Madison Avenue, that locus of all known evil, is at it again. Right now there's a Tommy Hilfiger commercial that uses the Jefferson Airplane song "Volunteers" as the sound-bed for a montage of hunky, wholesome boys and girls in a summer-home setting, frolicking in stonewashed denims and rugged cottons. The song has been deployed by admen once before (in a spot for the on-line brokerage e-Trade), and again the true text of its lyrics -- not some abstracted meaning but its literal thrust, what it always was about -- has been neatly expurgated.
"Look what's happening out in the streets," Marty Balin wails, backed by hits of Grace Slick: "Got to revolution, got to revolution." Hilfiger is a mogul who wants mainly to revolutionize his bottom line, and in this ad the song's "volunteers of America" become eager consumers who presumably look just like these sexy, capering models. The Airplane, for their part, meant "revolution" in the total, not just sartorial sense, and when they sang "Now it's time for you and me … come on now, we're marching to the sea," "you and me" weren't models and the march wasn't to the fields of Cape Cod. Something cuckoo is going on here. Look at song and commercial this way -- knowing both, do you have a choice? -- and a raucous, forthright battle march becomes as symbolic of displacement and general nuttiness as the "Twilight Zone" theme.
Pictures change the meanings of words, but not as directly or totally as leaving out those words altogether. A couple of years ago Wrangler Jeans offered a commercial that was, visually and conceptually, a forerunner of the Hilfiger ad: pretty teens in expensive jeans, athleticism without sweat, a billowing American flag, enough said. The song was Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son," and the lyric was this: "Some folks are born made to wave the flag / Ooh, they're red white and blue." Then, with an awkward splice, we skipped several key lines and went straight to the guitar break. In context the break was a nervous but measured pause, a slow feel of the polemical blade. Out of context, it was a scrap of junkyard funk. It sounded fine, but the complaint got cut: "But when the band plays 'Hail to the Chief' / Ooh, they're pointing the cannon at you."
Madison Avenue, that gaping vacuum of human values, exercised some bold historical revisionism here. Anyone who knows anything about John Fogerty knows that "Fortunate Son" is a livid protest against senatorial privilege, nepotism and unaccountability, flag-waving tax chiselers, and patriots who always call for someone else's sacrifice. Madison Avenue knew that a large part of its viewership would know exactly how the song was being twisted, turned away from its targets and onto itself, like a congenital frowner forced to undergo plastic surgery for a permanent smile. The act was that grotesque, that brazen. Madison Avenue didn't care. The ad would work or it wouldn't, and the marketplace would tell.
It's difficult to know just how to feel when pop songs and the various histories they hold (social, political, cultural, personal) are surgically altered, because pop culture has always been a phenomenon of ethical relativism. To participate in it consciously and love it critically require constant recalibration of one's compass: Every issue has at least two sides. Pop by its democratic nature has destroyed barriers and prejudices (good), yet by its capitalistic nature has always been available for cooptation by the power elites (bad). Pop stars inspire our best energies and make us feel alive (good); yet virtually all have committed personal offenses and ethical outrages we would never accept from those close to us (bad). Pop's consumers are able to select from a panoply of musical and stylistic options (good); but because millions of other consumers are also involved, engaging with pop often means putting up with other people's dumb infatuations, from The Bay City Rollers to "The Macarena" (very bad).
Nor is this merely a measure of how debased things have become, of how low we've sunk since pop's glory days -- whenever you think those were. In any kind of historical perspective, the contradictions of pop culture have always obtained as they obtain now. Pop was never pure, damn it: Colonel Tom Parker sent Elvis's Cadillac on tour, Brian Epstein signed off on Beatle talcum powder, and Rolling Stone once offered free roach-clips as a subscription premium. Today Shania Twain sings for Target and Bob Dylan has an exclusive deal with Starbucks. But wait, Target gives back to the community, and Dylan is Dylan … Pop-wise, you've got to grade on the curve: Hold the culture, its practitioners, and its consumers to too rigid a standard of purity, and we all fail.
Yet a lot of us go back and forth on the point. We resist embracing pop culture as a pop culture, a cult of popularity, of esteem measured largely in dollars, much of its history written not upon clouds of glory but in ledgers of banks. One commercialization draws a shrug and smirk ("Is there anything they can't make into a commercial?"), while another crosses a line we may not have known existed until someone erased it ("Come on, 'Fortunate Son' wasn't about that at all").
There's an ethical hang-up that prevents many of us from simply accepting this chaotic, imperfect, vigorous state of affairs -- from, as The Band once put it, taking what we need and leaving the rest -- and it is basically a product of the 1960s. It's the idea that a pop song, particularly one we happen to treasure, or believe distills important values, should not be used to sell pop products.
Obviously this resistance is attractive because it appeals to our sense that not everything is relative, that some verities escape the ethical stew. We're holding bits of ourselves -- heart, values, viscera -- above the chaotic fray in the form of beloved songs. But in so doing, we're also demanding that everyone else recognize our personal bits as inviolate. Don't touch them. Don't even look at them funny. That's when cherishing music becomes a waste of positive passion, a miserly mission -- given, once again, the context that pop culture inevitably, uniquely constructs. What cultural commissar or committee of cool will decide which songs are available for exploitation and which are not? Which artists need defending from the taint of commercialism and which don't? Nike were once assailed for using The Beatles' "Revolution" to sell running shoes; but no furor broke when The Beach Boys' "California Girls" vivified a shampoo ad. Additionally, this anti-commercial bias is a very white thing: I can't remember any controversy over a black artist's music being used in advertising. In fact, back when those Budweiser frogs were crawling around to the tune of Bob Marley's "Jammin'," most people thought it was really funny.
A broader question is, what will you do about those millions who don't share your biases? What can you do, beyond recoiling and retreating, exiling yourself from the culture that helped make you? And what will you do about ads that take controversial songs and declaw them in the service of moving merchandise or colonizing American leisure time?
I can think of three perspectives that allow embrace of this sometimes funny, sometimes offensive pop process without necessitating spiritual surrender to it:
One is to recognize that even a distorted, evasive ad may have the effect of alerting listeners to musics, and histories, they wouldn't otherwise have known. Columnist Mark Morford of SFGate.com has written of discovering the lovely, disturbing folk-rock of the late Nick Drake via a 2000 commercial for the Volkswagen Cabrio. The song in question, "Pink Moon," sounded in its edited form like a whispered reverie for a moonlit night, simple and beautiful. Except it's actually a terse, vengeful vision of doomsday -- as Morford's research revealed. "But hey," he asked, "if it fits the mood and sounds good and sells more Cabrios and ultimately gets Mr. Drake some posthumous glory and appreciation, who's complaining?" A lie always has the potential of exposing the truth: surely there are some who now know, where they didn't before, what "Volunteers" and "Fortunate Son" are really saying.
Another perspective is that of recontextualization. Exactly 10 years ago, Greil Marcus expressed delight that Michael Jackson had leased "Revolution" to Nike, because it would be interesting to see "if [the] song can stand up to the ruination of its context" -- i.e., survive being shorn of all piety, nostalgia, unique history. The resulting commercial, which showed a multicultural succession of boomer types running and sweating, suffering for their bodies, just doing it, should have been a natural. Instead it was awful. The music, recognizable on the instant as nothing but itself, all Lennon scream and Beatle blitz, simply did not connect with the appeal of the product. Most blatantly lacking was the soft skin of reassurance any song needs to be an effective selling tool, the implication of all good jingles that "it's gonna be all right" -- despite song and ad climaxing with exactly those words. Even stripped of context, the raw, desperately conflicted rocker communicated -- more, perhaps, than it ever had before -- agitation and rage.
Did it stand up? Nike's license expired, and the commercial vanished. I heard "Revolution" the other day and it almost burned my ears off.
Finally, you can laugh. Madison Avenue, that realm of Hades where Satan himself will not venture, came up with the idea of using Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" to advertise Carnival Cruise Lines. The commercials are a hit, the music ubiquitous: "Here comes Johnny Yen again, with a [SPLICE] lust for life--" What a diabolical inspiration! Do the thousands of middle-aged Middle Americans who sail on Carnival every year know that that [SPLICE] contains the lines, "with the liquor and drugs, and the flesh machine, I know he's gonna do another striptease . . . " Would they care? Does it matter? In pop terms, it makes every kind of sense. Only a dunderhead doesn't understand why Carnival excised those lewd lines, and only a mirthless martinet will not laugh at the ironic distance between what the song truly is and how it is being used. You think Iggy isn't laughing?
So pull down your pants and slide on the ice. It's all part of pop culture. It has to be, if we're to call it a culture at all. Anyway, Carnival has already blessed TV viewers with Kathie Lee Gifford and many of its passengers with stomach virus. Don't ask them to add moral turpitude to their list of offenses.
Devin McKinney is the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
