As someone who spent 15 of 25 years in radio playing classic rock, I have to get this off my chest. I’ve never been one to participate in a boycott—there’s something inherently silly about cutting off your nose to spite your face—but if this proliferation of classic rock as product jingles doesn’t stop soon I may be forced to go ballistic in a Peter Finch, I’m-mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-gonna-take-it-anymore kind of way.
   Do these ad guys really get paid for coming up with such Pabulum as Cingular’s use of Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill,” Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” on Nextel ads, or the Black Eyed Pea’s “My Humps” on Virgin Mobile ads? Is there no creativity to be found these days on Madison Avenue? I think not!
   I have a hard time believing Debbie Harry had a dust mop, much less a Swiffer in mind when she penned “One Way or Another” back in 1979. Sure, the lyrics, “One way or another, I’m gonna gitcha, gitcha, gitcha” lend themselves to a product that picks up dust the way a Swiffer does, but there have got to be more creative ways to sell cleaning products.
   As a community, we could come up with several reasons to pound Michael Jackson into the clay like so many tent stakes, but the most obvious reason, in my book, is his blatant disregard for musical history. Back in 1987, just four years after he took the world by storm with Thriller—thereby becoming one of the richest men on the planet—Jackson sold the rights to The Beatles “Revolution” to Nike for use in a shoe commercial.
   After out-bidding Paul McCartney for the ownership of most of the Beatles catalog, Jackson found himself in a position to do whatever the hell he wanted with the songs he “owned.” Despite an uproar from Beatles fans—including Paul McCartney, who complained that “the song was about revolution, not bloody tennis shoes”—the song began the modern era of popular music in advertising.
   In 2005, McCartney himself appeared in a commercial for Fidelity Investments, along with his song “Band on the Run.” Fidelity also sponsored his concert tour, so perhaps it was more of an “I’ll-scratch-your-back-if-you-scratch-mine” kind of thing than actual greed. I like to think so, anyway.
   Perhaps one of the biggest offenders is Led Zeppelin, whose “Rock and Roll” has been used as background music for Cadillac’s Escalade line. Not that I’d ever buy an Escalade (or a Cadillac, for that matter), but their use of this song—regardless of the fact that they probably paid millions for it—would push me over to the NO side if I were even thinking about buying the thug’s choice of SUV.    For one thing, the song has nothing whatsoever to do with cars. If anything, the lyrics “Been a long time since I rock and rolled / been a long time since I did the stroll” imply an old fogie who’s too far along in years for that type of music and any type of cool car, so, instead, he drives a Cadillac    Escalade. For another thing, it’s LED ZEPPELIN, for Christ sake! Please tell me the most influential rock band ever isn’t so broke its members need to raise extra cash by selling the rights to one of their greatest songs.
   Honorable Mention in the Extreme Sellout division goes to The Who, a band that went against everything it stood for—and sang about in their classic “My Generation”—and allowed the use of its “Happy Jack” in a Hummer commercial. Shame on you, Pete Townshend!
   And it really wouldn’t hurt these ad agencies to get creative and come up with something original again. They should all take a lesson from Coca-Cola, which made millions by using “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony)” in one of their most popular ads back in the early ‘70s.
   After dropping its “Things Go Better with Coke” campaign in late 1969, McCann-Erickson, Coke’s advertising agency, replaced it in 1979 with “It’s the Real Thing.”
   “ I’d Like To Teach the World to Sing,” was co-written by Billy Davis, of McCann-Erickson, who had toured as a member of the Four Tops and wrote several songs for Motown Records, Roger Cook, who wrote “Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)” for the Hollies, and Bill Backer, who wrote the “Things Go Better” jingle as well as the jingle for “The Real Thing” campaign.
   The song became so popular as a soda-pop jingle that requests for it demanded it become a radio single. The New Seekers, who sang the commercial version, were called on to record the single, which removed the brand name and became a top-10 hit.
   Of course, the advertising world is completely unable to leave well enough alone: in 2005, Coca-Cola Zero used the tune, but changed the words to the much hipper (and even more irritating) “I’d like to teach the world to chill.” Good Lord!

By Adam Goldstein  golstea@mscd.edu