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Pop Rock Nation

Category: Commercial-isms

songs-from-commercials

  • Commercial-isms: Lee Jeans vs. The Cars

    Usually, when a company is willing to fork over the licensing fees to use a classic pop song in a commercial, they’ve made some kind of connection between the song’s lyrics and the product they’re selling – even if it’s just a catchphrase removed from its context.  I always thought it was funny how the Disney Cruise ads discreetly cherry-picked Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life”.  But the new ads for Lee Jeans dispense with lyrics altogether in their use of The Cars’ awesome new wave hit “Let’s Go”.  Instead, they pitch an Obama-worthy message about their jeans’ utilitarian qualities and modest price points (as opposed to designer jeans with triple-digit price tags) over the Cars’ distinctive synth-meets-guitar, retro-futuristic hook.

    But just as we expect to hear the dearly departed Benjamin Orr sing “she’s runnin’ away”, or the song’s rallying call “I like the night life, baby!”, or even the handclaps that punctuate the chorus – clap! clap! clap-clap-clap! clap-clap-clap-clap! – or the sci-fi laser show instrumental break that follows them, the poor commercial’s over. This song is the very definition of power pop and I’d be hard-pressed to come up with another song which packs so damn many delicious hooks into three little minutes.  So while it’s nice to hear the little bit of “Let’s Go” we do hear, it’s hard to fight my gut feeling that the song’s been squandered on this ad.
     
    Of course, this got me thinking that “Let’s Go” – one of the Cars’ best (certainly my personal favorite), but maybe not their best known (with “My Best Friend’s Girl” serving as the title of a current multi-plex romantic comedy) – is now 30 years old.  And the ad seems to be appealing to people maybe just out of school who are too old for their parents to be buying them clothes, but too broke to be forking over more than 20 or 30 bucks for a pair of jeans.  That is, twentysomethings.

    And I’m guessing that most twentysomethings, even if they’ve heard of the Cars (maybe from their parents!), probably have no clue what the song is that’s playing behind this ad.  It just, y’know, sounds sorta cool.  I hope I’m wrong about that, but an informal survey of a couple of my officemates born in the 80s (and who are both fairly knowledgeable about 70s and 80s music) suggests otherwise.  Neither of them knew the song, and both only had a passing familiarity with the band who produced it.  I might as well have been asking about the Routers song of the same name, a guitar instrumental from 1962 to which the Cars’ hit makes a couple of obvious musical allusions.  (If the song had been recorded today, they might’ve used samples.)

    Personally, I have very specific memories of “Let’s Go” that go back to the daily after-school trip we’d take each weekday to pick my Dad up from work in Kenosha.  Whenever I hear the song, I think of riding in an AMC station wagon with the sun setting over Hwy 50 at its interchange with I-94, the Brat Stop restaurant (before it burned down and was rebuilt), and the Factory Outlet Mall, which was new back then.  And I remember thinking that it was by E.L.O. on account of the violins on the verses, and Benjamin Orr’s Jeff Lynne-style falsetto flourish on the chorus.  The ad’s target audience might not care, but that’s just the point.  It’s weird and sad to hear such a fantastic song used in a way that presupposes listeners’ indifference to it; to hear it gutted of most of its intrinsic excitement and reduced to little more than semi-stylish background music for an ad about, y’know, cheap blue jeans.

  • I’m Not Gonna Take It: Bayer Pharmaceuticals Ransacks the 80s with its Yaz Ads

    It’s probably safe to assume that when Dee Snider and his pals formed their band – a glam metal outfit they called Twisted Sister – back in the early 70s, that, despite their name and their gimmicky image which drew from drag culture and low budget horror in equal measure, they were really thinking about premenstrual dysphoric disorder. And certainly, their genre-defining 1983 anthem “We’re Not Gonna Take It” was more about defying parental (and, as it turned out, governmental) authority than defying a certain female-specific monthly tyranny.

    But there the song is these days: 25 years after Twisted Sister’s hostile (but playful) take-over of MTV’s airwaves with a video featuring Mark Metcalf (sending up his role as Niedermeyer in Animal House) playing the Wile E. Coyote to the band’s Roadrunner in a series of escalating slapstick hijinks, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” is back on the airwaves this summer as a chirpy, synthesized call to women’s liberation… from their periods. The song, along with a similarly re-recorded version of Scandal’s spunky new wave classic “Goodbye To You”, is currently being used by Bayer Pharmaceuticals to tout a birth-control-with-benefits pill called (oh it just gets worse, doesn’t it?) Yaz.

    Yaz (or Yazoo as they were known outside the U.S.), you may or may not recall, was the brilliant, if short-lived synth pop duo of husky-voiced singer Alison Moyet and synth-wizard songwriter Vince Clarke, formed in the wake of Clarke’s resignation from his post as Depeche Mode’s (then) sole obvious talent, shortly after that group’s debut. Together Clarke and Moyet recorded a pair of excellent records in the early 80s – Upstairs at Eric’s (1982) and You and Me Both (1983) – contributing a good handful of singles to the classic alternative canon before they too split, with Moyet launching a successful solo career and the openly straight Clarke forming Erasure with the wildly flamboyant singer Andy Bell and establishing his own little niche in gay iconography as Bell’s silent enabler. Despite generally minor chart performances (in the U.S.) at the time of their release, Yaz songs like “Situation”, “Don’t Go” and “Only You” have become just-left-of-center pop standards for a generation of almost-forty-somethings weaned on John Hughes movies. These are songs you might now hear piped in at your local grocery store while you’re trudging through the salad bar line. Tom Jones has covered Yaz. Seriously.

    It used to be (and still generally is) that established brands practiced a military vigilance against any unsolicited associations, no matter how innocuous, with pop and rock music groups. Chicago used to be Chicago Transit Authority until the Chicago Transit Authority threatened legal action. In the 90s, Green Jello promptly became Green Jelly when it started to look like they might sell a few records. So pardon me if I’m feeling a little galled (I’m not gonna take it! No! I’m not gonna take it!) that Bayer has appropriated the name Yaz for its latest birth control wonderdrug, especially since it’s my personal belief (admittedly, not backed up by any medical training) that three minutes of “Only You” can provide instant, albeit temporary, relief for just about any ailment with none of the side effects – cardiovascular problems, upper respiratory infections, and a few others I couldn’t possibly mention here without puking in my mouth a little – indicated for the drug Yaz.

    Bayer’s Yaz ads come at a particularly inopportune moment for fans of the band Yaz. The reunited (after 25 years) duo are currently on tour behind In Your Room, a new four-disc box set collecting remastered versions of their two albums, a disc of b-sides and remixes, and a DVD featuring the duo’s original music videos, live BBC performances, and a short documentary with new interviews with both Clarke and Moyet set for release July 8th, just in time for the group’s American tour dates. The box set (with can be pre-ordered from Amazon.com for about $60) and tour, which were announced back in January, are so hotly anticipated that I’m getting cramps just thinking about it.

    -P. Lorentz