Cultural Vandalism

Some things tend to upset me more than they maybe should.  For example, there is currently an advert on television that uses Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s ‘You’re All I Need To Get By’ to sell… well, something I’m not even going to name here.

I find this positively irksome.  I know that there are perhaps more important things to get angry at, and trust me I do – all the time – but I think popular music has a great deal of cultural value and I find it insulting when it is cheapened in this way.  Okay, I’m not naïve.  I know this has been going on for decades now.  Advertisers are constantly abusing the cultural capital that popular music has to shift product, it is also done in movies, sports and every form of entertainment.

However, popular music is in some ways different.  Some artists are considered sacrosanct, above being associated with advertisements whereas others are considered fair game.  Those immune to it may have had this written into their contracts or been fortunate enough maintain control over their publishing.  They may even have the respect of the music industry which still regards their catalogue with high cultural regard.  For instance, it will be a long time before we see a Beatles song advertising a fast-food outlet or Led Zeppelin being used to sell spreadable cheese.

So why is some popular music regarded as having value whilst another can be used in this rather cheap and tawdry fashion?  Why is it okay to use a remarkable record like ‘You’re All I Need To Get By’ to hawk stuff on daytime television?  Marvin Gaye was a towering figure in popular music, surely by anybody’s reckoning and his work with Tammi Terrell is among his most beautiful and enduring.  Both were struck down well before their time and left us with a strong cultural legacy.  Shouldn’t their work be treated with more respect?

Some advertisers can be tasteful.  For instance, the Levi’s jeans ads of the 1980s actually helped renew interest in the records they used by placing them in their uniquely American cultural context, thus making them cool and relevant again.  This shows that with a little bit of imagination a kind of synergy can happen which works out for everybody involved.  The adverts resulted in a lot of jeans being sold and those records becoming hits again.  What can be better than that?  A new generation of people listening to Sam Cooke, Ben E. King and Marvin Gaye?  Most of the time this doesn’t happen though and instead the records are used in a lazy and exploitative fashion, henceforth the whole thing comes across as cheap and very cheesy.

Popular music is part of our lives and immensely valuable.  It is no less important than any other art-form and – dare I say it – more relevant than most.  Let’s not advertisers take it away and ruin it for us.