By admin 
Introduction
We think of Barry Manilow as the ultimate showman—the “Fanilow” leader, the crooner of “Copacabana,” the soft-focus icon of 70s romance. But that is a carefully constructed mask. Beneath the spray tan and the velvet tuxedo lies a much sharper, more calculating genius. Before he ever stepped onto a stage to sing about love, Barry Manilow was the invisible puppet master of American consumerism.
In the early 1970s, Madison Avenue was a battlefield, and Barry was its deadliest mercenary. He wasn’t writing for the radio; he was writing for your subconscious. He possessed a terrifying gift: the ability to craft a “hook” so infectious, so mathematically perfect, that once it entered your ear canal, it could never leave.
He didn’t just write “songs.” He wrote the sonic DNA of the biggest corporations on Earth. Do you know the State Farm jingle? “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” Barry wrote that. He didn’t just write it; he cashed a check for $500 that turned into one of the longest-running marketing campaigns in history. How about Band-Aid? “I am stuck on Band-Aid, ’cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me.” Barry again. McDonald’s? “You deserve a break today.” That was him. KFC? Dr. Pepper? Bowlene Toilet Cleaner? Him, him, and him.
While other musicians were starving in garrets trying to write “art,” Manilow was sitting in a windowless room, engineering 30-second symphonies designed to make you hungry, anxious about your insurance, or desperate for fried chicken. He was the “King of the Jingle,” raking in money hand over fist while remaining completely anonymous. He was so dominant that at one point in 1971, you could not turn on a television set in America without hearing his voice or his music within ten minutes.
The scandal isn’t that he did it. The scandal is that for years, music critics trashed him as a “lightweight” pop star, completely ignoring the fact that he was technically the most successful composer of the decade before his first album even dropped. He manipulated the buying habits of an entire generation. He wasn’t just a singer; he was the soundtrack to late-stage capitalism, and he played us all like a grand piano.