later withdrawn from over-the-counter products because it raises the risk of stroke in the young women who eat this stuff.

I'm stuck on the name, I can't get past the name. A weight loss product called Ayds which, when you say it aloud, sounds like AIDS. I associate dieting so strongly with drawn-looking emptied out bodies that when I hear Ayds I think of the wasting suffered by people with AIDS, and that famous photograph of David Kirby dying amidst his devastated folks. This is probably not the association that the makers of Ayds wanted to promote in the product's heyday, but it's certainly the association that led to Ayds' demise.

Just saying the name invokes a handful of feelings: schadenfreude, a longing for other similar diet crap to bite the dust, sadness and rage about HIV/AIDS, bemusement. Ayds is so exposed by its name and obvious quackery, if it can happen to that product, why not Slim Fast, LighterLife and the rest of them? Why must it fall to an unfortunate coincidence?

Would Ayds be a viable brand nowadays? I'm inclined to think that it would. I think the obesity epidemicTM has made many people more desperate than ever to try and lose weight. Associations with illness don't seem to matter, I know someone who was congratulated on her weight loss after a couple of months suffering amoebic dysentery. How does the stigma of AIDS or terminal illness compare to fat stigma? Would people be willing to be associated with one in place of the other? I really don't know.

We recorded this pretty straight because, really, what else are you going to do with gold like this? Simon's spidery track sounds like a virus in your blood.

Diet Songs: Ayds by Charlotte Cooper + Simon Murphy (.mp3, 840kb)

Diet Songs
New Project: Diet Songs
Nimble
Slim-Fast
Tab
Diet Pepsi
Nutrasweet
Diet Coke
Ryvita
Ayds
Special K

Diet Songs: Ryvita

Next week I will pay £110 and submit myself to the indignity of the dentist, having cracked a tooth on a seed embedded in a piece of particularly hard German crisp-bread. It's unlikely that I will renounce my crisp-bread habit, despite this setback, I simply won't be without the cardboard-like texture of this fart-producing foodstuff. Spread with butter and jam is my favourite way of ingesting a sheet of crude roughage.

I eschew diet products in general, including joyless self-punishment food marketed mainly to women as a slimming aid (cottage cheese, I'm looking at you). I enjoy plain food, which is where Ryvita comes in and fucks with my stupid food rules. I can handle a rice cake too. I think I accept Ryvita into my cupboard and my tummy because I associate its brand with an earlier era of marketing, it reminds me of products of yesteryear like Bile Beans, which promise 'vim and vigour', or the mysterious 'pep'. Even though the company never had a manufacturing base in Sweden, I also associate Ryvita with 1970 blonde Scandinavian women and therefore porn. Yeah, I don't know why either. It's only when those rotten Fern Britton ads come on the telly that I realise I am eating diet food. Bah, they got me!

Ryvita marks the point where Diet Songs takes a turn for the weird. Lord knows what was going on when we recorded this one. My disjointed vocal track is the least of it, for me it evokes the imaginary sound of a slice of Ryvita making its way through your alimentary canal. Enjoy.

Diet Songs: Ryvita by Charlotte Cooper + Simon Murphy (.mp3, 568kb)

Diet Songs
New Project: Diet Songs
Nimble
Slim-Fast
Tab
Diet Pepsi
Nutrasweet
Diet Coke
Ryvita
Ayds
Special K

Diet Songs: Diet Coke

The peculiar chemical aftertaste in Diet Coke makes me feel like throwing up. My lived experience of drinking this product couldn't be further away from the images used to promote it: fun-loving skinny people larking around on the beach, in the case of this vintage jingle. Come to think of it, I can't recall a Diet Coke advertising campaign that hasn't been wholly gross, I have to look away every time those Sex and The City style office girl marionettes are on the box, for example. Ugh, puppets and their tippity-tappity little feet. Nightmare.

I tried to sing this Diet Song with passion, like Diet Pepsi, and Tab, the originals are a crescendo of mass hysteria. I wonder if anyone fainted when it was recorded. Unfortunately it's hard to replicate that sound in my front room in rainy East London, my range is, frankly, limited, and Simon lacks the technical resources to make us sound like a chorus of Diet Coke junkies screaming for our lives. So we've just plodded and muddled our way through, which is a lot like how it feels to drink a revoltingly nausea-inducing Diet Coke.

Diet Songs: Diet Coke by Charlotte Cooper + Simon Murphy (.mp3, 896kb)

Diet Songs
New Project: Diet Songs
Nimble
Slim-Fast
Tab
Diet Pepsi
Nutrasweet
Diet Coke
Ryvita
Ayds
Special K