Fun Musical Interlude

I'd tell you what I thought of John Kerry's speech, but frankly, I'm burnt out. I paid attention for three days and hit my limit pretty hard, like bird into a window. J is the political junkie. I got bored about 15 minutes in and went to check out Fark and drink Harp. I made up my mind on John Kerry a long time ago, so listening to him try to whip up the base bores me. He's not getting my vote, so why do I care what lies he peddles to the faithful?

So the donks closed out John Kerry's blather with a new U2 song followed by an old Van Halen tune. At least they listened to the lyrics and found something that sounded appropriate. I didn't think I would hear one of the great drunken good time rock-n-roll bands of the 80s at a political convention. Did they think not enough people would remember Van Halen?

I'm constantly being surprised by musical choices in commercials and such anymore. Either ad directors think most people don't know/don't remember the lyrics, or they think they're being clever and putting one over on us. Target did a commercial recently using Devo's Beautiful World. After all, the lines "It's a beautiful world/For you/Not me" inspire me to go shopping for mass-produced consumer items. Strangely, those lines were missing from the commercial.

Another music choice that threw me was some cell phone company using the Ramones' Blitzkreig Bop to push their service. What the hell? That's right up there with the Jaguar commercial using London Calling. The original punk wanna-be revolutionaries selling expensive motorcars? Yeah, that fits. Especially now that Jag is owned by Ford. I suspect the motivation in both those cases was more a desire of the remaining band members to get a quick buck. At least they had the decency, or common sense, to wait until Joey and Joe died.

Of course, none of those quite compares to some happy, family-friendly cruise line using Iggy Pop's Lust for Life in their ads. He's cleaned up and sober these days, but back when Iggy was interesting, the cruise line people would have shit themselves had he showed up on one of their boats. Some smack junkie with a penchant for stripping naked and cutting himself up wouldn't play too well with the happy families, I'm guessing. That's okay, we can still use his music! 

I  could turn this into some weird semi-socialist rant about how our crass consumer culture eventually co-opts everything into a vehicle for consumption, but it's late and I don't really think the argument has a whole lot of validity. I just think sometimes people are ignorant of what they're using to push product. I don't necessarily think the ad people are, but I question whether or not the corporate types that sign off on the campaigns quite know what they buy into.

Well, I suppose some things won't change. I'm willing to bet money I'm not going see a national ad campaign using Slayer anytime soon. But the way things are going, I wouldn't bet too much.

Update: I was going to mention this, but forgot in all the, um, excitement. Nick Gillespie reminded me this morning. What the hell was Willie Nelson doing at the DNC? The convention he should have been playing at was over on May 31st. Good old dope-smoking tax-avoiding Willie belongs at the Libertarian convention, not at this collection of deluded statists.