Eulogy for TAG Body Spray

It is never easy to say goodbye. Losing a friend we have known for so many years is like losing a part of ourselves. We look forward to the future, a future without TAG body spray, and it’s so hard to picture. So hard to imagine how we’ll go on, where we’ll go, and what we’ll do if we want to smell like flowers steeped in ditch water with some low-rent wine, 5-minute epoxy, a cabbie and grandpa’s deodorant after an afternoon of stewing in front of the TV.

We’ll miss you, TAG. We’ll miss the way you came on the scene only 5 years ago and said “Hey, AXE is popular. I want to be popular too but I do not want to put any effort into doing anything different at all.” We’ll miss your variety of scents which were all pretty much exactly the same but featured names like Midnight, Afterhours, All Nighter, Past Sundown, Around 10PM, Just Before Craig Ferguson Comes On, Discount Hooker Hour, Alone at Denny’s, Crackheads in My Yard Again, Shit on TV Right Now, Where’s the Pizza Guy?, Weeping on the Toilet and Just Ditched the Girl I Met on Plentyoffish.

Your marketing strategy, which was AXE’s marketing strategy, moved me. Moved us all. It showed us that, no matter how popular one brand already was, how mind boggling it would be for another company to brazenly rip off their gimmick without even trying to alter it in the slightest, it could still happen. It did happen. You did that, TAG. You had either the balls or the apathy to say “f*ck it” and just do exactly what the competition did. You were the Deep Impact to AXE’s Armageddon. The Chicago Hope to its ER. The RC to its Coca Cola.

I remember the first time I met TAG Body Spray. It was the summer of 2006 and I was pissing in a mall bathroom after having Subway for lunch. As I stood at the urinal, minding my own business, with no less than seven free urinals to my left, the pungent, fishy scent of seal musk mixed with vermouth, fabric softener and Aqua Velva wafted to my nostrils as a TAG man saddled up to the urinal next to me and began to chat about how nice a day it was. As I stood there, penis in my hand, the soft-boiled babblings of a functionally-retarded reprobate filling my ears, I heaved a sigh, my sinuses filling with a cloud of rose hips, anti-bacterial hand soap and despair. I have to say, my curiosity was piqued.

I remember being in the pharmacy section at Wal Mart as a squad of collar-popping douche rags saturated their Ed Hardy shirts with your heady aroma. As my eyes watered, my vision blurring from the searing pain and my brain refusing to allow me to experience the overpowering odor of aged pork marinating in citrus, skunk weed and vegan crotch, I couldn’t help but admire your strength of will, your silent but stately nature and your commitment to somehow being morally and spiritually at peace with aerosolizing bleach, bad Chinese and choda.

Now is not a time for grief. Now is a time or celebration, for joy at the body spray we all knew and loved. We must hold those memories dear and remember what TAG taught us – that you can market a product that smells like a wet dog with a yeast infection and people will buy it. TAG may be gone, but the stench will never die if we keep it in our hearts.