It’s bad form for a columnist to bang on about how things are worse now than they used to be. Small doses are fine, sure. But follow the impulse for cultural revanchism too far and one day — boom! — you’re a reactionary clown whining about how kids these days aren’t learning home economics or marrying Republicans, or whatever.
That said, when it comes to the United States’ brewing industry, comparing the way things are to The Way Things Were is a tried-and-true method for assessing beer’s rapidly shifting place in the national zeitgeist. And Super Bowl beer ads were pretty terrific. “A single Super Bowl commercial can change our vocabulary,” wrote the late ad journalist Bernice Kanner in 2003’s “The Super Bowl of Advertising: How the Commercials Won the Game.” “Whassup?!” She’s right: two decades later, Americans still use that Budweiser salutation — first coined for 2000’s Super Bowl XXXIV — as a byword for goofy intimacy. Like “Dalmations,” “Great Taste/Less Filling,” and the Coors Twins, “Whassup!? is rooted in the American vernacular thanks (or not; some conceits have aged way better than others) to the American brewing industry’s long-standing legacy of pushing cultural and creative boundaries in Big Game ads. But at the risk of sounding aggrieved: They don’t make ‘em like they used to.
Big Beer’s Super Bowl spots this year are uninspired, gun-shy, reductive schlock that insult the viewer and the industry’s long, proud legacy of culture-making advertising. This isn’t the first year they’ve missed the
