Tab Energy Kills You Dead: The famously toxic retro cola nails women with a new,

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Mark Morford: Tab Energy Drink Kills You Dead

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Tab Energy Kills You Dead

The famously toxic retro cola nails women with a new, pink energy

drink. Because you love it

 

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

 

Wednesday, March 8, 2006

 

 

 

You know what's brilliant, in a skin-peeling, brain-grinding,

I-can't-feel-my-soul sort of way? Target marketing.

 

Target marketing, like when they take some toxic product you don't

really need and which you already know rots the lining of your skull

and which could probably power a nuclear reactor, and then they put it

into a special new package and pump it full with $100 million in

marketing money and aim it straight at some exclusive demographic

that's not actually exclusive but which they want you to think is

exclusive so if you belong to it you can say, Oh my goodness, I'm part

of a sly, hip subculture and they're speaking directly to me. I am so

cool.

 

Take Tab. Tab is that freakishly kitschy, creepy-tasting diet cola

from the '60s you can barely get anymore but which is still drunk by

hordes of secret Tab cultists and fetishists, people who will have

multiple cases of the virulent drain opener shipped to their private

refrigerators every week from the handful of Coca-Cola plants that

still produce it, because the stuff is wickedly addictive and crazily

unhealthy and is still, apparently, cheaper than heroin. But in a good

way.

 

Yes, Tab, that saccharin-loaded, oddly metallic,

rumored-to-be-cancer-causing rocket fuel your mom drank throughout the

'70s and which she had for breakfast with her Pall Malls and her

birth-control pill and which came (and still comes) in that lovingly

tacky pink can and which has come back into vogue on that rogue wave

of retro '70s kitsch, the wave that we are all hoping will go away

very, very soon, much in the same way we all pray for the quick and

fiery end of Ashlee Simpson and Crazy Frog and Mel Gibson movies. That

Tab.

 

Alas, Tab lives on. Because God help us, there is now Tab Energy, a

re-engineered, reformulated, rebranded version of the famous '60s

blood pollutant that of course tastes nothing like the original and

from which they took out the saccharin and swapped in sucrose and

tripled the caffeine and added a bunch of synthetic herbs, and are now

trotting it out as a specialized energy drink for " fabulous " (read:

anorexic, jittery, L.A.-wannabe) women who care far less about their

health than they do about text messaging and what will make a bitchin'

mixer for their Stoli.

 

Yes, Tab Energy is yet another completely gratuitous Red Bull wannabe

in the $85 gazillion energy-drink market, one that tastes, according

to various reports, like a liquid Jolly Rancher, like cough syrup

mixed with Pixie Stix, like Sweet Tart-flavored Alka-Seltzer. You

know, the kind of delicious verbiage that make you say, Oh my God yes,

I want to pump four cans of that into my flesh right now. God bless

America.

 

Did you see the commercials? During the Oscars? When the Coca-Cola

Co., the world's largest manufacturer of synthetic sugar-blasted

chemical-loaded corn-syrupy obesity-causing addiction-inducing goop in

the history of mankind, launched Tab Energy into the world the way a

bad Vegas comic launches an insult?

 

The ads featured a slew of loud, brash, oddly unattractive,

L.A.-tainted women with way too much makeup who were apparently amped

on six cans of the pinkish stuff because they needed the extra energy

to help make them feel even more, uh, suckered in by the culture, an

attitude that apparently entails a great deal of eyeliner and lipstick

and strutting down the street in high-heeled boots and that might or

might not include a Pall Mall and a case of birth-control pills.

 

It is merely the latest in a relentless barrage of violently pink,

taurine-jacked, Splenda-sweetened energy drinks aimed at women and

girls and caffeine addicts, drinks called, well, Pink and Her and

even, say it with me now, Sugar Free Kabbalah Energy Drink. (Yes!

Whore that ancient mystical religious sect to death, you

Madonna-sucking L.A. Kabbalah geniuses! God loves shameless

co-branding! Next up: Kabbalah-flavored condoms. Watch for it.)

 

Caffeine, of course, is key. It is our favorite drug, meth for the

masses. A basic can of Coke has about 45 mg of the world's most

beloved drug. A good cup of strong coffee has about 80 milligrams. The

average sickly sweet, fizzy energy drink, from Tab Energy to Monster

to Liquid Ice to Rockstar, has anywhere from 100 to 200. And they all

taste like some nasty Frankenstein inbreed of liquefied Skittles, road

chalk and the blood of dead moths.

 

But no matter. Tab Energy is being carefully target marketed to hip,

urban, fashionably unhealthy women -- you know, the kind who look to

Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan for their branding and diet tips --

because Coke saw a ripe opportunity to cash in on both the retro

fashion trend and the energy-drink craze at the same time, all via

milking one of its old brands for a few more bucks and messing with

women even more because, well, it's what they do. And who can blame them?

 

After all, people are buying the stuff by the truckload, thanks to the

genius of target marketing, an angle that takes the worst aspects of

regular marketing (the pitilessness, the hollow flattery of your ego,

the creation of a false sense of belonging to a group that really

doesn't exist) and amplifies them to such a degree that you are led to

feel that if you don't partake of the product at hand, you are wildly

unhip and out of touch and desperately lost, not to mention probably,

like, totally old.

 

It is merely the direction of the species, another limp cultural

signifier to look to see how we are progressing, what we value, where

we are headed, with what sort of attitude we now value the body and

the mind.

 

And what, pray tell, does the existence of Tab Energy prove? What does

it say about how we think of women and the body? Very little,

actually. At least, nothing you haven't heard a million times before.

If anything, it's just a little derogatory, a winking slap in the face

to progress and health and awareness. Which, for this time and this

place and this bitterly anti-choice, neocon era, feels exactly

appropriate.

 

By the way, there was another Coke-owned product launch during the

Oscars. It is called Coca-Cola Blak. It is not, as you might imagine,

Coca-Cola infused with the essences of Samuel L. Jackson and Chris

Rock. It is, rather, merely Coca-Cola Classic, the same one that's

ruined more teeth and rotted more esophagi and numbed more brains than

heroin and marijuana and cocaine combined, mixed with -- you guessed

it -- black coffee.

 

And the gods went, Sigh.