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Tag: Volkswagen

  • Commercial-isms: Volkswagen Passat vs. Madness “It Must Be Love”

    Commercial-isms: Volkswagen Passat vs. Madness “It Must Be Love”

    It Must Be Love

    Always much more popular in their native Britain, the seven-man new wave ska band Madness are mainly (and somewhat erroneously) known here as a one hit wonder. That hit, “Our House” which hit the Billboard Top 10 in the summer of ’83, remains a staple of 80s party playlists. It’s a great song, but it’s tended to overshadow the rest of the band’s copious singles catalog from their classic 1979 45 “One Step Beyond” (The best instrumental single of the 70s? Oh yes, probably.) to quirky numbers like “Baggy Trousers” and the so-adorable-so-heartbreaking “My Girl”: “Why can’t she see, she’s lovely to me, but I like to stay in and watch TV on my own every now and then.”

    Madness “My Girl” (1979)

    “My Girl” was the second of more than a dozen top ten singles the band had in the U.K. But it took four years for the band to get any airplay here. After “Our House” finally broke the band to a big American audience, instead of releasing a new song as the follow-up, they reached back into their catalog for one of their most beloved previous hits, “It Must Be Love”, a cover of a 1972 song by folk-pop singer-songwriter Labi Siffre which went to #4 in the UK in 1981. (This selection only made sense in that the group’s self-titled U.S. debut album was essentially a greatest hits compilation – Labi Siffre was even more unknown to U.S. audiences than Madness was. He still is.) “It Must Be Love” wasn’t a total flop – it still managed to break into the American Top 40, but it never made it into the second hour of Casey Kasem’s weekly broadcast. Nevertheless, it remains the band’s second-biggest American hit, and until Volkswagen started airing commercials for the new Passat, it was mostly forgotten, even by the 80s kids.

    Madness “It Must Be Love” (1981)

    Madness’s cover of “It Must Be Love” was and remains Labi Siffre’s biggest American hit. Most of his albums weren’t even released in the U.S. until the last couple of years (and even then, only by digital download. You want a hard copy, it’s gonna be an import.) That said, Siffre does share a writing credit on Eminem’s 1999 single “My Name Is…” due to the fact that it samples Siffre’s 1975 song “I Got The…”, a very sexy song with one hell of an awesome breakdown. At that time, Eminem was getting a lot of flak for his apparent homophobia. Ironically, it was the openly gay Siffre’s bassline and electric piano hook from that sexy, sexy mid-song breakdown that anchored Em’s first really big hit. Check it out:

    Labi Siffre “I Got The” (1975)

  • The Random Endorsement Files: Cindy Blackman- Europeans are Crazy!

    From the Random Endorsement Files: the new pitchwoman for Volkswagen appears to be none other than Lenny Kravitz… ‘s drummer. That would be Cindy Blackman, whose appearances in Kravitz’s videos have been, for this writer, all that truly matters about Kravitz’s recording career. Witness her magnificence in the 1993 video for “Are You Gonna Go My Way”!

    There she is amidst all the dread-flailing and fancy lights – she’s the only one in the whole video not throwing her hair around. In fact, her whole body seems completely consumed in the generation of the song’s relentless beat. That singularity of purpose coupled with giant black sunglasses and auburn chrysanthemum afro make her the most magnetic sight in a video full of people trying really, really, really hard to hold our attention. There’s really no one else in the video I want to look at, and I can’t think of anyone else who projects such a mystifyingly wonderful stage presence from behind a drum kit without opening his or her mouth.

    Which, apart from the shear randomness of the casting, is what makes her appearance in this new Volkswagen ad such a surprise: Cindy Blackman speaks! Playing the leader of the house band (Kravitz’s band, minus the Lenny) for a talk show hosted by a VW bug with a comically thick accent and an effusively flattering manner, she delivers the familiar tagline – “Europeans are crazy” – with a withering cool. Even better though is the “whooo” she launches before she and the rest of the band play the ad out. The vocal equivalent of the ascending flare of a firecracker just before it explodes into its colors, that “whooo” is what makes the commercial for me – a nanosecond of good old-fashioned, retro-soul, dance-to-the-music joy, incorruptible even within the context of something so crass as a car ad (albeit a crazy European one).

    Of course, more than making want to check out the new VW Tiguan, the ad made me want to look further in Cindy Blackman’s work, and as might have been predicted, the Lenny Kravitz connection is not just the tip of the proverbial iceberg (she’s played on Joss Stone’s records too), it’s also largely an anomaly in a career that’s found the 48-year-old Brooklynite jamming with a virtual who’s who of contemporary jazz players – Bill Laswell, Cassandra Wilson, George Benson, Hugh Masekela, and her most frequent collaborator bassist Ron Carter, among many others – and, with her gift for dynamic Tony Williams style polyrhythms, holding her own quite well in a still-very-much male-dominated genre on a still-very-much mail-dominated instrument.

    Since 1987, she’s released 10 albums as a band leader, and though her most recent album – 2004’s monumental double-disc Music for a New Millennium – is woefully out of print (at the time of this writing, Amazon has a single third party listing for the album, selling for $170), you can hear a few tracks from the album, recorded with saxophonist JD Allen, keyboardist Carlton Holmes, and bassist George Mitchell on Blackman’s website. I’m particularly digging “Letter to Theo”. Whooo!

    -P.Lorentz