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Use of Rock'n'Roll Songs in TV CommercialsNOT BORED! writes: "When the Cure Is Worse Than the Disease"
Greil Marcus has changed his mind since he wrote these words, back in 1987, when his "Real Life Top Ten" column was published in The Village Voice. He now says, "I think all songs should go up on this block [...] It's a way of finding out if songs that carry people with them, songs that seem tied to a particular time and place, can survive a radical recontextualization, or if that recontectualization dissolves them" (see "Bob Dylan After the 1994 Congressional Elections," in Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives, published in 2000).But this essay isn't going to be an examination of Greil Marcus' change of mind or the increasing timidity of his politics. No, this is going to be yet another denunciation of the on-going and relentless use of rock 'n' roll songs in TV and radio commercials, a subject we have taken up twice before, in essays about Pete Townshend and Lou Reed. Much of what Marcus once said about the Budweiser ads can be applied to the "anonymous" use of "Pictures of You" (a song by the familiar but chart-poor British band The Cure) in a TV ad for Hewlett-Packard printers. But the "reification" of style in this instance is much worse. Unlike Squeeze or Dave Edmunds, the Cure never made "happy" music. All of their songs were dark and brooding, perfect confirmations of Lester Bangs' assertion that "the whole reason pop music was invented in the first place was to vent sick emotions in a deceptively lulling form" (see "On the Merits of Sexual Repression," in Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste, published in 2003). Released on the 1989 album Disintegration, "Pictures of You" is a typical piece of Cure-shit: a "sick" and maudlin tearjerker narrated by someone whose lover has committed suicide ("And you finally found all your courage / To let it all go"). But you couldn't possibly realize any of this from the small part of the song (the chorus, of course) that's used in the commercial:
And so this is a doubly sanitized version of the song. Not only has it been "cleansed" by the removal of all traces of the death and decay of the lover's body, but it has also been rendered "sane" by the suppression of all hints that its narrator is mordidly depressed. Sure, there's still fragmentation (the full-color pictures of some happy family that are coming out of the Hewitt-Packard printer are separate and distinct from each other), but it's not the result of anger or destruction ("If only I'd thought of the right words / I wouldn't be breaking apart / All my pictures of you"). What was once a messy disintegration has become a series of clean separations. Unfortunately, that's not all. The last line ("All I can do") is not in the original version of the song. Either it was taken from an alternative mix or was created specially for use in the commercial. The original line was "All I can feel." And so this is real sickness, a sickness in the soul of society itself: the narrator no longer feels, no longer feels anything at all; he simply does, he simply takes pictures. Not only are his pictures more "real" than his dead lover, they are more real than he himself is. |
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