0.5.1 - I don't want you, to be no slave
Psychology is obviously a valuable field of study, and advances in understanding our own mental health have been crucial for a whole host of people, me included; but whichever psychologist taught the advertising world all the tricks to bypass our conscious, rational thought processes and sink their slogans deep into our lizard brains deserves some kind of ongoing punishment. The intersection of music and advertising is a murky one; the memetic qualities music innately possesses, the way it's linked so intrinsically to memory and mood is a cheat code for advertising executives everywhere. And for every marketer who ever used these tricks to break down our defenses, there's at least one band out there, drowning in the overwhelming pool of talent in the world, who every night live in hope that one of their songs might get used in an ad, or a TV show, and catapult them to their fifteen minutes of success, and maybe beyond. Art and capitalism often exist at odds; bands who've made it accuse struggling up and comers of selling out to the advertisers, like they are jumping the queue of fame at the cost of some kind of integrity; meanwhile record labels and established stars mortgage off their own musical catalogue into some marketing library in return for another Malibu beachhouse. Like everything to do with advertising, no-one comes away clean.
It's possible I'm a hypocrite, or just wrong (both are equally plausible), and I don't have great justification for why I feel this way, but I think this pairing of music and advertisement represents the platonic ideal of the form. The fact that its much more a short art film/music video which just happens to say "Guinness" at the end of it, rather than using the tune as some kind of background jingle to reinforce the advertising pitch they are making, carries all the weight of my argument. That and the fact that I went and bought Rhythm & Stealth and then shortly after Leftism because I heard the start of Phat Planet as part of this campaign and it was awesome. Etta James might be the historical powerhouse on this list of albums, but this is the one I think everyone should listen to really. The late nineties were the glory days of Uk based electronic music, and Leftfield were a huge part of that.
As with many of my weekly themes, this one came to me by chance. I've mentioned before that my partner Catherine has been very understanding of my new fixation, and as a result has been occasionally trying to suggest things she might think I haven't listened to. Now, we've been together nearly eighteen years at this point and there's not much about her music taste that I've not been exposed to in one way or another, but as with most things, we have different avenues of musical discovery, so on Saturday this weekend, while I checked on her while she was working, she said "Have you heard of Lola Young?". Catherine had seen her on a late night chat show confusing Anthony Mackie with her South London accent, then had listened to her album, and she thought I might like it. She played me a track, and I thought "Ok, sounds interesting and saves me making a decision, lets give it a try."
Knowing literally nothing about her apart from she was from South London and had been on the Graham Norton show, I went to wikipedia to get a sense of who she was and what her musical background was, where I read this.
For those not familiar, John Lewis is an English Department Store who, every year, release an incredibly twee and stripped back version of a great song with performed by some breathy, wistful singer designed to crush your rational brain into a fine paste and make you buy very expensive, mostly unnecessary household items as Christmas gifts. I have a visceral reaction to them as a genre; you might not believe me, but I am certain there's an inextricable link between this ad campaign and the reason every single movie and tv trailer now uses the same "here's a twee / slowed down / stripped back cover of a song from three decades ago" that has manifested itself into society to torture me specifically.
This revelation did not endear me to Ms Young. It's not her fault, it was three years ago and she wanted to get paid, but she took part in something that makes me uncomfortable with the sheer naked manipulative force it exerts, and the way we go "oh, that's sweet, I loved that song and its made me all emotional and sad, I must buy cousin David an air fryer" makes my teeth itch. Knowing nothing about her apart from this fact, can I listen to her album and appreciate it absent of this context?
Of course, that made me think of other songs, other bands, forever paired in my mind to the medium of advertisement, so I'll give Lola Young some room to breathe, and make my way through a long road through some other albums which, one way or another, I'll never be able to divorce from products and services in my lifetime.
Ray Wilson might be an unfamiliar name to start with. Would it make more sense if I were to tell you he was once the lead singer and creative force behind the band Stiltskin? But that Stiltskin don't really have a presence on streaming services, and while I couldn't find a copy of their original album The Mind's Eye to listen to, Ray Wilson released his own version of Inside, the song from the jeans advert that catapulted his alternative rock band to number one for a fraction of a second before the band flamed out and imploded. Ray has had an unfortunate path through the music industry; number one with Stiltskin but the follow up barely charted, he completely replaced the band before they recorded their second album which went nowhere, was brought in to replace Phil Collins in Genesis for their final album which got massive negative review coverage and he was blamed by the label; then just going off and just putting out music under his own name. His Spotify release page is a mess of albums thrown on in 2011 with his name on (She, the second Stiltskin album, is on here but under his name, there are two albums on here called Genesis vs Stiltskin and some stuff which is obviously his own work) and if you are getting an undercurrent of bitterness at the music industry and his relationship to it from what you are reading, let me tell you The Next Big Thing will confirm everything you were thinking. He's got a great growly voice for bluey rock but the bitter sentiment laced throughout this album feels like someone shouting "it's so unfair" over and over again. It might be true, but it's not fun to listen to.
As someone from the north of England, the geographical expectation for me would be to be more on the Oasis side of the Oasis/Blur dividing line across the nation, but I'm a man more interested in interesting, narrative lyricism than high energy grunting, so I've been a Blur fan since the music media made the Britpop Wars a thing in the mid 90s. I've owned The Great Escape since its release on CD, and I still have that 30 year old CD in my now archived-into-a-cupboard CD rack. As soon as I saw this advert for the first time, my heart sank. I'd loved The Universal from this album, with its Clockwork Orange inspired video, and its distant and haunting atmosphere. Then, for years to come, the string section and Damon Albarn's voice became synonymous with the company that came to service your central heating in your house. Conversations about why you like Blur, and this album in particular, become much harder when you get met with "Oh, you like the album with the British Gas song on it? Yeah, I like that too.". I think The Great Escape is conceptually and in execution an incredibly interesting album; every song paints an image of a person, a family, a part of society and the emotions which drive it. Sometimes its obnoxiously radio friendly (see Country House), but there a quiet sadness to He Thought Of Cars and Yuko and Hiro and Best Days which provides the emotional contrast to the public school japery laced across the more well known songs. It's now a great album with one skip, thanks to the ad campaign that took one of my favourite songs away from me.
How I have felt during the entire process of writing this post.
I've tried to start this paragraph a few times, and I really don't want this entire post to just be me repeating "Co-opting music for advertising is bad" over and over again, but there's little that bums me out more in this set of albums than the fact that generations of people's only exposure to Etta James is through a Coke commercial. There's something emotionally foundational to me about this record, and the other Soul and Motown records of this era; the power of music is its ability to resonate or express emotion in ourselves and those around us, and the sheer power Etta James has to do that is staggering. If you strip away the advertising nonsense, I Just Want To Make Love To You is one of the most directly horny songs about women's sexuality I remember; this is the W.A.P. for the 1960's, and deserves to be treated with some respect. The rest of At Last! is just as powerful, and it gets my strongest recommendation, but if you only have time to dip in briefly, Trust In Me and the title track are the standouts.
There's an apocryphal story I've heard about Babylon Zoo and the advertising jingle that sent them briefly to number 1; it goes that some ad exec heard the song being played at some gathering and loved the energy and wanted to use it for their ad campaign, only to find that what he had heard was a 33rpm being played at 45pm because the turntable setting was wrong, but they'd already signed the deal. This is, apparently, why the Babylon Zoo version of Spaceman on The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes starts and ends with a sped-up version of the chorus and instrumentation, and drops into the low-tempo rock dirge the song actually is for the rest of it. I'm certainly not going to do any research to prove or disprove that, but intentional or not, here the musicians get the advertising industry to boost them up into the public eye enough to get some recognition. Which is fortunate for them, because having listened to the rest of the album, they were never destined for big things without a big helping hand. Suede are a popular and successful band, and Babylon Zoo would very much like to be Suede also, but they don't have the virtuosity of Bernard Butler or the songwriting or performance chops of Bret Anderson. Turgid is a great word, and I'm not going to miss an opportunity to use it to describe the majority of this album, and once the advert was out of the public eye, so too were Babylon Zoo, and no-one was the poorer for that.
I saw Joze Gonzalez at the Leadmill in Sheffield many years ago; it was amongst the first gigs I ever went to with Catherine, and the notable things I remember from that performance was that I lost a pair of glasses which fell out of my coat pocket that night, that a group of three middle aged men stood towards the centre-rear of the crowd and had a full volume conversation as if they were in the pub while he was playing; and that the performance was indistinguishable from someone coming on stage, putting the CD of Veneer into their PA, and pressing play. Some acts are just not meant for live audiences, and this is an album far better appreciated on a Sunday afternoon in your living room than it is a concert venue. I still enjoy it, if only because I don't really have much in the way of go-to music in that low tempo, soft spoken guitar music-as-ASMR genre apart from this. I even like the advert that the song which propelled this album into prominence, Heartbeats, was attached to, though I didn't find out until years later that it was a cover of a song by indie-electro band The Knife, and I prefer their version immensely now I have heard it.
I'm not sure I know what the musical consensus on Phil Collins' body of work is, but amongst my original cassette collection of albums I owned was a copy of Invisible Touch and let me tell you, if you think you know what Phil Collins music is about, go listen to that album, because it's incredibly dark to the point of finding it genuinely unnerving as a teen, and has Land of Confusion on it, which is awesome. Face Value is not that, despite the iconic In The Air Tonight which the Cadbury chocolate advertisers co-opted for their marketing campaign. We'll get to the advert in a moment, but let's cover the music, which is 11 tracks of Phil processing the fact his wife left him for a painter and decorator, and one of the most unnecessary and self-indulgent Beatle's covers I have experienced in the wild. I'm sure the process of writing the album was cathartic, as much as I am sure there must be people out there who find the songs incredibly relatable and a source of empathy and comfort. That's not me though, so I find it hard say nice things about it apart from I listened to it and that counts towards my album listening stats.
Phil performing on Top of the Pops with a paint can in the foreground. He's definitely dealing with it in a healthy and mature manner.
Now lets talk about the advert. I've been learning to play the drums for around five years now, with some on and off experience before that. I practice for 2-3 hours per week and play with other people occasionally when they let me or when I bully them into doing so. There's no doubt that the drum fill in In The Air Tonight is iconic. I know because this drum transcription video says so. But it's not hugely technical, or fast. I can play the In The Air Tonight fill which is how you know that is true.
The gorilla doesn't play the fill! As the drums kick in, we don't see the camera zoom out to encompass the kit until the initial phrase of the fill gets played, and then the gorilla just doesn't play the other two sections of the fill, and just plays the Kick-Kick-Flam Snare groove which goes between the fill sections. And this is what impressed people, put In The Air Tonight back into the charts nineteen years after it was first released? What is wrong with people?
OK, having run the gamut of all forms of music and advertisement combinations, how does Lola Young fare? Can I forgive her for her John Lewis based transgressions?
It helps significantly that This Wasn't Meant For You Anyway sounds nothing like her wispy rendition of Together In Electric Dreams, and far more like the generationally confessional/honest/emotional music-as-therapy that has worked so well for other artists, and she delivers it with a pleasing sarcastic sneer which feels edgy and genuine at the same time. Messy gets the big streaming numbers because it has had some airplay, got some traction on TikTok before it became a fascist playground, and it's catchy as hell, but the whole album maintains a lot of the same quality - it feels like anything could have been the hit single (though Fuck might have been harder to market to the mainstream, admittedly). So Lola Young is granted grace and clemency and absolution from her prior transgressions, and without remorse I heartily recommend her if you like a combination of the Phoebe Bridgers/Julien Baker songwriting with some Self-Esteem/FKA Christine & The Queens performance over the top of it.
Now, time for a pint of stout and some chocolate.
