 |
Most bizarre music/commerical pairings? |
Tiki-bot
Tiki Socialite
Joined: Jun 24, 2002
Posts: 1345 |  Posted: 2005-03-27 2:05 pm Permalink
Shag is an interesting and relevant example. His art is not only sold as "art" per se, but is used to sell all kinds of consumer items. Most certainly he started doing his artwork out of simple desire to do create something he thought was cool. But then he licensed the hell out of it. Is that called "selling out" or "whoring"? It's no different than a musician allowing a car company to license their music. It's a business and he has a product to sell and wants to make a living doing what he enjoys. More power to him.
_________________
|
Thomas
Tiki Socialite
Joined: Mar 15, 2005
Posts: 369
From: Lake Mojave
| Posted: 2005-03-27 3:09 pm Permalink
There was some show on this topic, maybe on NPR, quite a while ago. The most hilarious thing they played was Iron Butterfly doing an ad for Ban roll-on antiperspirant, many years ago. Please imagine this with their weird art-rock / heavy metal sound, and the lead singer's husky voice singing (shouting): "Ban doesn't wear off ... As the day wears on!..." It was such a bizarre thing to hear, I have never forgotten it.
|
Kono
Tiki Socialite
Joined: Oct 08, 2003
Posts: 1266
From: Orlando
| Posted: 2005-03-27 5:32 pm Permalink
Reading this thread today for the first time, my initial thought is you guys sure watch A LOT OF TV! Seriously, I don't know 25% of the commercials you all are referring to and I'm not even one of those anti-TV people like Bong.
When I do hear a commercial with good music, I just figure that the ad company has someone cool on the payroll that just wants to inject a little taste and goodness into their work. Expose an unknown artist to the masses, that sort of thing.
As far as who's a whore and who's not, 99% of you all have sold out to "The Man," why hold the heros of your youth to higher standards than you hold yourself? You know that your priorities today are not the same as they were 5, 10, 20 years ago. Neither are Eric Clapton's or Iggy Pop's. To want your heros to be perpetual rebellious teenagers while you grow up, get a job and buy a house is a bit selfish.
But that's OK, I know how you feel. I too get a jolt when I hear a favorite non-mainstream song used for a TV ad. Not so oddly enough, whether or not I have indignation about the song/product pairing is highly correlated to how I feel about the product. The "Lust for Life" cruise commercial is a good example. I don't go on cruises, so I was like WTF is this? But I just figured that someone cool worked on the ad. The opposite would be when Mountain Dew came out with a television commercial a couple of years ago that used the Supersuckers' "Four Stroke." I loved that ad but then again I was drinking a lot of Mountain Dew at the time. Had Prudential Insurance used the same music I'd have probably hated it but who knows? I've got enough real life things to worry about to care about TV ads.
I hear that Smith and Wesson have licensed Fugazi's "Repeater" to use with a series of TV ads in South America and former Soviet republics in Eastern Europe.
_________________
|
TikiGardener
Tiki Socialite
Joined: Mar 24, 2002
Posts: 1359
From: 1st website dedicated to Tiki Gardens
| Posted: 2005-03-27 5:41 pm Permalink
I hear that Smith and Wesson have licensed Fugazi's "Repeater" to use with a series of TV ads in South America and former Soviet republics in Eastern Europe.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Brilliant Irony... Now that I can appreciate.
|
TikiGardener
Tiki Socialite
Joined: Mar 24, 2002
Posts: 1359
From: 1st website dedicated to Tiki Gardens
| Posted: 2005-03-27 5:46 pm Permalink
There was some show on this topic, maybe on NPR, quite a while ago. The most hilarious thing they played was Iron Butterfly doing an ad for Ban roll-on antiperspirant, many years ago. Please imagine this with their weird art-rock / heavy metal sound, and the lead singer's husky voice singing (shouting): "Ban doesn't wear off ... As the day wears on!..." It was such a bizarre thing to hear, I have never forgotten it.
---------------------------------------
Don't forget Jefferson Airplanes Levis Stretch Jeans ad. And the Electric Prunes Lays Potato Chips ad. But at least both bands wrote the jingles. "Crunchy Munchy Potato Chip" is about the lamest thing you've ever heard.
|
TikiGardener
Tiki Socialite
Joined: Mar 24, 2002
Posts: 1359
From: 1st website dedicated to Tiki Gardens
| Posted: 2005-03-27 5:48 pm Permalink
Who made me king of declaring all things good or bad? Ah..hem. I don't know, why don't you tell me about when you started wearing the crown.
-------------------------------------------
Still my favorite quote on tiki central, bar none.
|
stuff-o-rama
Tiki Socialite
Joined: Nov 20, 2003
Posts: 751
From: Central Coast of California
| Posted: 2005-03-27 9:45 pm Permalink
Just saw an ad for Payless shoes with Luscious Jackson's "Naked Eye" playing in the background. Kooky!
|
Phillip Roberts
Tiki Socialite
Joined: Sep 09, 2003
Posts: 1489
From: OAHU, Hawaii.
| Posted: 2005-04-07 12:12 am Permalink
[ This Message was edited by: filslash 2008-09-13 12:18 ]
|
SES
Tiki Socialite
Joined: Sep 14, 2003
Posts: 992 | Posted: 2005-04-08 3:20 pm Permalink
I cringe every time that coke ad comes on and I hear them sing:
"Put the Lime in the Coke You Nut"
Arrrgh!
Mute mute mute...
|
mrs. pineapple
Tiki Socialite
Joined: May 12, 2003
Posts: 611 | Posted: 2005-04-15 10:52 am Permalink
Last night I heard Jane's Addiction on a Coors commercial. bah!
|
mrs. pineapple
Tiki Socialite
Joined: May 12, 2003
Posts: 611 | Posted: 2005-04-15 11:06 am Permalink
Quote:
|
On 2005-03-27 13:45, TikiGardener wrote:
If you allow an advertising company to use you art to sell a product. Well the word that best describes what you do starts with a W.
|
|
I think the reality is that musicians don't own the rights to their music. The publisher owns the rights. I have lotsa friends in the music biz, some more succesful than others. They give up the rights when they start out, to pay for the record to get made & distributed and to pay for the tour to support the record. I think that's why you hear of so many musicians being totally broke, even though they've sold millions of records. Music is a business, you gotta have money to make money. When I hear the Ramones in a Pepsi commercial or the Clash in a Jaguar commercial, it's sad, but I know Joey or Joe didn't sell the rights the that song, BMI or whoever owns it did.
When Michael Jackson gives up the Beatles Catalog to Bank of America to pay off his legal fees and the mortgage on Neverland, the shit's really gonna hit the fan. But this is America, we reap what we sow.
_________________
"You're the mayor of shark city, people think you want the beaches open."
|
TikiGardener
Tiki Socialite
Joined: Mar 24, 2002
Posts: 1359
From: 1st website dedicated to Tiki Gardens
| Posted: 2005-04-15 11:18 am Permalink
Most musicians don't own their own music. Prime example is The Sonics "Have Love Will Travel". They got screwed contracually by the owner of the label. So he gets rich, Range Rover sells product, and The Sonics get the short end of the stick.
I don't believe in selling out, but it bugs me even more when someone appropriates my youth to sell product, and screwing musicians and artists while doing so.
|
tikifish
Tiki Socialite
Joined: Mar 25, 2002
Posts: 2720
From: Toronto,Canada
| Posted: 2005-04-17 01:45 am Permalink
Again, as someone who does this evil job for a living (buying music from artists to use in commercials) , I am not out to ruin your memories, fuck with your sacred bands, or piss you off. I am just out to make the best commercial I can with what I a have. And its a proven fact people like commercials with 'known' music better than unknown. Now, having said that, I live in Canada, and mu budgets usually cannot affford big name bands for our spots. I give most of my business to a music house in Toronto called Eggplant who write original music fo my commercials, but sometimes a known track is needed, And if those people want to sell it to me, well then we both are happy.
Bit then again, I only write GOOD commercials. I still do cringe every time the Swiffer spot comes on with the Devo song.. glood lord!
|
TikiGardener
Tiki Socialite
Joined: Mar 24, 2002
Posts: 1359
From: 1st website dedicated to Tiki Gardens
| Posted: 2005-04-17 11:01 am Permalink
There used to be a group called Fox Tracks ( I think that was the name ) from somewhere in the northern midwest. They did commercial jingles. At some point they did an album of commercial parodies. I vaguely remember hearing some of them on Dr Dimento back in the late 70's.
|
TikiGardener
Tiki Socialite
Joined: Mar 24, 2002
Posts: 1359
From: 1st website dedicated to Tiki Gardens
| Posted: 2005-04-18 12:09 pm Permalink
Graffiti Legend Is Back on the Street
By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: April 18, 2005
He arrived on foot, and on time, wearing heavily grease-stained beige overalls and boots. He seemed to be in his late 30's or early 40's, with thinning light brown hair. He had the windburned eyes and blackened fingernails of an ironworker, along with the vaguely feral intensity of someone on the lam.
But he hardly looked like the kind of shadowy revolutionary figure who had once declared that his goal was to "tear the city to pieces and rebuild it." Now, he says, smiling weakly, "I stop at stop signs; I pay taxes; I get up and go to work and get a paycheck."
In the New York graffiti world of the early 1990's, he was everywhere and larger than life, sometimes literally: the name Revs, usually accompanied by that of his partner in crime, Cost, could be found scrawled, wheat-pasted or painted in gargantuan white letters on overpasses, walls and roofs from SoHo to northern New Jersey. The work upended many traditional notions of graffiti and helped inspire a new generation of so-called street artists.
Then in late 1994 Cost was arrested for vandalism. Revs went underground and left the city for Alaska. And when he returned, his work went mostly underground, too - into the subway, where he painted long, feverish diary entries worthy of a Dostoyevsky character on dozens of walls hidden deep inside the tunnels. (He called this a personal mission and said he did not care if anybody else saw them.)
But over the last few years, he has re-emerged into public view and reincarnated himself in a way few of his fans ever expected, as a legitimate and (mostly) law-abiding sculptor. He has made dozens of works using construction-grade steel and other metal parts and has sought the permission of building owners to weld and bolt them to the outsides of buildings in the meatpacking district, the East Village, the Gowanus Canal area and Dumbo, where the gentrifying but still half-deserted streets have become a veritable Revs gallery.
Yet unlike many former graffiti artists who have turned their street credibility into successful careers as graphic designers or youth-market branding gurus, Revs has continued to shun, angrily, the worlds of conventional art and commerce. He makes his living about as far from the art world as possible, as a union ironworker, surrounded by co-workers who mostly have no idea of his reputation as a near-mythical deity of the graffiti world. His only gallery show, in Philadelphia in 2000, was to raise money so he could pay a lawyer after he was arrested for the subway graffiti. Otherwise, he has refused to sell his work or take commissions for it.
"To me," he said recently, in a rare interview, "once money changes hands for art, it becomes a fraudulent activity."
He also continues to avoid publicity. In order to find him, a reporter contacted several graffiti aficionados, most of whom warned that Revs, whoever he was, would probably not cooperate. Calls eventually led to Julia Solis, an author and photographer who specializes in charting forgotten and subterranean New York. She agreed to pass a message along to Revs. A day later, a call came to the reporter's home from a man with a thick New York accent who agreed to an early-morning meeting in Brooklyn, at an intersection almost beneath the Manhattan Bridge, on the condition that his photograph not be taken and his name and age not be revealed.
He apologized for the cloak-and-dagger routine but said that his anonymity was still his most prized possession. "I don't want to become nobody; I just want to do what I do," he said, stressing, as a kind of implied message to the police, "I'm not trying to stage a major comeback or anything." (The New York Police Department confirms that he has not been on the radar screen of the Citywide Vandals Task Force since his arrest in 2000.)
But Revs fans can be forgiven for thinking a comeback is in the works. Over the last several months, pictures of the sculptures have shown up on several street-art Web sites. This has prompted graffiti cognoscenti to scour the streets to find - and in a few places, to wrench loose and steal - the works, most of which are clustered in or close to Manhattan, although some have been discovered as far afield as Queensboro Plaza.
"He's huge, you can't deny it," said Will Sherman, a photographer who operates a Web site called untitledname.com and has scouted out several Revs works recently. "I have a lot of respect for him not just as a graffiti artist or street artist but as an artist in general."
Peter Sutherland, another photographer, spent a year tracking Revs down. Last year, in a book of portraits of graffiti artists titled "Autograf," he featured a picture of the artist himself, though his face is completely covered by a cap. "I'm a photographer and I don't usually get intimidated or impressed by celebrities," Mr. Sutherland said. "But when I met Revs, I kind of geeked out."
During the recent two-hour interview in Brooklyn, Revs conducted a proud tour of half a dozen of his metal sculptures, only one of which he said he installed without permission: a tall, heavy piece that spells out "Revs," welded several years ago to the top of an abandoned loading dock. Asked how he was able to weld something so large and distinctive to a building without attracting a crowd and eventually a phalanx of police, he shook his head.
"I can't talk about my techniques," he said sternly. "It's a trade secret, you know? It's my cloaking device."
Over the last few years, he said, he has made more than 100 metal pieces, some weighing hundreds of pounds, and he estimated that he has installed about two-thirds of them with permission, including nearly all his most recent sculptures. He says that while he may not be a guerrilla street painter anymore - some of the 1990's wall paintings were more than 10 feet tall in the middle of sheer walls, most likely requiring a harness and ropes to accomplish - he is still a fully committed outsider, and his work will be seen only outside, on New York City streets, as long as he keeps making it.
He kicked one the pieces, made from two-inch-thick steel, part of a column left over from a construction project where he once worked near the Port Authority bus terminal.
"A car can back up into it," he said. "Somebody can get their head cracked open on it. A dog can go on it. Somebody can paint it if they want. It rusts. It's more interesting that way, you know?"
But is it any less interesting because it's legal?
He smiled. "I might still have a few little knickknacks scattered around in places where they're not supposed to be, who knows?" he said. "I'm not commenting on that."
|
|
