Commercial Break

Being a music fan is a pretty selfish thing. Even if you do something generous, like make a mix CD of a band you love, there’s a certain secret piece of you that screams “YES!” when the CDR is handed back to you with a wrinkled up nose and gentle shrug. Nobody will ever love that band as much as you do. FACT.

So, logically, there’s nothing worse than seeing an advert and realising that one of your favourite songs has been nicked and is now just a backing track to a tampon ad (Just so we’re clear here, I’m not suggesting that this is my favourite song of all time).

Recently, Channel 4 are my bugbear. As they’ve pinched one of my favourite Spinto Band songs, ripped out its heart, cut & pasted the catchiest bit in some sort of horrible loop, and completely erased the vocals to use as a ‘bed’ for their Channel 4 + 1 promo ads. Here’s the untouched original, sniff.

When I first saw this, my initial reaction was to clasp the sides of my head and scream. A bit like this man. Then, about six seconds later, an imaginary lightbulb pinged above my big stupid head. After all, things could have been much worse, couldn’t they?! For starters, the advertising execs might have changed the words. Or then again, I could be a Shed Seven fan!

So I continued thinking about it properly, like an ADULT, and decided that while we’ve a right to be pretty miffed about this corporate butchery of great song-writing, we should also think of all the virgin kiddiewink ears that might be turned on to new music through hours upon hours of mind-cleansing TV!

I mean, even uber-indie mentalists of

Montreal have allowed their songs to be re-recorded and reworded for adverts. Fancy an Australian steak? (The anti-sell-out cynics amongst you will enjoy the additional entertainment in reading Pitchfork to see how they spare their uber-indie bretheren from a much-deserved bollocking, YOU SEE? THEY WERE ‘AVIN A LAFF! IT’S FINE! What if Kaiser Chiefs had done this, eh? They’d be pilloried. That’d be funny too).

The more my little cogs clicked and clacked with super-charged thoughts, the closer I got to the conclusion that adverts are sometimes a good place for music. New or old.

For instance, little-known Glasgow rockers Figure 5 came up smelling of, well, French exchange students, when aftershave people Old Spice picked up their (at the time) unsigned arses and squeezed out the track ‘No Fixed Abode’ to spearhead their Red Zone Showergel advertising campaign across the whole of North America.

And of course, to complain about something I love being used on an ad would be a bit hypocritical, as, thanks to a raft of re-releases, I’ve been in turn bewitched and enchanted by the music of Penguin Café Orchestra this year. A band who are less well known for their brilliant avant-jazz/neo-classical/playful mini-orchestra music by name, but whose songs ‘Telephone and Rubber Band’, ‘Music For A Found Harmonium’ and ‘Perpetuum Mobile’ are instantly recognisable thanks to their blanket use on advertising.

Then the little lightbulb burst as I realised the full naïveté of my comfy little theorem.

Everyone hates Moby.

Oh well, no matter, I’m just off to browse this brilliant website.

P.S. (04/12/08) I just found out that one of my FAVOURITE SONGS OF ALL TIME is being used to sell cars in Korea. Check this out.