Monday, February 21, 2005

venue renaming

To preface this, I’m not one of those people who hates corporations just because they’re corporations. I’m a raging capitalist. Yet when companies started buying the naming rights to venues we hold near and dear, it was nothing short of blasphemy. While this has also, and probably more poignantly, destroyed nostalgia for millions of sports fans everywhere, it has also chipped away piece by piece at the stalwarts of tour. I attended my first show in 1995 at Greet Woods, and returned in 199, only by this time is was known as the Tweeter Center. People were outraged, and road signs were soon pasted over with the likes of Tweezer center and Tweeker Center.

While I understand the economic rationale, it’s ludicrous that the marketing department of said companies don’t understand that they are viewed as blasphemous bastards as opposed to saviors. It’s like suddenly renaming Mount Rushmore, Kmart Mountain. How do you feel about Kmart now? Two years ago Verizon was simply a phone company to me, but now it has become the enemy. The enemy that raped the corn-fed honey betty, inside-out Harry Hood homeland known as Deer Creek.

I must admit there’s been a few concessions to collective sanity. Such as Desert Sky in Phoenix becoming Blockbuster Pavillion at Desert Sky. Bust mostly its been a battlefield for our memories. But I can assure you, as long as I survive you will not win. Because I will never ever utter the words “the last great Tweeter Center Bowie”. And because you’ve messed up royally. Because the best venue anywhere, Polaris, is already a secret corporate name, and you cant take that away from me. And because the Providence Civic Center, my stomping ground, became the first second tier city in the country to ink a corporate naming deal and wound up not only being known as the Dunkin Donuts Center- Providence while simultaneously causing jealous fits of rage in Worcester, but because it is now affectionately referred to as “The Dunk”! Ha! We will defeat you. We will subvert you. We will have the last laugh while you are investigated by the SEC for fraudulent accounting. We will tear down your monikers and impale them on logging spike. We will rage!

posted by jaimee @ 9:03 PM

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