Is this another phase?
I still remember being very nearly incoherent while ranting about Ronald Reagan trying to use Springsteen’s Born In The USA as a campaign theme song (Got in a little hometown jam, So they put a rifle in my hand, Sent me off to a foreign land, To go and kill the yellow man
; come to think of it, I might still be capable of incoherent ranting), but when I saw an mlife commercial the other day featuring the Ramones Blitzkreig Bop, I just thought it was hilarious. There’s really nothing too extreme about the lyrics, though They’re piling in the back seat, They’re generating steam heat, Pulsating to the back beat
might not be exactly the corporate image they wanted, but it’s still a song off the same album as classics like Beat On The Brat and Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue (both of which bear some responsibility for the current sad state of the vertebrae in my neck). I just can’t summon any response besides laughter when a corporation wants to have their phone service one small degree of separation away from lyrics like Beat on the brat with a baseball bat
and Now I wanna sniff some glue, Now I wanna have somethin’ to do
, and Joey’s got to be laughing his ass off in his grave. Though once I typed that, it’s not a very pretty picture, is it?
I laugh everytime I see the Wrangler commercial with CCR’s Fortunate Son as noted here. Then there was the Target commercial with the Devo lyrics that left out ”Its not for me.”
Somehow I always got the feeling that Target’s ad people knew exactly what they were doing and that it was some sort of inside joke.
I doubt Joey’s laughing though, he was much more political than he came off, as was Dee Dee, whose death probably allowedc the commercial to exist. Johnny is a card-carrying Republican and NRA member, though, you can probably blame him (I am.)
Political, sure, but he also seemed (at least his last few years) to have a sense of humor about himself and the rest of the world. If it was Dubya starting speeches with ”Hey, ho, let’s go to Iran and bomb the shit out of them” I doubt he’d be amused, but a phone company urging its customers to pile in the back seat, with the net result that one old Ramones fan remembered how much he loved blasting Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue at the neighbors twenty years ago, strikes me as worth a snicker.
Way too many commercials using rock music and it all sounds just sad to me. Beatles, Who, Stones, silly money grubbers. Except Sting, which isn’t really rock music, he fits right in with those Jaguar wankers.
I’ve lost track: you’re a hair older than me, aren’t you? So either you’re slow, or it’s not a phase so much as me being odd, finding it funny that the songs that I thought were ideal for drinking, smoking, and screwing to excess to are now ideal for selling cars and calling plans. Ah, well, either way it reminded me of good stuff, and I’m thinking I might need a copy of the CD (no idea where the vinyl’s gotten to), so that’s even better.
My 42nd birthday passed by in a wooshing rush last month, so I think I’m older. And it is true that we are moving into the prime buying demographic for this crap so I shouldn’t be too surprised. Why, after all, would anyone think rock and rollers would be somehow different from everyone else where the great mass is mainly interested in pocketlining?