Stolen Text.

[Guest Neubeatz]

Maybe rock n' roll finally died, really and truly and once and for all, roughly a decade ago, when Microsoft shelled out a whopping and still quite ludicrous $10 million to Jagger & Co. for the use of the Stones' classic "Start Me Up" for the massive overblown launch of the utterly awful and terrifically bug-addled Windows 95.

And maybe that sad epitaph was writ even larger a few years back when stodgy old Cadillac bought the rights to Zeppelin's manic mega-anthem "Rock n' Roll" for use in hawking the wildly mediocre CTS sedan to wealthy boho yuppies, all of whom vaguely remember inhaling back in the '70s and who might've once believed Page & Plant to be demigods but who now only fantasize about owning a riding lawn mower and having sex once a month and glimpsing the babysitter's nipples through her Avril Lavigne T-shirt.

Did you cringe at all when you heard Iggy Pop's fabulous "Lust for Life" during that commercial for the utter dystopian nightmare that is Royal Caribbean cruises? Did you laugh in a bitter and dejected sort of way when you read about that PR firm that wanted to use Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" to market a hemorrhoid cream?

Did a small but significant part of your rebellious antiestablishment anticorporate soul get slapped like a drunk Hilton sister when you first heard The Who's "Tommy" used to hawk Clarinex or Sweet's '70s glam-rock masterpiece "Ballroom Blitz" used to sell Nissans?

Because make no mistake, there is no longer any even the remotest argument that says cool rebellious artistic integrity still exists as any sort of separate and distinct category from crass commercial whoredom.

Not that it ever really did, I know, but it was a wonderful delusion, wasn't it? Especially in music, especially in rock music, where the universal belief was once held that rock n' roll really could change the world and affect minds and rejuvenate souls, largely by defying and nonconforming and by screaming out against injustice and cube-farm-itis and the very hollow and heartless megacorporate establishments that have now wholly co-opted it and turned it against itself.

To be sure, art and commerce have always been wicked and bizarrely fused Siamese twins, ever connected and interdependent, but they used to bicker and fight and at least pretend to hate to be in the same room together. Now, of course, they smile coyly and pant lustily for each other and make out like desperate Mormons.

Bowie's "Heroes" is used to sell flowers for FTD. Hendrix's drug-addled "Purple Haze" moves cases of Pepsi. James Brown's "Sex Machine" wants you to drink Gatorade. The Cure's "Pictures of You" is all about HP digital photography. Styx's ultra-cheeseball "Lady" gets abused in the "Happy Cows" ad for, appropriately, California cheese.

Intel used Blur's "Song 2" to sell Pentiums. George Thoroughgood's "Bad to the Bone" was used to sell everything from Crispix cereal to aspirin. And of course, in the longest-running and most obnoxious example to date, Chevy still somehow refuses to knock it off with Bob Seger's "Like a Rock" to hawk bigass trucks to monosyllabic Midwestern dads who dream of piloting their tanks over giant muddy boulders as they haul the kids to Wal-Mart.

(The Stones, by the way, have gone on to waste the lovely "You Can't Always Get What you Want" on Coke's obnoxious C2 cola campaign and "Jumpin' Jack Flash" for the new Chevy Corvette. Apparently, Mick wants to have more money than God).

The list is truly endless. Sinatra (Visa) to Tom Petty (ESPN), the Clash (Pontiac, Jaguar) to Screamin' Jay Hawkins (Levi's), Queen (Coke) to Earth, Wind and Fire (the Gap), Paul Oakenfold (Volvo) to Celine Dion (Chrysler), Ted Nugent (Cingular), Stevie Wonder (Red Lobster), Andrew W.K. (Expedia, Coors Light) to the Shins (McDonald's). It goes on. And on. And on.

(My favorite bizarrely ironic musical-bedfellow example has to be that nastygood grunge tune "Awake," by heavily tattooed and happily pierced pagan n-metal dudes Godsmack, now used in recruitment ads for the U.S. Navy. Ah yes. Kill me now).

Sometimes there's appropriate synergy. Sometimes truly (or even partially) hip companies use truly hip music to sell truly hip products, and it all makes some sort of sense and doesn't openly offend your sensibilities all that much and perhaps the most obvious example is Apple's iPod, a deliriously popular must-have music-delivery gadget whose ads feature some suitably stylish indie music, from Black Eyed Peas to Jet to the Propellerheads, from N.E.R.D. to Ozomatli to Steriogram.

Haven't heard of some of those artists? Cool. You're not supposed to. Even hipper that way. (All this aside from the whole recent U2/iPod spectacle, which raised the bar entirely by actually creating a band-branded product. Now, that's synergy).

But then comes those moments when your soul is sort of raked across the coals as you hear a classic, epic song that actually sort of meant something sincere and cool and the tiniest bit profound to millions of fans, and represented everything that corporate profiteering did not, and it just makes you sad.

And I truly thought I had really stopped caring all that much about pop music used in TV commercials until this recent visceral hit, the deep pang in my rock n' roll heart that struck like an ice pick when I heard Aerosmith's epic ballad "Dream On" in an ad for ... Buick.

Oh man. And you think: Have they gone too far? Is this a sign of the apocalypse? What's next, Metallica's "Fade to Black" to sell draperies? Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" to sell kiddie Prozac? Why not?

Sure there's irony. Sure commercials are now used as launching pads for new and undiscovered artists. Ad execs have apparently tuned into the fact that hip music can make the most tepid product look hip. Especially, for some reason, cars. VW, Lincoln, Mitsubishi, Volvo, Nissan, Hyundai, even Hummer have jumped this particularly bizarre bandwagon, using music from everyone from Hooverphonic to Modest Mouse, from the Chemical Brothers to Mr. Scruff, from Kinky to Overseer to sell cars, giving these relatively obscure artists unbelievable exposure as fans across the nation plaster music blogs with questions of "Hey, what was that cool song they used in that annoying commercial?" And, lo, a fan base is born.

(This precedent was set, by the way, by Moby, who, after recording probably a dozen techno albums over the years and languishing in relative obscurity, finally popped huge by selling every single song on his excellent 1999 "Play" CD for TV commercial use. Did he sell out? Sort of. Did he gain a million new fans who never would have heard of him otherwise? Definitely).

(Oh, and the Nick Drake resurgence is due largely to VW employing Drake's song about nuclear holocaust, "Pink Moon," to sell Cabrios. Which goes to show you, never underestimate the power of the TV commercial: they can even raise the dead.)

All well and good. I am all for new artists trying to reach wider audiences by whatever means possible and if that now consists of using great music in largely dumbass TV commercials, well, go for it, because it sure beats trying to get your song on the reality-show wasteland that is MTV or on some dumbed-down preprogrammed Clear Channel station that cares about as much for good music as a Republican cares for trees.

But this truth must be stated and reiterated and finalized, once and for all: Rock music has lost perhaps its most vital ingredient. It is no longer about rebellion. It is still, gratefully, perhaps eternally, about sex, and drugs, and money and power and girls and depression and loneliness and sex and angst and sex. Which is why ad companies love it.

But anarchy? Defiance? Revolution? That raw and potent and transformative feeling you maybe used to get via listening to some honest emotion-addled rock song, the notion that by wrapping yourself in the swirling chords of "Gallows Pole" or the delicious crunch of "Back in Black" or even the digital mellowness of modern electronica you'd suddenly been given a magic, moist, sexed-up ticket to transcend all the BS and all the BushCo and all the commercial crassness of the world? Not anymore, baby. You no longer get to transcend. You just get to participate.

Video may have killed the radio star, but TV commercials nailed the coffin shut.

[psydoll]

I enjoyed reading that I did

[steve corps]

me too.

pant lustily is a great line, i may nick that for myself.