No getting laid in the NYT
« previous post | next post »
Rob Walker's "Consumed" column in the NYT Magazine on Sunday (9 November) looks at prepaid credit cards, in particular the Prepaid Visa RushCard, "the product of a partnership between Unifund (a Cincinnati company best known for buying up and collecting on bad debts) and Russell Simmons, a founder of Def Jam records and the Phat Farm apparel brand."
“We created the prepaid RushCard,” Simmons says in [an ad], “so everyone will have access to the American dream.” That sounds a little bland for someone with Simmons’s brand-building panache, but recently, in The Economist, Simmons gave his pitch a bit more zing by suggesting (in terms that can only be paraphrased here) that the card has aphrodisiac properties.
The point he was making, however earthily, was that plastic and status are intertwined in contemporary America.
Ah, the NYT, ever modest (as we've commented on here many times). Just what was it that Simmons said that required paraphrase in the Times?
Here's the passage from the Economist (dated 16 October):
The ad is intended for the BET television channel, with a mainly African-American audience, but Mr Simmons says he does not want it to imply that black people are the only poor people in America, or, indeed, that the user is poor at all. “This card is meant to get people laid, get them feeling dignity,” he says.
Apparently, there's no getting laid in the pages of the NYT — that would be too earthy — only aphrodisiac effects (oh, and dignity).