• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, September 18, 2024

It’s a cool, shiny presence, full of purpose and rectitude, and, from all accounts, racktitude, but we’ll get to that later.

We speak of Kitchen Aid’s latest offering: the KitchenAid® 360° Max Jets™ Third Rack Dishwasher, formally known as the FreeFlex™ Third Rack.

I don’t know about the Flex or the Rack, but the KA 360 Max Jets shown here in a music video has quite an alluring inner glow.

To celebrate the name change, KitchenAid, working with Whirlpool Corp’s in-house agency,  WoW Studios, asked Grammy-award-winning artist and lead singer of the X Ambassadors, Sam Nelson Harris, to write and deliver a song about the machine.

In the music video, Nelson is shown arriving at a party, kissing people hello in the kitchen. Then he sees it across the room and time stops. Fixating on it, he stares deeply into the open door of the KA 360, with its by-now-legendary third rack.

An aggressively mustachioed, orange-turtleneck-wearing, bald dude who makes his over-the-top emotions known, Harris overplays every word in a hilariously deadpan way.

This is funny.

That’s because the lyrics -- beginning with the attention-getting line “I love the racks!” -- were pulled directly from KitchenAid online consumer reviews.

“So crazy, right?” he says, warming up.

“I love how quiet it is -- so quiet. That’s so quiet. I like that.” 

Then he moves into a rat-tat-tat “Racks racks racks racks! ” 

Harris actually loads some dirty plates inside the dishwasher, including one that reads: ”Lyrics from GermanIris’s real five star review on 4/4/24.” 

“I was an actor before I was in a band, and being onstage and embodying a different person every night was such a thrill to me,” he told the magazine The Big Takeover.

But back to the frontman’s acting, dancing, and singing in the video -- a power trio.

He sings of his love for “The front control panel, that is angled, so I don’t bump into it,” and “Forcing myself not to rinse things, including egg yolks.”

He’s convincing.

At one point, he holds up an eggy frying pan as he sings. He later strokes the machine, and even, in the end, kisses it with his hand. It turns out that the charm hanging from his necklace is yes, a fully racked dishwasher.

The amusing video can be seen on YouTube and was posted to the @KitchenAidUSA Instagram channel  yesterday.

A Kitchen Aid spokesperson seemed to get into the same deadpan (rather than dishpan) spirit, releasing this statement to Mad Blog: “Our new love song is a first written to a dishwasher, leverages real consumer praise for our product, and plays on current musical trends we’re seeing born in the social space.”

That’s true. I think this using-consumer-comments-to-write-commercials thing is having a moment.

So I went to check out some of the latest online comments. One reviewer could be an inspired copywriter-in-disguise with his/her entry:  “Whisper quiet!”  Impressive.

Next was the succinct and energetic “Piece of crap!”  One star.

That’s all part of the game, of course. It’s not as thoughtful or poetic as “I love the racks.”  But it is more rhymable.

Still, I give the ode to the racks five stars. Sudsy!