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Soulless Corporate Whore Chronicles: Vol. Eight Million
You know what bugs me though, that everyone here who’s in marketing is now thinking the same thing: “Oh, cool, Bill’s going for that Anti-Marketing Dollar. That’s a huge market!” QUIT IT! Don’t turn everything into a dollar sign, please! ...“Oohh, the Plea For Sanity Dollar. Huge! HUGE market! Look at our research.”
-Bill Hicks
Ever since its inception, rock and roll has been a vehicle for rebellion. Its raw, naked energy and aggression have always naturally lent themselves to those who yearned to raise a proud middle finger to the Powers That Be.
And since roughly five minutes after rock and roll’s inception, ad execs have sought to harness its primal, emotive force, strip it of the danger that makes it so powerful in the first place, and use it to sell their crappy products.
Over the years, this has led to frequent bouts of unintentional comedy, as clueless corporate shills buy the licensing rights to songs whose lyrics they’ve obviously never read. Hence we get Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life,” a song about kicking heroin and featuring drunken transvestites and kinky sex, used to sell family vacation cruises; Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” an angry, populist rant about rich men who send the poor off to die in wars they themselves never fight in, enlisted to sell blue jeans; and Nirvana’s “Breed,” a shriek of paranoia at the crushing conformity of middle class life, showing up in a video game commercial.
But the most ridiculous juxtaposition of art and commerce I’ve ever seen has just appeared recently.
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