Is this the part where Greg Kot flies the rockist flag?

why do so many critics place such a huge value on being "daring"? "Daring" has a tendency to produce "myopia" for "shitty songs."

How corrupting could it possibly be if, after five or so years of those commercials, Kot can't even pay enough attention to them to notice that they're for a cruise line, not for "a Jamaica vaction"?

(To get a little pedantic about it, it doesn't look like many of Carnival's cruises, even those going to the Caribbean, stop at Jamaica, so I sorta doubt they ever based a whole commercial around that destination.)

I don't question his sincerity at all, but I think it's curious that Bono is defending his bands mega-spectacle sell-out behavior in New Pop language by speaking of the "poverty of ambition" in indie rock. And he defends U2's dalliance with the iPod in practically Momusian terms -- the meeting of creative minds and all that tommyrot.

If refusing to be a shill makes you a douche, I'm on the side of the douches.

TW: The memory that you have and the association you have with that song can be co-opted. And a lot of people are really in it for the money. Period. A lot of people don't have any control over it. I don't own the copyrights to my early tunes. So it is unfortunate, but there are a lot of people that consciously want their songs exploited in that way, which I think is demeaning. I hate it when I hear songs that I already have a connection with, used in a way that's humiliating. I mean, in the old days, if somebody was doing a commercial, you used to say, "Oh, gee, too bad, he probably needs the money." But now, it's like hocking cigarettes and underwear with rock 'n' roll. I guess that's our big export. It's like how a good butcher uses every part of the cow. I don't like hearing those Beatles songs in the commercials. It almost renders them useless. Maybe not for everyone else, but when I hear it I just think, "Oh, God, another one bites the dust."

O: I still can't hear "Good Vibrations" without thinking of Sunkist.

TW: Oh, wow, yeah. That's exactly what they want. They want to plug your head into that and change the circuitry. While you're dreaming about your connection with that song, why don't you think about soda or candy or something? It's too bad, but it's the way of the world. They love to get their meat-hooks in you.

I agree with him. And it's a great interview.

Do you think there's a difference between how use-in-commercials affects songs, depending on if they follow a rock-authenticity-earnesty or pop-diversion-fantasy function?

Further, my sense of a song isn't corrupted or demeaned or humiliated when I hear it in a movie, a practice that has much stronger emotional connotations than an appearance on a commercial. I can think of lots of songs that take on newer (and sometimes better) meaning simply because I hear them in a different context or making a new connection with them.

The same goes for songs that get covered by other artists--gee does Tom Waits get his panties in a wad when people cover his songs, thereby possibly changing their dream about the connection to that song because they are hearing it sung by someone other than Tom Waits? And what about listening to songs in the context of a Greatest Hits situation, where the songs are in a different sequence than the album, thereby possibly displacing a previous connection? Is Waits worried about that, too? Is it simply another form of shilling when the label releases a greatest hits or allows a tribute album to appear?

All artists have to understand that after a certain point, if they are truly successful, their art will become part of the world and they can't really control how people experience it, if they ever could to begin with.

Does this at all apply to Waits, though? If I was an advertiser and I wanted to use a song, a familiar song that I knew people lots of people liked, and were already warmly familiar with, I sure as fuck wouldn't use a Tom Waits song -- outside of "Downtown Train" (made famous via a Rod Stewart cover/normalization), how many of Waits' songs achieved the level of recognition that would make such a tactic effective?

This is all kind of the wrong issue, anyway. For one, lots of advertising (iPod and Volkswagen especially) nowadays seems to bank on an ad songs' *lack* of familiarity to a mass audience. Furthermore, I think for Waits the more immediately vexing issue about his relationship with music and ads isn't the use of his songs but the use of his singing style. His first lawsuit was with Frito-Lay over a soundalike in one commercial -- IIRC, this and a similar suit filed by Bette Midler over a car commercial helped establish a legal precedent for the notion that a singers' particular style could be treated their intellectual property. Such appropriation is probably even more harmful to an artist than the appropriation of a song. Ruining-by-assocation a single song is one thing; ruining-by-association an entire schtick or persona (especially when it's already as mannered* as Waits' is) can pre-empt an entire career -- you'll sound silly no matter what song you sing. I think of all the godawful cloying Randy Newman-isms in ads in the late-to-mid-eighties, including those Newman sang himself, as it's made even his most acid satire sound a touch cloying to these ears.

*I don't mean "mannered" in a perjorative sense, mind.

Now that I've used "cloying" twice, I'll rephrase it: thanks to the use of the Randy Newman meme in eighties commercials -- the dude himself recorded a commercial for Nutrasweet! -- drawling-white-boy-with-piano now sounds a bit too much to me like the voice of shilldom.

SEE THE OMEGA CODE

OMG WTF LOL HI SATAN YOU POURED YOUR LIFE INTO VERTIGO AND ALL YOU GOT WAS A LOUSY IPOD AD

Those songs do not come around easy. The melodies of most songs are A-B, A-B, and this is A-B-C-D. The construction of it is unique. And I want you to want us to have that song out on the radio. Because it's about other bands [who value songwriting] coming through. It's not just us. Rap-metal nearly put the white race in jeopardy [as a creative force]. It's a travesty. Those [rap-metal] people should just take suicide pills and go away. What we have to offer, if we're lucky, are lyrics, some interesting arrangements and beautiful melody. That's what rock music can do right now. To be relevant, to set the imagination off on a new generation coming up. Songs that up the ante.

HI BONO HAVE YOU HEARD "SOMETIMES YOU CAN'T MAKE IT ON YOUR OWN" YOUR GUITARIST EVIDENTLY DID NOT GET THE PROG MEMO

I dunno. Except for Bono's continuing inability to talk about hip-hop without being condescending, he sounds as alert, charming, and empathetic as usual (and I don't like U2). He's usually a step ahead of his interviewers, I'll say that.

I think it's pretty well tied into the vanity that it should be out there at all.

...but the associations are now hard-wired enough that you can name the ads the songs appeared in off the top of your head, which kinda makes Waits's point, partially anyhow.

We used to have this discussion around here every five minutes or so, it seemed. There's no question that the "Advertising bad!" position is rather unsophisticated and lets a lot drop. By the same token, though, I don't think that it's unfair or dogmatic to ask what happens to a text (a song, say) when it's deployed in a new context, and I think that to say "oh, nothing whatsoever happens, that's your fault as a listener" is disingenuous. Something does happen to a text broadly deployed. "Lust for Life" is a great example; the core of that song is drugs & casual sex, allusions which people who already got the song hear & laugh at when it's used in an ad, but it rankles me - just a little - to think that the good-time groove is all some people will ever know of that song. Iggy used the term "lust for life" in a fairly nuanced way; ads may be nuanced, but their musical components tend to be very carefully targeted. Certainly ambiguity in advertising isn't often considered a virtue, whereas in song it's a mark of craft.

A few thoughts there anyhow I guess.

Whoa!

I'd like to replace "rap-metal" with "U2's post-Pop output", plz.

And I need you to need me, Bono.

Greg Kot: "hey yeah you stood for all these watered down post-punk values and now you've betrayed them all and it sucks."

Bono: "Ah what you don't realize is that we are reinventing the wheel. The black race is greedy too, but we represent the white race. It's not our politics that changed the world, its actually our outstanding song writing and our lovely faces. It's not about the message, its about the medium. It's hard to make a living these days, what with being a rock star all of my adult life. Oh, the things we do for money. But we do them because we have a message. That Apple is cool looking. Did you know my dad died? KNEEL BEFORE ME, SON OF JOR-EL! KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!"

That's a really important point that I want to get across to you. There's this poverty of ambition, in terms of what rock people will do to promote their work. That's a critical issue to me. The excitement of punk rock, in the Irish and UK scene when we were coming up, was seeing our favorite band on "Top of the Pops," right next to the "enemy." That would be exciting. We did talk shows, TV shows, back then. The great moments of rock 'n' roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto. I don't like that kind of thinking. I know some of it exists, and some of our best friends are part of it. It's not for me. Progressive rock was the enemy in 1976. And it still is. And it has many, many faces. This beast is lurking everywhere. It can describe itself as indie rock. It's the same [blanking] thing. It's misery. I have seen so many great minds struck down by it. . . . When you suggest we're betraying ourselves by doing TV shows and promotional stuff, to me the Super Bowl was our Ed Sullivan moment. It just came 25 years later. I didn't expect it. But it is one of the moments I'm most proud of in my life.

Dear Bono, plz fuck off and die forever xoxox

rollin' with heaven 17 in this bitch.

Anyway, I thought they both did pretty okay. I think U2's big sellout maneuvers lately have been irritating--mostly the ones that have to do with these recent back-to-basics records--but I also think, having seen U2 in concert, that the whole 'this song is only good if it's HUGE' thing is kind of true. The hugeness of their show is amazing. They are one of the only bands in the world that can sell out months worth of stadiums in countries on every continent, and that fact that in a good U2 show every one of the tens of thousands of people there knows the words and sings along to 'all i want is you' makes the show an amazing experience. and U2 do this while writing songs that are, IMO, good!

i have to say: if you're going to be all anti-rockist or whatever, you can't then hold bono to your puritan principles of proper rockstar behavior, whatever they may be.

(of course, now I know there's no difference between "Runaway" or "Livin' On A Prayer" and "Mysterious Ways" or "Two Hearts Beat As One." But Larry Mullen Jr sure is foxier than Tico Torres)

But I don't get how it's half-arsed. Haven't you read your Frankfurt School? CAPITALISM IS THE ENEMY. The Man is real and he is assimilating U2! The whole point is that Bono's 'hugeness' ambition is also awesome, and unfortunately the two principles are in conflict. That's part of what makes watching U2 fun--esp. around the time of "Achtung Baby" and "Pop."

Taking Sides: Theodor Adorno vs Walter Benjamin

The surgeon general has determined that listening to progressive rock may lead to Alzheimer's, stroke or other dementias.

In other words, I think it's fine when an artist chooses to let their work be used in a commercial, but if the artist chooses not to, I mean Jesus Christ, it's not like it's too hard to find ripoffs songs/artists. If you can't get the Killers, go with the Bravery, you know?

See, I'd rather it was Bon Jovi, like much much rather, since their songs are better and also they don't pose as though they were feckin' CULTURALLY RELEVANT, MAAAN like teh Bono.

"What [rock critics} basically want is for it to be like 1969 again. It 's this thing where British – or in U2's case, Irish – groups discover the roots of American music. U2 have discovered this and they're just doing pastiches [his voice rises] and it's reviewed as a serious thing because DYLAN PLAYS ORGAN on some song and B.B. King playso n some throwaway pop song "When Love Comes to Town" that could have been written by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It coudl bein Starlight Express if you ask me.

...We hate everything that they are and stand for. We hate it because it's totally stultifying, it says nothing, it is big and pompous and ugly. We hate it for exactly the same reasons Johnny Rotten said he hated dinosaur groups in 1976. To me U2 are a dinosaur group. They're saying nothing but they're pretending to be something. I think they're FAKE."

I would agree that this line of U2 crit made a lot more sense in 1989 than it does now.

where, during this period, they were selling out stadiums, incidentally

No, wait...

Anthony Is, in fact, Right. But only because he ignores Achtung Baby, Zooropa, and Tennant's painfully rockist accusation of fakery.

U2 idolaters deserve an undending stream of scorn and mockery. The band and Bono still strike me as quite self-aware and often hilarious.

Usually I read the word "U2" in a headline as "Skip To Next Story," but I was prompted by this thread to actually read the interview. Bono comoes off as far more clearheaded than Kot, whose rockism he challenges in a way that, were he not Bono, many here might support.

I wish. Cf. Madonna Studies.

It combines any number of half-baked notions, including what appears to be some professional jealousy. I still wish that it were as OTM as this group's interpretation of it is.

OTOH, "U2 sell themselves on their authenticity, but their authenticity is fake" strikes me as no less rockist than a straightforward fake=bad argument.

"Better my authentic fakery than their fake authenticity."

Or maybe it's just me.

And yeah roger, I'm not saying that that Neil Tennant quote isn't wrong-headed, but the last thing anybody wants right now is another gambol through the swamp of R-ism ;)

this thread was kind of like waving a red flag in front of a china shop full of bulls though

Wow, the power of pop criticism.

I will download it next time I'm on slsk - that mid-80s period of Depeche Mode is my favourite so there's no reason why I shouldn't like it now.

So we're to sound out what Tennant meant instead of playing with what he actually said? Such strategies are the Great Big Poppa of authenticity tropes!

As for lackign context, I think I made the context clear. Reporter Chris Heath asked them what they thought of "Rattle & Hum." Without the benefit of forming a lucid statement (as we do, sitting here in front of our compuers), Tennant came off rather well. The guy was a critic at one point, remember. As for "professional jealousy" or whatever, the Pet Shop Boys were still having hits in the UK and USA at that point in their careers - as well as a fair amount of critical acclaim - so nuts to that.

(and Anthony's right too: their U2 cover is the perfect U2 critique - and tops U2's version.)

a) a song of yours now being associated with something that you don't like or don't want it to be associated with. "I liked Lust for Life BEFORE it was on tv and regular people knew about it"

b) having the assumption that the commercial is of greater artistic value than the song

c) Hearing a great song that you immediately associate with a product

Considering the relatively short life of most ad campaigns, the number of people who will make that association is small, but I still wish I didn't associate Beach Boys tunes with car ads and Cubs radio spots, and I sure as hell don't think of "Rhapsody In Blue" as anything more than that United Airlines jingle, at least for the first split second I hear it.

It's the artist's right to do what they wish, but some of those associations are annoying...

The Nazis had their death camps to wipe out races. We've got Limp Bizcuit and Korn. :(

I admit that it's perverse, but as they say it's there in the text.

The first quoted paragraph (which is where I read some envy over U2 pandering in just the broadest possible way to the Landau Nation and being celebrated for it while serious artists like the Pet Shop Boys, who wouldn't be caught dead doing anything as obvious as making a pilgrimage to Graceland, were treated as bubblegum, no matter how many hits they had) is razor-sharp.

The second paragraph... not so much. You can't decry artifice without implititly valorizing authenticity. Though I happily concede that NT is well aware of the irony in holding up the Pet Shop Boys as champions of the authentic.

Not that it's any of your business, but Discography did indeed replace various cassette recordings at some point (I think when I got a car w/out a cassette player - I can't drive in LA without "Left To My Own Devices")

That said, Tennant is much more fun. Is this threadjacking complete Beware of Alfred Soto bearing most excellent quotes.

OM,er,G.

Bathe it and bring it to me.

haha. Tennant's got loads of great lines. I'm surprised U2 never covered "Opportunities" back when they were being ironic and coming out of lemons.

and Larry's got the brains too.

He's dead on about indie rock though.

and Larry's got the brains too.

True - he's the one who stays out of the papers. And he's made lots and lots of money.

Everytime I read that word, I have the sudden compulsion to say something like:

"Shut up you fucking self-important pretentious loser."

But I never would, that's rude.

But no matter what you think of Bono or what he's said or done, I tend to agree somewhat when he says that the iPod is the "most beautiful object art" in music culture since the electric guitar. Agree?

http://www.yenra.com/george-foreman-grill/foreman-grill.jpg

"Shut up you fucking self-important pretentious loser."

This is the kind of intelligent debate we need more of.

[IMG]http://www.imagehosting.us/imagehosting/showimg.jpg/?id=481559[/IMG]

http://www.imagehosting.us/imagehosting/showimg.jpg/?id=481559

Must...stop...listening...to...Anal...Cunt...

anyway...

GRRRR PRO TOOL BUTT PIRATES AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRR!

anyhow, WRONG

http://killingmylobster.com/albums/goooaal/keytar_mark_yess_copy.jpg

http://software.cyber-development.com/products/images/electronic_drum.jpg

This is the kind of intelligent debate we need more of.

"Intelligent debate" is the last thing we need. It's fucking music. Get over your own alleged importance.

I've long switched over to extra lean ground beef, but I find a little worscetshire (sp?) sauce and garlic powder mixed in with the beef makes for a tasty burger!

U2 might be a lot of things, but it's not Fucking music.

You are such a load.

http://www.videohelp.com/forum/images/guides/p1057837/tnt.jpg

One's in the MoMA's permanent collection, if you think I'm being a cheese-hound.

as an "indie rock" musician I gotta say Bono's actually kinda right - I *do* prefer my music to be in "a ghetto", because I don't see any virtue in being willfully absorbed into the larger marketplace. just let me have my little corner over here where no one's looking and I can do whatever I want....

Anyway, since when was this thread about music? I thought it was:

TS: Bloated Rock Hax0rz Who Should Have Retired A Decade Ago And Would Have If Not For The Opportunity To Do Good In The World That Comes With Money And Fame But Somehow Come Off As Even Bigger Douches Than If They Just Did It For The Money vs. Music-Writer-Slash-Consumer-Advocates Who Position Themselves As The Temple Guardians Of Teh Realness

Meanwhile, I can't believe George Foreman allowed his name on a kitchen gadget. Sellout/Douche.

I kiss you M@tt. There's the thread in a nutshell.

Off now to check the going rate to have "GoldenPalace.com" tattooed on Iggy Pop's back.

Now, that I've shilled... where's my money?

BONO: That's a really important point that I want to get across to you. There's this poverty of ambition, in terms of what rock people will do to promote their work. That's a critical issue to me.

The excitement of punk rock, in the Irish and UK scene when we were coming up, was seeing our favorite band on "Top of the Pops," right next to the "enemy." That would be exciting. We did talk shows, TV shows, back then. The great moments of rock 'n' roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto. I don't like that kind of thinking. I know some of it exists, and some of our best friends are part of it. It's not for me.

Progressive rock was the enemy in 1976. And it still is. And it has many, many faces. This beast is lurking everywhere. It can describe itself as indie rock. It's the same [blanking] thing. It's misery. I have seen so many great minds struck down by it.

Lol is that a recent quote?

no, from the article upthread