Commercial Music

Many, many, many moons ago, The Black Eyed Peas rapped, “I see you try to diss our function by stating that we can’t rap. Is it cause we don’t wear Tommy Hilfiger or baseball caps. We don’t use dollars to represent. We just use our inner sense and talent.” Forget for a moment, that these are some of the worst rhyming, most awful rap lyrics ever created, in a song (“Falling Up”) dedicated entirely to how well they can rap. Rappers who write shitty lyrics are like writers who wear ugly clothes: it’s to be expected. The Black Eyed Peas, like many hip-hop groups, are full of awful lyrics, but that’s not what bugs me about them. It’s the way they denounced selling out on their first two albums (Bridging The Gaps and Behind The Front), constantly calling out other groups for being “fake,” shortly before they did a mass-market Dr. Pepper commercial campaign. Soon after, Fergie became a prominent member of the band, and they were off and running, doing every commercial you can possibly imagine.

It was sad seeing one of my early favorite hip-hop groups (pre-Fergie) sell out like that. The Black Eyed Peas were at the forefront of turning hip-hop into commercial music (For the purpose of this entry, commercial music refers to music actually appearing in commercials). The commercialization of hip-hop, something that had flourished outside of MTV and network television prior to the ‘Peas and a few others, was a disturbing trend.

Perhaps my own arrogance and desire to be “hip” wouldn’t allow me to listen to music that had been embraced by the masses. People are stupid. That’s not a gross generalization; I’m fairly certain that if you picked ten people at random between the ages of 12 and 55, from across the United States, a majority of them would watch American Idol. I repeat: People are stupid. And my disgust for mainstream stupid people often leads me to hold stupid opinions of my own, just so I can be different than the masses. It was the mainstream, frat boy success, of talented groups like The Dave Matthews Band, which led me away from rock and towards hip-hop in the first place. Now that hip-hop was mainstream, I found myself running blindly towards a genre which prided itself on having a plethora of bands that most people would never hear: indie rock.

I began to explore indie music, sifting through tons of shit, searching for those elusive incredible bands. Generally when I found them and bragged to my friends, they were already myspace friends with them. For the first time in years, I felt like I was behind the curve on what was hip. In many ways, this only resulted in getting me more interested in the genre. I wanted to be the one cluing my friends into which bands they should be checking out. Unfortunately, advertisers have made sure that will never happen.

A few weeks ago, I begged people on this blog to check out a French group called Nouvelle Vague. I thought I’d discovered a talented, obscure band that I could finally share with my friends. A few days later, I heard their cover of “I Melt With You” on a GMC commercial. Suddenly, I was hyper-aware of all the indie rock suddenly appearing in mainstream television commercials. Bands like The Postal Service, The Shins, Modest Mouse, and Peter Bjorn and John (who will henceforth be known as PB&J per my friend Lauren), were appearing in commercials for UPS, McDonalds, Nissan, Pontiac, AT&T, and (ironically?) Napster.

At first, I thought my disgust was purely selfish. The fact that savvy advertisers were smart enough to hire young people with good taste in music to pick the songs for their commercials, would surely be good for indie rock. The added exposure to cutting edge bands and artists, might inform consumers, schooling them on things they should be checking out. That was certainly the case with those catchy Target ads that feature the chorus, “a little bit more… a little bit more… a little bit more… a little bit more…” After some research, I discovered the song was written by Jamie Lidell; I checked out some of his stuff and it was quite good. The fact that I was getting musical advice from a Target ad wounded my pride, but I tried to set aside my ego and focus on the music.

Then the ads kept running and I heard the music over and over and over again. I mean, that’s the point of an advertisement right? Product branding. If you see a product over and over and over again, and it becomes imbedded in your brain, then you’re more likely to spend your money on it. Using catchy music to sell a product is nothing new; jingles have been around… forever? A while anyway. Catchy indie rocks songs are even better though. Jingles are commercials… you don’t hear them unless you’re watching tv or listening to the radio. Indie songs are everywhere, and if the advertisers do their jobs correctly, every time you hear the 5,6,7,8’s “Woo Hoo” you’ll think of Vonage. That’s the power of branding.

So now, my grievance is far from not being on the cutting edge, has nothing to do with the guile of advertisers trying to educate me on what I should listen to, but rather, commercial music is destroying a genre that I’ve grown to love yet again. Commercial branding is so much worse than the Dave Matthews Band frat boy craze phenomenon… a catchy song/band getting overplayed and becoming irritating from that over-saturation. It’s just a matter of time before I see Tide commercials using The Cold War Kids’ (big ups Preeti) “Hang Me Out To Dry” in one of their commercials. And in doing so, Tide, like every other company that uses an indie rock song to promote it’s product, will help ruin a genre of music which prided itself on being anything but commercial.