I like the recent General Electric commercials. High production values, slick, clever. Strong music, both the Alan Jackson line dance and the big-band "Sing Sing Sing".

But have you actually paid attention to the message? I'm not sure it's really what GE intended.

The line dancing commercial is very dynamic, but the lyrics are about wretched working stiffs who can't wait for the end of the work week to go get blitzed and laid. The same people portrayed as building jet engines, nuclear reactors, and medical imagers, not to mention the appliances in your kitchen. I wouldn't want to fly on a jetliner powered by engines that came off that line on a Monday morning! Never buy stuff built by people who hate their jobs.

And I love "Sing Sing Sing" (though the version by Glenn Miller with Gene Krupa on the drums is more spectacular than the bland Benny Goodman version they use), but an elephant ''dancing through a clean room????'' I want to get the lot numbers for the batch they were working on that day, and steer clear of it. What kind of idiot would even contemplate such a thing? Does the commercial reflect GE's clean room practices?

I have a theory about what's behind this sort of thing. In our modern intensely crass and commercial world, about the only way for artistic types to make a living is to whore themselves to the advertising industry. That's why so many commercial videos seem like such overkill, in my judgment: Frustrated creative impulses finding whatever outlet's available and pouring everything into the allotted 30 seconds.

Like these two examples, where the production completely overwhelms the message.

I think that, consciously or unconsciously, a little social commentary seeps through under these circumstances. The linedancing commercial has a subtext about dissatisfaction with work, one that no doubt went right over the heads of the management types who reviewed it. Another subtext was that subtle homoerotic byplay at the beginning, with the one guy glancing first horizontally at his buddy, then down. Anybody who's spent time standing in front of a urinal has seen that gesture, and it ocnveys a particular meaning. Though guys in the men's room don't usually start line-dancing when the proposition's accepted...anyway, I suspect that that was another little thing the producers slipped by the client. More subtext.

I can't deconstruct the elephant commercial the same way. Maybe it is just somebody's flight of fancy. Sometimes a dancing elephant is just a dancing elephant.

That's my trivial social observation for this week.