RFD: Light-hearted, whimsical indie hipster music that seemed specifically manufactured for Apple commercials

Number one indie dinner soundtrack after The XX ime.

never hear beirut in this role, weirdly. the xx were ruined for me by being indie dinner default choice.

No Surprises also seems to me to be a big song in the development of this genre. Replace Thom's weltschmerz with someone cooing along in a baby voice and there you go.

i tried to find that coke ad from a few years back with some sickening cover of the beatles "all together now" but i couldn't.

was it the Beatles?

It's this ad for MS with Lenka that urges me to smash things up..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ2cftjyHys

urges me to smash something

I don't think "Don't Falter" belongs here. It apes Saint Etienne with it's 90's pop charm.

For some reason the worst of these songs for me are the ones with confessional, "dysfunctional" lyrics, like they're just angling to be in this movie - http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1174730/ - or this one - http://www.imdb.co.uk/title/tt0449059/ - or basically anything with Alan Arkin and a brooding teenager

like omigod, what an unexpected pairing! Whimsy and darkness! It's almost as crazy as a bloody battleground scene filmed in slo-mo with tender orchestral music over the top!

Surely the Jose Gonzales Knife cover with the bouncing balls is the point at which this all went supernova?

key text:

http://www.kicktickets.com/img/original/Event/1933.62b83113548dacf31843b6540f2c0e8d.jpg

oops that's huge.

The other turning point (following on from Feist 1234) was that "I'm not invisible" song, which didn't exist before the advert, and everyone wanted it.

Did it chart?

that bloke covering tears for fears in donnie darko.

as far as "meaningful cover of meaningless dross" crosses over with "xylophone folk tells lovely story about sharing data with your pals"

I guess this is manic pixie dream-girl music, though good luck getting a real manic person to wait for a roomful of pianos, xylophones and ukuleles to be mic'ed up and coordinate brass sections and string quartets before singing languidly over polite twinkling about idk curling up on the sofa with you or whatever lyrical conceit it is that makes people's wallets open

yeah pixie music is right. my theory is this sound was invented in Iceland, i just wish they could have kept múm

I guess this is manic pixie dream-girl music

there are men involved sometimes too. innocent smoothie's office must be full of this.

Oh totally, I didn't mean it was made by actual manic pixie dreamgirls, what with them being a fictional trope - just that it comes from the same place

(but possibly an even worse ratio of people who actually want to believe they are a special creative pixie : people who've realised other people's cynical pixie simulacra sell and constructed their own)

I think most people like some of these artists* and they tend to be more diverse than their presence in these ads suggests but imagine how enervating an entire compilation of this stuff would be.

*Like a maximum of three or four artists each and never the song on the ad.

I think Apple's move to this stuff from 'vaguely hip-hop beat-beaty slightly rocky dance music' probably coincides with the launch of the iPhone. It's also wrapped up with the need to secure early adopters and wanting to evoke some kind of aspirational coffee-drinking fashionable tech startup lifesytle in those people.

Seemingly every E4 youth drama is sponsored by some kind of tech company pitching a product or service directly at teenagers and they *never* use this sort of music, it's usually a sort of grimey frankenstep hybrid.

apple has veered into cheesiness with its new ads though:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrRHPf0_B3M

http://youtu.be/nvKyYeJJYwM

I think most people like some of these artists*

I disagree, I am sure some people do but I don't know anyone who does.

you don't know most people

i like willy moon! or maybe i like the idea of willy moon. i like what he's after. anyway. willy moon!

Maybe I'm thinking of the more acceptable end of the genre, like there must be stuff that's so much worse than Feist.

Charlie Brooker moaning about this in 2007: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/jun/11/media.advertising

2007 Creative Review, many examples of twee ad music: http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2007/july/the-rise-of-the-twee

And again discussed in Creative Review in 2009: http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2009/january/change-the-record

this all started with stereolab and velocity girl having their music placed in vw ads in the '90s and, like the type of music broad-brush referred to as "indie rock" in the ensuing years, got more bland and self-signifying as the years went by

stereolab? really?

dots and loops era

i don't know if this is germane, having never heard them, but there are two new bands with the actual names "the sparrow and the workshop" and "a hawk and a hacksaw"

hawk and hacksaw have been around for 10 years and are much more legit and interesting musicians despite the elephant 6 twee connection you would assume

just re-order and re-write that sentence to make sense in your heads please

ya, Jeremy Barnes of A Hawk and a Hacksaw was the Neutral Milk Hotel drummer (when he was real young) but he's spent the last decade or so super immersed in eastern European folk music, with interesting results.

haha ok

much love to Malvina Reynolds but this feels like a notable touchstone in the '00s shift towards hearing sub-Moldy Peaches bullshit coming out of yr teevee:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_2lGkEU4Xs

the sparrow and the workshop

Heh, my old housemate got thrown out of that band. I have no idea whether they're any good or not.

mo herself has quite correctly realized that milquetoast liberalism is destroying america

you believe that? or are you just challoping?

Ford Fiesta song also features prominent use of an under-discussed twindie signifier: woozy but uplifting Elephant Six horn section. Would be interesting to figure out by what channels that went mainstream, seems like for ages it really signified bedroom recording, four-track, living-room-party type bands directly getting it from E6 records and then suddenly it was kind of everywhere.

― Doctor Casino, Wednesday, April 17, 2013 9:15 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I would trace it back to the mid 2000's kitchen sink twee like Polyphonic Spree, I'm from Barcelona, Architecture for Helsinki, which I guess ultimately traces back to Belle and Sebastian, though I don't place the blame at the latter's feet so much.

Oh and Sufjan of course.

That Nick Drake song in the VW ad really shook things up a lot when it came out in the late 90s. I remember that it seemed to tap into something a little different with the youth market. Could that have been the spark?

A big precursor of this whole phenomenon was definitely the VW ad with Pink Moon which was all the way back in 1999. But stuff like that still has a nocturnal pensive aspect so it's not so cloying (see also B&S, most of Feist, Cat Power, the Mad World cover, etc). The strain that emerged in the mid 2000's stripped that out to become purely happy-go-lucky kindergarten sing along music that I think people find so insufferable.

xpost beat me to the punch!

There was a whole era we're forgetting of indie-rock (but not twindie) music in commercials for young-people cars, e.g. Modest Mouse on the new Nissan Quest Commercial

Polyphonic Spree is a good connection, I sort of forgot their existence after the first album getting hyped to me by friends, but they may well be a link in the chain as they were, it turns out, much more successful than I remembered with licensing:

In early 2003, they were dropped by their record label, 679 Recordings, citing "lack of record sales." Ironically, it was about this time that the band had only just begun to break into the pop-cultural scene. The song "Light and Day / Reach For the Sun" was used in a joint Volkswagen Beetle/iPod tie-in advertising campaign, appearing on nationwide television commercials in 2004.[7] The same song was used in a tribute to Bill Walsh during an NFL football preseason special. It was also used in an episode of the TV series Scrubs, the end music for the first series of the BBC Radio 7 sci-fi comedy Undone, the music video for the song was also adapted for the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind".

Startling to discover there are sixteen ILM threads about the Polyphonic Spree.

xpost!

wow polyphonic spree in a joint VW/apple commercial that is a bit overdetermined

That Nick Drake song in the VW ad really shook things up a lot when it came out in the late 90s. I remember that it seemed to tap into something a little different with the youth market. Could that have been the spark?

I think this is to blame... seemed to usher in an era of using music in the middle of the venn diagram between 'cool enough' for young people and 'young but unthreatening' to old people.

much love to Malvina Reynolds but this feels like a notable touchstone in the '00s shift towards hearing sub-Moldy Peaches bullshit coming out of yr teevee:

ever heard this atrocity?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM8JhvfoqdA

Even more than just how downright shitty this music is, I find I am enraged by the idea it seems to be selling, i.e., this wondrous fucking world of benevolent innovation that brings you new and stylish toys to connect to your childlike creativity and the miracles of sharing that via developing technologies to friends, family, and the hoards of admirers of your "art". When really, it's just to sell utterly useless shit that we spend millions of dollars creating and consuming instead of bothering putting time, money, or effort toward any of our problems as a nation and/or culture. It is actually music for children and plays the same role as putting a toy in a McDonald's Happy Meal or a cartoon on a packet of smokes: to sell something unnecessary and probably harmful to a bunch of innocent dupes who think they "need" this stuff.

"vest-and-hat"

I'v been calling it C&U, Cupcake and Ukulele.

can't believe companies are selling people stuff they don't "need"

i think that the use of this horribly, cloying music is not an attempt to sell "stuff" but to sell consumers a naive, innocent, creative, and simple state of being... which you can do by buying their expensive shit.

cat power for zoloft ad?

"there you go
marriage and kids
and drug addiction

all lies aside
I believe I am the
luckiest person alive

hell we all die
sometimes
hell we all try
somewhere

money always sees
money always draws
the light

hope you can see
through the beggars
In the clear"