• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, July 11, 2013

Owing to a pair of unfortunate incidents, I've been without a phone for the better part of the last two weeks. The first one, my own fault, confirmed the vulnerability of circuit-reliant devices to immersion in pooled water. The second, attributable to the spatial-reasoning-impaired woman I love, affirmed the rep of paving stones as the AC/DC of patio surfaces. It's the timing that gets me: No sooner did the first replacement arrive than it met a brutal and smashy demise. If you'd like to replicate my reaction to this turn of events, shake up a can of paint thinner and microwave it until your kitchen melts.

Still, beyond octo-hourly monitoring of my fantasy baseball squads, I don't feel like I missed much during my phone-free fortnight. Or at least I didn't until I started my weekly column-topic recon and saw that HOLY BOTOXED CROW'S-FEET THERE'S A NEW HASSELHOFF VIDEO! But for the ballerina-like daintiness of my chosen smart phone I could have immersed myself in this clip a full 16 days earlier! Hey LD, the zeitgeist just called. It said nice pop-cultural consciousness, loser.

Indeed, for the 26th time in the last three years, David Hasselhoff has chosen to gently lampoon his image as a gilded relic of the 1980s, this time on behalf of Cumberland Farms and its new "Iced Farmhouse Blend" coffee. Over the course of 61 glorious seconds, Hasselhoff croons, overemotes and blue-screen-surfs his way back into our hearts - which had never really expelled him in the first place. That Knight Rider goodwill has the half-life of a nuclear Twinkie.

"Thirsty For Love" works owing to its proud, profound idiocy. It's not as outright funny or precisely calibrated as the genre's bestsatire-mindedvideos. But it doesn't have to be, owing to its corporate benefactor. As a brand, Cumberland Farms is associated (fairly/accurately or not) with little beyond snackables and scratch-off lottery tickets. Nobody goes out of his way to patronize a Cumberland Farms store. If it's distinguishable from its roadside ilk and fellow Gatorade oases at all, it's by virtue of the "Farm" in its moniker. Somewhere on an interstate, there's a dude driving around with a serious yearning for a garden-grade cucumber. Upon checking out the Cumberland "farm," that dude is about to be very disappointed.

What a campaign of this sort does, then, is inject personality where previously there was none. And who better to perform this kind of brand plastic surgery than David Hasselhoff? The guy can carry a tune and he's willing to play along, whether by singing his heart out to a plastic cup, frolicking all emotional-like on a beach or ripping open his crisply tailored white linen shirt to reveal a "99¢" medallion. Whether the guy is shameless or acutely self-aware is irrelevant; his presence stamps the clip with something akin to viral street cred. This is the world in which we live.

It doesn't hurt that the song Hasselhoff warbles is melodic in a way that only a handful of modern-era jingles are. "Thirsty For Love" would sound out of place on a current top-40 playlist, but one could easily imagine it sandwiched it between, say, "High On You" and "Is This Love" on Sirius XM's supremely awesome "'80s on 8" channel. There is no higher compliment. Wear your fingerless gloves proudly, Jingleman or Jinglelady.

When I heard about this clip, I expected the worst: faded celebrity + faceless brand + "funny" = a textbook retrocity (if "retrocity" isn't an actual word, it should be). Instead, Cumberland Farms comes out of this looking sly and - unlike several of its competitors - far from desperate to establish itself as a Bränd-with-a-capital-B-and-maybe-a-gratuitous-umlaut-just-because-umlauts-are-totally-bitchin'. Throw in a neat throwaway social-media gag courtesy of the "#IcedHoffee" hashtag, and "Thirsty For Love" does the nigh-impossible: elevate a convenience store from the realm of the generic.