The Chiquita Banana jingle goes back at least as far as 1945, but is still in circulation (with various modifications over time): "I'm Chiquita Banana and I've come to say / I offer good nutrition in a simple way / When you eat a Chiquita you've done your part / To give every single day a healthy start," and it goes on to underscore how wholesome and healthy (no fat) this tropical fruit is. The music was done in Calypso rhythm, sung by a Latin American woman who personifies a banana. The United Fruit Company had intended the jingle more as an educational message, less about selling bananas, they claimed. BBDO, the advertising firm that created the jingle, did follow-up research to see if American consumers got the message that you weren't supposed to refrigerate tropical fruits, and brown spots did not mean they were spoiled. Everybody got the message, as it turns out, and Tim Taylor shows us how this jingle and many others fit into a classification scheme that had evolved by the mid-1940s. His history of how music as entertainment got transformed into music as a way to sell stuff begins with the radio era (1920s) and progresses through the ascendance of punched-up emotion during the 30s and 40s, when advertising became ubiquitous, and on to the so-called Creative Revolution of the 50s and 60s when advertisers used boomer nostalgia and youth phenomenon of MTV in the 70s and 80s and beyond to erase the boundary between advertising music and popular music--the conquest of cool becomes the conquest of culture itself. Taylor aims to give us the first history of music in advertising, but also to examine the nature of various forms of American capitalism and the role that consumption has played, and continues to play in American culture. Our archetypal DNA, as consumer-citizens, is imprinted with the sound of songs that sell.

If you want to find out why you're humming a jingle or commercial from the past (or present), Taylor's book will show you why. His is an important, indeed a major, chapter in the story of how American culture has evolved into the new consumer capitalism.