We’re inured to it now — even those of us who remember a time when weirdo rock music, even of the most commercially popular sort, wasn’t used in television advertisement. But every once in awhile, there is an odd or interesting enough juxtaposition of the content of the song to the company being advertised… or even just to the fact that someone deemed this appropriate to be part of an ad, that it makes me, at least, sit up and take notice (and wonder why no one else ever seems to).
The first big fuss, way back, was about The Beatles song Revolution being used in an ad for Nike (the song was owned by Michael Jackson) in 1987. Revolution wasn’t a particularly revolutionary song (“Don’t you know it’s going to be all right?”), but McCartney made some unhappy noises about its use (Lennon being unavailable). McCartney’s songs have since been in a number of ads.
A stranger note was stuck by the use of the Jefferson Airplane’s Yippie-esque marching song, Volunteers in an E*Trade ad, which I think may have been aired in the late ’90s, if memory serves, or it may have been later. Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life to advertise Royal Caribbean Cruise was pretty strange if you know the lyrics, but in contrast with Volunteers, the songs’ more radical or distinctive lyrics weren’t a part of the ad.
The truly weirdest thing I ever saw mixing rock with advertising was — I swear to my own memory of this — a Goodyear Tires ad using Venus In Furs by the Velvet Underground. Now, I find on YouTube only a Dunlop ad from Great Britain, which is peculiar enough, but this ad is visually strange whereas the Goodyear ad was visually straightforward, and therefor did not call any attention to the content of the song. I saw it once and never again.
And in 2014, we had David Bowie’s harpsichord remake of “I’d Rather Be High” for Louis Vuitton with its chorus
I’d rather be high
I’d rather be flying
I’d rather be dead
Or out of my head
Than training these guns on those men in the sand
I’d rather be high
So there’s the contemporary anticolonial war undercurrent (we naturally think of western soldiers in Arabic territories), but what really sticks out like a sore thumb with a tab of ecstasy on it is the well enunciated “I’d Rather Be High.” The French Revolution-era Court of Louis XVI party decadence visuals are just there. Interesting, but more Louis Vuitton than I’d rather be high. But then, at the end, the fashionable and contemporary beauty — model Arizona Muse sitting at the piano gazes up rapturously at the Michaelangeloesque ceiling, reaches slowly — as though, in fact, high, slightly out-of-body, for her fashionable LV pocketbook and then, outdoors, gazes at the camera with eyes that seem, well, high in a psychedelic sense, a bit like she’s seeing you better than you’re seeing her, and maybe having casually drifted up to that Michaelangelesque ceiling, she’s now a tad the chic urban visionary, and at the same time she’s not experiencing quite enough boundary between her self, the camera and whatever’s behind it.
What’s interesting here isn’t any residual purity anyone may have about rock in advertising. That ship sailed long ago. What’s interesting is the conflation of being high… on drugs… with the desired product. Which has been done over and over again for years, but never enunciated, clearly, lyrically, until now.
So that’s it then. A cultural watershed? Wanting to be high… even being high… it’s normal as wanting to be chic, which is… how normal? Not sure. But the whole negotiation around drugs, their legalization, their use, and maybe even the more liminal states that some of them sometimes provide are coming into the open. Maybe? In most peculiar ways.
I’m not getting the vibe of any liminal states from this so much as equating the escapist aspect of say, opioids, and the comfort that arises from that escapism, with the product. It’s less transcendent and mind opening and more “World got you down? Bludgeon your senses and buy our product! You’ll feel better when you do.” And considering how profitable it’d be if people started using a product as reliably and regularly as they use opioids, it makes sense that a company would want that association formed.
Psychedelics are a trickier thing to wrangle into advertising for the same reason they proved ineffective as mind control agents back in the MKULTRA days. They’re also if anything increasingly going invisible in the overculture, with police even in major cities being of the belief that LSD simply no longer exists (don’t worry; it does). I’m not sure I care to cast a value judgement about this development, but it does seem to follow a trajectory that Dr. Leary predicted, in that with the further development of technology, people are opting for other ways of changing their consciousness than via the chemicals of old. And the spiral unfolds.
well said, cykros. happy trails. +