Do Not Remove This Tag (A Doo-Wop Love Song)
Doo-wop-a-doo-wah
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Do Not Remove This Tag (A Doo-Wop Love Song)
There is a line printed on the edge of every mattress sold in America that most people have read a hundred times and understood exactly zero times: UNDER PENALTY OF LAW THIS TAG NOT TO BE REMOVED EXCEPT BY THE CONSUMER. 1 This song is written from inside that tag, and the tag has feelings.
It is a slow 1950s doo-wop ballad: clean electric guitar, upright bass, brushed snare and handclaps on the backbeat, one warm saxophone break, and a low bass voice answering the lead in close harmony. The tag sings as a devoted male tenor who has attached himself to one person for life, and everything he confesses is text the law requires him to carry. He introduces himself the way the federal standard defines him — a mattress is "a ticking filled with a resilient material used alone or in combination with other products intended or promoted for sleeping upon" — then lists his credentials like a lonely heart filling out a personal ad: the month and year of manufacture, the location of the manufacturer, a white label printed in black ink. 23
His chorus is his own printed sentence, and the small legal twist inside it is the whole drama of his life. Federal law says no person other than the ultimate consumer may remove or mutilate him, or cause or participate in his removal or mutilation. 4 State law makes it unlawful to remove or alter the tag prior to retail sale, which means the crime is committed by everyone who handles the mattress before you do. 1 Read closely, it is not a warning to you at all. It is the story of a small, permanent, extremely attached object and the one person in America permitted to take it off.
He gets fragile in the middle of the song, because the reason this tag exists is that the federal government once laid eighteen burning cigarettes across his body, nine on the bare ticking and nine tucked between two cotton sheets, and measured how far the burn spread. He passed by a margin of two inches, using a standard reference cigarette bought from the National Institute of Standards and Technology on Bureau Drive in Gaithersburg, Maryland. 2
One verse belongs to the strangest label in the same regulation: for a mattress made to a physician's written prescription, the required warning admits that it "may be subject to ignition and hazardous smoldering from cigarettes" and that it was never tested under the federal flammability standard at all. 4 The tag that promises the safest possible construction and the tag that confesses to being a protected fire risk sit in the same document, which is roughly the emotional range of this channel too.
Play it while you make the bed, while you flip the mattress, on the drive home from the mattress store, or any time a warning label has gone unappreciated for too long.
References
- 112VAC5-125-90 — Law labels conforming to the Virginia law
law.lis.virginia.gov
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