Music in Advertising: The Lobotomy of Art

One of the undisputed song writing masters of our time Stevie Wonder once sang that “music is a world within itself with, a language we all understand”. But what happens when that world is invaded by money hungry corporations that twist its language to lure the precious little money you have from you in a scenario ironically similar to Stevie’s career in the 80s?

Sadly we’ve all been there, sat enjoying some of television’s richest fruits only to find that in the commercial break corporate blood suckers have seized the opportunity to rape and pillage a much loved song in to a 30 second backing track to accompany garish images of something new to squander your meagre funds on. Most recently Clark’s has touched a nerve, although the rage that I felt when watching this particular advert was more accustomed to somebody physically throttling my spinal cord.

The crushing hammer of musical disillusionment began to fall whilst I was leaving the glare of the TV screen to avoid such a catastrophe during the ad break. It was only until I was just out of the door did I hear the opening line to Birdhouse in Your Soul, a personal favourite by the American new wave come alternative rock band They Might Be Giants, flowing with all its saccharine nostalgia and optimism. In disbelief I whipped back in to the room to see what possible purpose this song could possibly be serving between the two halves of ‘Coronation Street’ only to be greeted to a nightmarish vision of a society, where select children have grown to gigantic proportions and are allowed to run, cycle and skate freely over school playgrounds and idealised suburbia in the name of promoting a shoe retailer most people of recent generations have not had the displeasure of dealing with since they were in need of shoes for school. In little over thirty seconds a favourite song had become irreversibly mentally linked to the thought of generic shoe design and the childhood dread of starting a new year at school with shoes your mother chose for you. All of its original sentiment and personality removed, lobotomised.