Now I'm going to have that Royksopp song in my head all day
I've been noticing something strange lately when I watch TV: bands I actually like and respect are licensing their music to television commercials. I know this is by no means a new occurrence, but it seems to be happening more often recently with so-called "indie bands." There are plenty of people stalking usually late-night across the Interwebs who will start throwing around the S-word (rhymes with "fell out"), so I'm not going to make any kind of judgment call on this issue. I just wanted to point it out because I thought it's odd.
I'll just be, you know, sitting there, and suddenly I'll hear a voice I know--often a voice I love--on a commercial for something I don't want or could never afford, and the disconnection there is immense; it's disconcerting, even disorienting. This particular trend actually started, for me, a few years ago, when I heard Modest Mouse's "Gravity Rides Everything" in a Nissan commercial. I honestly thought I was dreaming at the time; I think I was watching Conan O'Brien, and it was late, and I thought I'd dozed off and imagined it. I remembered the ad recently and lurched to my computer like a madman, googling it like a conspiracy theorist looking for UFO snapshots. I can't find a video anywhere but it definitely happened. The whole thing seemed strange because at the time I was really enjoying the album (that was The Moon and Antarctica) and it seemed to me to be so diametrically dissimilar in philosophy to the commercials I was seeing at the time. But there it was.
Cut to years later, a few weeks ago, when I was sitting around, catching up on back strips of some of my usual webcomics with the TV on in the background, and suddenly heard Tracyanne Campbell's unmistakable voice. I looked up to a commercial that turned out to be for Coldwater Creek, a clothing company I won't bother linking to because honestly there's nothing there you need to see. I was sure it was a Camera Obscura song but my optimistic brain was reluctant to believe that the two could be connected. Another Google search and it turns out I was right again. I sort of slumped over halfway at the ridiculousness of it, right there in my chair, and might've uttered a slight whimper--or at least a sigh--having just seen the band perform at the Bluebird days before and falling at least three-quarters of the way in love with them. Coldwater Creek? Really? The commercial's imagery is more in touch with the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants side of things than anything else, and, yes, Tracyanne Campbell is a woman (and how!) and, yes, the music is pleasing, inoffensive pop, but, still, how did that deal go down?
(That internet search did, however, did lead to my now-regular readership of a fellow Denverite's blog; she'd written an entry about the same experience.)
Another instance along the same lines--also strange, but not nearly as disturbing--is the latest in Geico's actually rather brilliant Caveman series of commercials (a few of them--1, 2, 3, 4), this one featuring Royksopp's catchy "Remind Me" (also check out that commercial's shorter companion piece). And I guess Royksopp is maybe a little more commercially friendly than Modest Mouse or Camera Obscura is known to be--I did, after all, hear that same song the other day at work--but it's still not something you expect to hear on national television.
And then, tonight I caught a Sears commercial featuring another voice that was very familiar to me; after fighting it, but knowing the sad truth, somewhere deep down, I came to terms with the fact that the voice was Neil Halstead's; the Sears advert somehow managed to secure for their own evil capitalist purposes Mojave 3's "Running With Your Eyes Closed" from their album Puzzles Like You. Quick pop music history lesson: Mojave 3 members Neil Halstead, Rachel Goswell and Ian McCutcheon were all members of seminal shoegaze band Slowdive, who were nearly as critical to that genre as were the revered (by me, by all) My Bloody Valentine. What that means, simplified: one of the most important voices in all shoegaze music can be heard, now, in a Sears ad.
Huh.
Oh, and I can't forget hearing The New Pornographers' "The Bleeding Heart Show" in a commercial for The University of Phoenix. How inspiring! How life-affirming!
I don't know what this all means. My first instinct is to be wary of (or downright horrified by) this trend, but then I wonder if there's ever a bad time or place for good music; wouldn't that Coldwater Creek ad, for example, be even less appealing with some generic light-rock tune? Would I have even noticed that van commercial without the Modest Mouse song? I'm really battling some rabid fandom demons here. Leave a comment, push me one way or the other, and I'll go down that road.
Edit: in a similar development, Devendra Banhart's "Insect Eyes" lends a decidedly creepy feel to the new teaser trailer for upcoming horror flick The Hills Have Eyes 2. The songs works quite well. I'm all for the "indie/commercially mainstream" union in this case.
I'll just be, you know, sitting there, and suddenly I'll hear a voice I know--often a voice I love--on a commercial for something I don't want or could never afford, and the disconnection there is immense; it's disconcerting, even disorienting. This particular trend actually started, for me, a few years ago, when I heard Modest Mouse's "Gravity Rides Everything" in a Nissan commercial. I honestly thought I was dreaming at the time; I think I was watching Conan O'Brien, and it was late, and I thought I'd dozed off and imagined it. I remembered the ad recently and lurched to my computer like a madman, googling it like a conspiracy theorist looking for UFO snapshots. I can't find a video anywhere but it definitely happened. The whole thing seemed strange because at the time I was really enjoying the album (that was The Moon and Antarctica) and it seemed to me to be so diametrically dissimilar in philosophy to the commercials I was seeing at the time. But there it was.
Cut to years later, a few weeks ago, when I was sitting around, catching up on back strips of some of my usual webcomics with the TV on in the background, and suddenly heard Tracyanne Campbell's unmistakable voice. I looked up to a commercial that turned out to be for Coldwater Creek, a clothing company I won't bother linking to because honestly there's nothing there you need to see. I was sure it was a Camera Obscura song but my optimistic brain was reluctant to believe that the two could be connected. Another Google search and it turns out I was right again. I sort of slumped over halfway at the ridiculousness of it, right there in my chair, and might've uttered a slight whimper--or at least a sigh--having just seen the band perform at the Bluebird days before and falling at least three-quarters of the way in love with them. Coldwater Creek? Really? The commercial's imagery is more in touch with the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants side of things than anything else, and, yes, Tracyanne Campbell is a woman (and how!) and, yes, the music is pleasing, inoffensive pop, but, still, how did that deal go down?
(That internet search did, however, did lead to my now-regular readership of a fellow Denverite's blog; she'd written an entry about the same experience.)
Another instance along the same lines--also strange, but not nearly as disturbing--is the latest in Geico's actually rather brilliant Caveman series of commercials (a few of them--1, 2, 3, 4), this one featuring Royksopp's catchy "Remind Me" (also check out that commercial's shorter companion piece). And I guess Royksopp is maybe a little more commercially friendly than Modest Mouse or Camera Obscura is known to be--I did, after all, hear that same song the other day at work--but it's still not something you expect to hear on national television.
And then, tonight I caught a Sears commercial featuring another voice that was very familiar to me; after fighting it, but knowing the sad truth, somewhere deep down, I came to terms with the fact that the voice was Neil Halstead's; the Sears advert somehow managed to secure for their own evil capitalist purposes Mojave 3's "Running With Your Eyes Closed" from their album Puzzles Like You. Quick pop music history lesson: Mojave 3 members Neil Halstead, Rachel Goswell and Ian McCutcheon were all members of seminal shoegaze band Slowdive, who were nearly as critical to that genre as were the revered (by me, by all) My Bloody Valentine. What that means, simplified: one of the most important voices in all shoegaze music can be heard, now, in a Sears ad.
Huh.
Oh, and I can't forget hearing The New Pornographers' "The Bleeding Heart Show" in a commercial for The University of Phoenix. How inspiring! How life-affirming!
I don't know what this all means. My first instinct is to be wary of (or downright horrified by) this trend, but then I wonder if there's ever a bad time or place for good music; wouldn't that Coldwater Creek ad, for example, be even less appealing with some generic light-rock tune? Would I have even noticed that van commercial without the Modest Mouse song? I'm really battling some rabid fandom demons here. Leave a comment, push me one way or the other, and I'll go down that road.
Edit: in a similar development, Devendra Banhart's "Insect Eyes" lends a decidedly creepy feel to the new teaser trailer for upcoming horror flick The Hills Have Eyes 2. The songs works quite well. I'm all for the "indie/commercially mainstream" union in this case.
posted by Patrick at 2:22 AM
2 Comments:
I remember you telling me about the Cadillac commercials with Explosions in the Sky songs in them. And I didn't believe it, but then I saw one, and also Googled it. I found an article where Explosions replied to their fans on the matter who'd called them out for... Well, you know.
Simply put, they just said that they're people too, and that people need to make money to buy food and pay for space to live.
In a lot of other cases, though, it has a lot to do with recording contracts. In a lot of situations, you basically give distribution and licensing whatnots to the label, who has sole discretion over how to pump money out of it. So it might wholly be out of your hands after you've signed a particular contract.
Interesting phenomenon nonetheless.
Ah, I'd forgotten about those. Yeah, when I said I was going to let someone else call them sellouts, I meant I wasn't going to because I don't really think that way. There are so many factors involved, there's no way to know where the intentions lie. It's just interesting to see which bands/songs get paired up with certain companies or products.
I'm still outraged about that Jon Brion song from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind being used in a commercial calling for a 9/11 memorial. But that's a separate blog post unto itself.
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