I have a soft spot for Radio Foorti. When I was a copywriter at Bitopi, I worked on the pitch team for the brand and I got an unrefusable offer (2.5 times what my salary was then) and I became the first fulltime employee for a station that had a name and nothing else. Working with some truly amazing people, including my childhood friend Daniel (whose birthday gift gift of Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son introduced me to music in 1992), we built up the studio from scratch.

I remember how we had empty office space and I raided petty cash to buy remote controlled cars to race on the furniture before it was assembled. The day of the launch, every one of us worked untold hours (Daniel and I had taken to sleeping in the office by then), and everybody went home at 5 AM. Except for me and RJ Apu, god of the morning waves. At precisely 8 AM, Apu played Feedback’s “Moushumi” and Radio Foorti was officially on air. We were hugging and crying. Which would have been odd but we were both confused at the time and we used to hug and cry a lot.

I used to be really proud of the tagline I came up with: “Radio manei foorti!”. For non-Bangla speakers, “Foorti” means “fun.” Being the first radio station, we needed to build the category. Our primary job was to get people to actually listen to radio. We also had a close competitor, ABC Radio, that launched within a few weeks of us. So the tagline, which means “Radio means fun!” is actually a pun on the word “Foorti”, because Foorti = fun = Radio Foorti.

But I didn’t start this post to talk about memory lane. I actually wanted to show you niggaz Radio Foorti’s new print campaign, which I think is absolutely fucking awesome (and it’s spearheaded by my pal Daniel, who is now Head of Programming at the ole place). The new campaign’s idea is “Don’t stop the Foorti!”, which I think is great. Here’s my favorite image, announcing that Radio Foorti is now broadcasting in Barisal too.

First of all, this is fucking awesome. The baby’s holding a taka instead of a dollar, and the joke here (aside from the Nevermind sight gag) is that Barisal is a watery place. It’s called the “Venice of Bangladesh.” (No old buildings though.)

It also made me think of how great it is to live in a country with no copyright laws. I know I’m in the minority here, but I gotta say–it’s really fucking great to use whatever art you want to use without having to go to jail for it. In this specific case, Christopher Ricks would have called it allusion. The courts would have called it copyright infringement.

Foorti took a bold (or lazy) route and just altered the original image. You could draw a cartoon of the same thing but it wouldn’t be as powerful. I guess you could even do a trace with Illustrator and alter it enough to pass a court of law. (Speaking out my asshole here so don’t hold me to this.)

But seriously, isn’t this a cool ad? I thought it was genius.

It also makes me miss living in Bangladesh and being inspired by great works and using them without fear. I am probably in the minority in this, because most people tend to be paranoid about copyright. But I studied English in college and a standard poetical conceit is “imitations” of great poets by others. So Byron would do an imitation of Pope, where he’d try to write like Pope using the same devices and shit. In the 21st century, we have a strong demarcation between art for art’s sake versus art for money. Advertising is on a tangential spectrum, where at its best it’s art for money, but it’s never really art for art’s sake for which one gets paid.

Historically, of course, great art was also advertising. Poets and artists would write or paint in praise of their patrons: my favorite example is Milton’s Comus because of the cum-glue forest throne, but every portrait painter has felt the cognitive dissonance of painting as is versus painting a prettier version of an inbred noble. This was justified by saying they were painting idealized versions, but that’s a relatively small step, philosophically, from say BP saying they’re trying to create a better world by cleaning up the mess they made.

But god damn it. Do you think Warhol would paint if nobody paid him? Once again, there are two sides–one side would say “Churl, Warhol wouldst have painted even if God fucked the sky into him, because it was in his blood.” Others would say “Sure, but he wouldn’t have spent his life pursuing something which couldn’t keep him in cigars, bitches and bling.”

For us advertising peeps, it’s always hard. I think we make good advertisements because we need to. Sure, consumers like intelligent ads. But if we didn’t use these extremely limited formats–a half-page here, thirty seconds there, though YouTube et al has widened the scope considerably–to create something of artistic merit, we would hate ourselves.

All this being said, let me share with you an ad that I made. When I say I “made,” I mean I wrote the script (events, lyrics, campaign idea, tagline etc) for this ad and it was produced a few months after I left the agency. Well, when I say *I* wrote it, I mean, I wrote it…with a lot of help from my friend Ringo Starr.

Edit: Picasso changed to Warhol (a more fitting example) thanks to Jarett Kobek.