Tuesday, May 16, 2006 - You actually asked me the question: "Are you taking any steps to keep shit real?"

there is bloc party song i really like in a new car commercial

i can't decide how i feel about this. its a good song, and they don't use the majority of the song, just one guitar part (its a mellower song) and a line or two. so its not that i'm going to get sick of it the way i did when they started using death cab for cutie on the commercials for gray's anatomy. after hearing it like seven times in three days i wanted to saw off my ears. and i actually liked that song before that.

but this trend towards using obscure parts of indie rock songs in commercials, especially car commercials (aqueduct, franz ferdinand, postal service -- damn! ben gibbard, sell the farm why doncha!) is freakin me out.

i've always been a stanch advocate of musicians making money from their music however they can. "selling out" is a concept held by people who care too much about unimportant things. as long as an artist stays creative, who's to say its not their prerogative to play on the gilmore girls? lord knows that getting signed to a record company only guarantees any sort of fiscal mother load to a small few. if you can sell beer cozies with your band name on it, or license a song to a popular movie, good for you! if its a way for you to gain popularity, play big crap venues, thus allowing you to stay together and write more music, bravo. i still love radiohead and am breathless for a new album, regardless of how i feel about going to see them at madison square garden. (i'm not)

so its not the fact that the hipsters who make commercials "know" about these bands that bug me so much. i'm sure it is only me and a couple of other music nerds that realize these snippets of songs are actually songs recorded elsewhere, not just as background for a commercial. and *should* i be complaining about that, since they are using, well, if not *quality* music, interesting music, instead of something generic? although it should be said that when modest mouse's gravity defies everything was used in a minivan commercial, it made me smile every time.

so maybe its the fact that these songs just don't have enough of a shelf life to be played over and over again. and it only annoys me that their worth as a song seems to diminish when i'm forced to listen to them constantly?

and how about that julia marvel song "summertown" that was on the mercury/jeep/chrystler commercials back around christmas. weird. and, it held up..

thoughts?

dave eggers has a good point here: AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVE EGGERS
In 1993 Dave Eggers founded the now defunct Gen-X sneer of Might magazine. After a brief stint at Esquire, Eggers returned in 1998 to the avant-garde of the magazine world with the eccentric banality of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (www.mcsweeneys.net). Eggers' first book, the bestselling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was published in February of this year by Simon & Schuster to rave reviews. The following is an email transcript of a Q&A exchange with Eggers in which he is prompted to "rant" by the mention of the phrase "selling out."
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