There was a time, in the late eighties and throughout the nineties, when a new Levi’s ad generated real interest and anticipation. They were like miniature music videos, built on wit, visual flair and, above all, soundtracks that felt genuine, defiant and different.
It was 1994 and we were young students in Granada. Life was not all studying or going out; we watched television too. That was when the new commercial appeared. Striking, irresistible and ingenious: pure adrenaline with a thunderous soundtrack. Somehow, its song was perfectly in tune with the music scene of the time and the explosion of grunge. That volatile mix of story, images, eroticism, cheek and music hit us hard, very hard. We were watching a fabulous music video, complete with a clever ending and an epilogue Tarantino would have been proud to sign. Obviously, one of us rushed out to buy the single, and the rest of us are still grateful, even now, thirty years later. We played that slab of plastic mercilessly on repeat, filling the thin walls of a run-down student flat in nineties Granada with grunge energy and decibels.
The years passed and life pulled us in other directions. Layers of dust gathered over those memories, the kind that tend to grow until they harden into oblivion. But that did not happen this time. A small chain of circumstances kept the commercial more or less present in our lives. It disappeared and returned in conversations whenever we got together to revisit memorable moments and old stories.
It is true that, over the last decade, the accumulated dust of forgetting came close to swallowing that jewel from the past altogether. But it did not. A spark, a memory, a conversation with the right person swept away the thick layer of oblivion that slowly dissolves memory. I am so, so glad it did, because it is a tremendous song, because it is an unforgettable commercial and because it carries me back to a time that still lives and roars deep inside us.