But I turn on the tele this fine morning to see some kind of SUV roaming the desert while their faux-sage existential "Do You Realize?" plays. And that's pretty sad, especially since it's a song that (in a very straightforward, plain way) talks about the fragility and temporal nature of life. Apparently which is solved by a sweet ride. On the plus side for the ad execs, they did successfully edit the song to NOT include the line "DO you realize that everyone you know someday will die?" Because, as all relevant ad research suggests, Sartre was not big on purchasing SUVs.
But it got progressively worse, because then I saw a University of Phoenix (the online university, not our neighbor) commercial featuring a New Pornographers song. And this is even more crushing in a classic indie-hoard sense, because while the FLips are relatively huge (what with the 90210 and Charmed appearances and such) and their tie-ins to corporations are more or less par for the course, when a lower level (though still, great and popular in their own right) band like the NPs start selling their songs, you just get these desperate starving artist images that make you envision the band as forced into this act of self-degradation. The situation, that they cannot subsist on their artistry in and of itself, is an unpleasant one. Here's the ad that continued my sad morning:
But then you use the power of google (thanks Zach!), and you see that there's actually a pretty funny back story to this, that Carl Newman (NP frontman) got a call from the U of P and, thinking it was just the local city university, said "sure, use our song, it'll only show in the Southwest." Wrong. Anyhoo, cute story, plus in the interview he rips on Of Montreal and their sold song to Outback Steakhouse, which is actually worse because at least the U of P commercial is just saying "hey Yeah hey yeah," whereas the Outback commercial:
Actually substitutes "Let's go Outback tonight" for "Let's pretend we don't exist," which is rock-authenticity heresy of the first order, the equivalent of Mick Jagger crying that he can't get no Snickers Satisfaction. And that's bad. So the NPs don't look so "bad" anymore. But I still have to refuse to be swayed by tragic circumstances, that just because something is becoming ubiquitous - Modest Mouse, the Shins, Postal Service, the entire O.C. catalog have all "sold out" to advertising and mass market capitalism - does not mean that it's not a sorry development. The sacred space is gone, and even though it's a falsely ingrained impression that any of this was ever sacred to begin with - it was ALWAYS about ticket sales and albums, no matter how tempting the true-to-his-heart indie rocker narrative strikes you - it's still sad to have it two times removed from whatever magical feeling it once engendered, to have it forever stuck to greasy burgers like so many artery walls. HA!
On the plus side, when you search for these videos, you occasionally run into something brutally endearing like this one that includes the entire above-mentioned NP song. So it seems that this kind of thing can save us, even though it's painfully clear that things have degraded to the point where nothing can save us. Fall in love with the inauthenticity:
On a wildly unrelated note - Beck is Back! Yes she's back! Sudden urges to do Clark Cougar mat drills are suppressed! I think I make this joke every time she leaves and returns. Anyhoo, she's back and vetting in the Sunny Azz, so things are back to their normal selves, indie-rock commercials and all. More later.
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