Because we're in the waning hours of Father's Day, and because it's simply too depressing for me to think about the fact that my own father recently received his black belt while I haven't thrown a punch in anger since the '90s, I'm going to bitch about the fact that the newest song of my youth being subverted for marketing purposes is "Sunny Side of the Street" by the Pogues.
It's hardly the first song from my impressionable salad days that's been appropriated in order to convince us to buy things. I can still remember the days of actual indignation when Orange Crush used "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys back in the early '80s, Nike set their shoe commercials to "Revolution 1," or when Eric Clapton and Genesis essentially wrote songs specifically to sell Michelob a few years later, but the interval between a song's release and when it pops up in a TV ad is pretty infinitesimal these days, so nobody really notices. Until it's something near and dear to them.
Which is what happened last night. I recognized the tune almost before the picture started, and when I realized my beloved Pogues were shilling for Cadillac (in an Escalade commercial, of all things), I just had to clutch my head in my hands. Very few of these things affect me anymore, but...fuck, I love the Pogues. I mean, using "Fairytale of New York" as the background music for Dominic returning to Ireland in season 2 of The Real World was kind of bad, but at least it was fucking Ireland. Escalades? Shit.
What's worse is, I suspect the guy who pitched this campaign is someone like me: he probably digs the Pogues and listened to their music a lot while getting loaded in college and exaggerating his Irish heritage to the foreign exchange students in his marketing program. Hell, he might even have thought he was doing something cool by proposing it as the song for their new ad campaign. So he got whoever the surviving members of the band with legal say-so are to agree to it, it doesn't change the fact that this person missed the fucking point entirely.
In the grand scheme of things, this is all pretty insignificant, but it annoyed me, so I guess that's good enough for a blog. Stay tuned for my next meltdown, which will probably take place shortly after Coca-Cola uses "Bastards of Young" to sell Diet Coke "Plus" during the World Series.
EDIT: Karin beats me to it.
Have you seen the full-length version of the ad? It’s got the entire first verse, with the lyric “All I can remember now / Is little kids without no shoes” over the happy affluent family about to get into their Cadillac.
My own rant here, with linkage.
Jewel takes the cake in this regard. Intuition was about about artists selling out and Jewel sold out the song before it was even released. I mean the release of the song and the Intuition marketing campaign were one and the same. AND THE SONG ITSELF ABOUT SELLING OUT!! makes my head hurt if I think about it too much
The worst offenses that I can remember were Gil Scott Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” — a song decrying both advertising and television — being used in a TV ad for either Nike or Reebok, and of course, Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” — a song about how shallow MB customers were — being used to market MBs to baby boomers.
To quote the late great Bill Hicks, “If you’re in advertising or marketing, do us all a favor and kill yourself. There’s no joke coming. Kill yourself.”
I was gobsmacked when I saw and heard this commercial.. Someone apparently is not clued into the lyrics and somehow it managed to slip by the execs. I love it! Shane is one in a million, as are all The Pogues! The entire collective of The Pogues is brilliant! What other band makes you want to get up and dance?
After Shane left and the Pogues sorta petered out, I was bummed that I’d never get to see them live, but they got it enough back together to tour again. Current “surviving members” are a lot like the classic lineup.