Perhaps you’ve seen Acura’s “Drive Like a Boss” commercial. You probably have. It’s been running pretty frequently, especially during the NFL playoffs. And if, as you’ve been watching it, you’ve sat there thinking “Hmm, that woman rapping along to Blondie’s ‘Rapture’ sure does look familiar,” well, there might be a good reason for that: she was the star of a viral video from just a few months ago.
Yup, the rapping lady from the Acura commercial is Toronto dental hygienist Chelsea Ranger, the same rapping lady from the “The Cutest Little Gangsta I Know, My Wife” video, which features Ranger rapping along to Salt-N-Pepa’s “None of Your Business” in the car while her husband secretly records her, and has racked up over 17 million views since it was uploaded in November.
In fact, that’s how she landed this gig. Acura produced a behind-the-scenes video for the commercial that explains the whole thing. The lesson here appears to be that rapping along to Salt-N-Pepa in the car pays off. Please make a note.
There is one other relatively important thing to note about this commercial. I don’t know how familiar all of you are with the musical stylings of Blondie, but the verse Ranger is performing gets really, really strange at the point where the commercial cuts off. You can hear it start to go wacky right as the voiceover kicks in when she says “Out comes the man from Mars,” but here is where it goes from there:
And you try to run but he’s got a gun
And he shoots you dead and he eats your head
And then you’re in the man from Mars
You go out at night, eatin’ carsYou eat Cadillacs, Lincolns too
Mercuries and Subarus
And you don’t stop, you keep on eatin’ cars
Then, when there’s no more carsYou go out at night and eat up bars where the people meet
Face to face, dance cheek to cheek
One to one, man to man
Dance toe to toeDon’t move too slow, ’cause the man from Mars
Is through with cars, he’s eatin’ bars
Yeah, wall to wall, door to door, hall to hall
He’s gonna eat ’em allRapture, be pure
Take a tour, through the sewer
Don’t strain your brain, paint a train
You’ll be singin’ in the rain
This brings up two points: One, rap has come a long way, as this reads more like a poem your 8-year-old nephew with the active imagination would come up with after drinking too much soda. And two, Acura, if you’re reading this, please make a part two of this commercial based on this. Let’s get weird. Let’s sell cars using an ad campaign where an Internet famous dental hygienist zombie and a Martian drive around the country eating your competitors’ cars and dancing in nightclubs, which they also then eat. Make it happen.
