When Eddy Grant sang, “We gonna rock down to Electric Avenue//And then we’ll take it higher,” back in 1982, he might not have imagined that 32 years later, the name of the song and his name would be popping up all over social media in relation to electric cars.
That happened on Friday, when Elon Musk CEO of Tesla Motors Inc, the luxury electric car maker, announced that the new address of the company’s “gigafactory” battery manufacturing facility was Electric Avenue, McCarran, Nevada. The address never previously existed, but bets were out that before long it would appear on Google Maps.
The bigger news of course was that the state of Nevada had granted the car company US$1.25 billion in tax incentives in return for its investment of US$3.5 billion in the state within ten years. According to Reuters, the Tesla Motors lithium-ion battery factory is expected to create 20,000 jobs and eventually enrich the area’s economy by US$100 billion.
Tesla put the announcement on its Facebook page and on Twitter and immediately there were hundreds of references to Grant and “Electric Avenue”, said to be his biggest hit, rising to No 2 on the charts in both England and the US. Fans posted YouTube links to the song with many linking the lyrics to Tesla’s meteoric rise since the company was founded in 2003.
Contacted, Grant, who is currently in Guyana, said he had seen some of the tweets and comments, which brought to mind the importance of branding.
“There are brands and there are super-brands. ‘Electric Avenue’ has become one of the latter, by virtue of the ubiquitous nature of the song I wrote, sang and recorded, and whose copyrights are beneficially owned by me,” Grant said. “By choosing to name their address Electric Avenue, Tesla Motors has shown great vision and cultural insight by bringing to the State of Nevada, and by extension the world, not only a world-class manufacturing plant to power its eco-friendly vehicles, but the very real possibility of introducing its location on Electric Avenue to the world as part of America’s vast tourism plant.”
He added” “I am extremely proud when an event of this nature takes place, wherein social change for the good, can be brought about through the appreciation of a single piece of intellectual output, such as my song ‘Electric Avenue’. I wish good luck to Tesla Motors Inc and the State of Nevada for having enjoined in this most strategic of relationships thus creating another of the world’s great branded trophy addresses with all the attendant benefits thereof and therefrom.”
