Is There a Metaphor in Bud Light Seltzer Hard Soda?
We need to talk about a new product from the Anheuser-Busch InBev corporation of São Paulo/Leuven/New York: Bud Light Seltzer Hard Soda. If the string of adjectives and nouns in that title makes sense to you, and it almost certainly does, something weird has happened. Because that string of nouns and adjectives—some conjunct, some functioning as both nouns and adjectives, at least one entirely vestigial—would make absolutely no sense to anyone beaming in from the far distant past, say, 2018.
That it makes sense comes from a process of accretion whereby humans, once confused by a fragment of nonsense, acclimate themselves to it, making their minds pliable to accommodate future waves of accumulating nonsense. It is also a comically baroque example of corporate brand extensions, so absurd it is beyond parody. I mean, it was just two years ago that I wrote this:
But Bud Light Seltzer? This makes no sense. Budweiser is a beer. Light is an adjective describing what kind of beer. Seltzer is … not beer. “Bud Light Seltzer” is like selling “Smoked Gouda Folding Chairs.” Please, stop the slaughter of our helpless words!
(To my delight, that post spent about a month as the top link for people searching for “Bud Light Seltzer” on Google—ahead of the official site.) Of course, in the half-life of brand extensions, it didn’t take long to get to where we are now, when a product like Classic Cola flavored Bud Light Seltzer Hard Soda produces barely a yawn. But it is insane. I mean, behold my attempt to diagram its meanings.
The product is a flavored malt beverage, of which “hard” describes “soda.” But it’s a brand extension of a seltzer, which is in turn a brand extension of a beer, itself a brand extension of another beer. I’m honestly not sure how the same government that once told Fritz Maytag his “barley wine” was too confusing (they worried oenophiles would stumble into it unawares, and he invented the term “barleywine” instead) would allow the name of three separate product categories to appear on the same label. On the box with the name of the beer, it has the tagline, “seltzer, with the pop of soda,” which also … what? Oh, and it comes in four flavors.
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In some ways it is the perfect metaphor for an absolutely crazy year that is at once marginally understandable to us because of the process of nonsense-accretion, but is in fact bonkers by any rational measure. We are nearing the end of the second year of an apparently unending pandemic for which we have an incredibly successful vaccine. The year started with an insurrection in the US Capitol that one party of the oldest extant democracy now says was a pretty sweet deal if you really think about it. Things looked pretty good up through summer, when we hit a vaccine ceiling and science became a proxy for political tribe. By fall we had inherited a world where fully a third of the population were committed to the idea that the vaccine, administered almost without incident 450 million times, is more dangerous than a virus that has killed at least 800,000 people. Governors are banning masks in schools. 2021 is the year we learned the name “ivermectin” a horse dewormer—and not because anyone was deworming horses. All of this has become so routine the latest reports … barely elicit a yawn.
The beer world has been somewhat more sensible. The very existence of Bud Light Seltzer Hard Soda is evidence that the seltzer craze is flagging. Not only is AB InBev spinning out this brand extension, which given the “success” of hard soda may not be the most promising product line, but they’ve already offered us these amazing extensions:
Bud Light Seltzer Lemonade
Bud Light Seltzer Iced Tea
Bud Light Seltzer Sour (comes in “blue raspberry!”)
Bud Light Platinum Seltzer (a boozy extension of Bud Light Platinum, still somehow on the market)
In the world, as in the world of beverage alcohol, we wonder if the escalation can continue. Will Covid Omicron lead someplace worse, like Covid Omega, the Final Virus? Will the “innovators” at Bud Light come up with something even more innovative, like Bud Light Seltzer Hard Coffee CBD Soda? After 2021, I am not willing to bet against the house. But no matter what happens, consider this comforting thought: we’ll always have pilsner.
Hive mind gets it.