I was on the Fence Records Beefboard the other day and someone mentioned that he had heard The Aliens’ Happy Song on telly being used to advertise the Disney Channel, and said that “a little part of my soul died.” Now, to be clear, he wasn’t criticising The Aliens for the fact that their song had been attached to something so depressingly saccharine, crassly vapid and utterly banal as the Disney Channel. He was just lamenting this being the way of the world at the moment.

Now, this conjured a couple of thoughts in my mind. Firstly, people are slowly developing a marked immunity to a lot of advertising (article, article). And secondly, despite its importance, no-one has quite figured out how to advertise properly on the internet yet either, as evidenced by the slightly comical attempts of spammers, flashing banner merchants and employers of those idiotic pop-up windows. Basically, this sort of idiotic flailing about just alienates people, so what else can they do?

Well, one of the most popular methods at the moment is the removal of the barriers between content and advertising: basically turning all content into a kind of ungodly co-branding exercise whereby the more prominent the usage and the more key the moment, the better. For a band, this means placing a song in that climactic final five minutes where we all realise that if everyone is just ‘there for you’ (whatever the fuck that imbecilic phrase means) then life will be all beer & skittles.

So far so obvious. I think most of us knew that already. So what does this do for bands and the concept of selling out? Well TV and movies are already balls-deep in this particular fatted calf, as anyone who saw the downright embarrassing come-shots of that Audi in I, Robot can testify. Both these media are completely compromised now, and frequently one big advertorial, so in all honesty, fuck ‘em.

Music, on the other hand, will find it very difficult to shoehorn a line about, say, Sony laptops into a song, but plenty of people sing about their favourite shoes and spaff all over iPods and god knows what else which, whether or not they receive any actual cash for doing so, is essentially the same thing – co-branding, brand network curation, whatever punchable buzzword you happen to prefer. The hardest aspect of this kind of thing is the impossible blurring of the lines between someone who is simply being honest, and someone who is being a corporate shill.

Several bloggers, for example, advertise eMusic on their sites with various levels of evangelism. They get money for doing so, assuming people take them up on it, but they are almost all completely up-front about their reasons and almost all being completely sincere – eMusic really is the best music download service out there, and just about the only thing keeping me honest in this digital age.

As a band, money is always involved. If you want to make a living as a band you have to sell your music to people. So it’s all very well for legends like Tom Waits with a cast-iron back catalogue to refuse all commercial use of his music, because he can afford to. But I have seen too many of my friends play shitty gigs in grotty venues where the few people there spend the entire evening talking over the music to begrudge anyone saying ‘oh, sod it, alright’ if a company wants to use their song in a trailer, even for something as meretricious as the Disney Channel.

But as to marketing by association, it is almost certainly something we are going to have to get used to, and I don’t think it will be easy to do so. I detest, absolutely detest, the sort of American TV show that is becoming one of the best sources of exposure for emerging bands. Teeth-grindingly awful programs like The OC, Grey’s Anatomy, Lost and, going a little further back in time, Dawson’s fucking Creek. I don’t know what’s worse, their toe-curling desperation to be so cool they could sprain something at any minute or the need for society to have the empty, passive act of watching the same pointless television programs in common to act as some sort of social glue.

Consequently, if the scabrous marketing departments for these entities alight upon the same things as myself in the search for the new and the interesting then I genuinely feel tainted by association. You may think this is shallow, but I make no apology. It feels a bit less special if it has been fondled by the slippery fingers of the bleeding edge marketeers of this world, and I feel a bit less happy to like it.

That said, one of the best sources of exposure for our favourite bands is increasingly going to be this sort of circle-jerk festival of mutual ego massage which reeks of selling out – it just smells as fishy as hell to me – but I don’t think it really is. I may be aggravated if I were to hear, say, Honeytrap on The OC, because it is a program made about cunts, by cunts for cunts, but it would certainly not be Honeytrap’s fault. Those producers are basically fans, the same as we are. They’re only possibly compromising themselves in doing so, if they are claiming to like bands they don’t just because they thing The Kids will be impressed. But in this case, again, it is not the band, it is them.

So Madonna writing songs to peddle Gap clothes which she may like, but I would put money on her not loving, is selling out. This imbecilic stunt is certainly selling out. But music is still a commercial industry, and selling your music to people is an unavoidable part of the business. So fuck, if someone, even in The OC, mentioned reading Song, by Toad I’d fall off my chair in delighted surprise.

But as soon as money is involved, we need to be very suspicious. Bands may well be honest in their support of products, but it is sincerity that seems to me to be the core of the sell-out. Sincerity is notoriously hard to detect though, especially as we have a nasty habit of conflating a band’s opinions and motives with our own. But I do believe that in the end a consistent lack of sincerity is very hard to keep hidden, so don’t worry about what your band chooses to associate themselves with, worry about how much they seem to mean it. Even Chris Martin, for all his crimes against music, seems sincere.

Honeytrap – Death Before the Silver Screen My favourite song of the year? Quite possibly.
The Clash – Complete Control
Barry Adamson – You Sold Your Dreams

And, for the kings and queens of advertising, I actually really like these two songs. Yes, Moby. Ah fuck off, so crucify me. I like it, alright?

Moby – Run On
Goldfrapp – Paper Bag

This is not a post about Clem Snide, I just thought the album title was highly appropriate and I love the artwork.  What this post is really about is that precise moment you see the fashion train about to leave the station and instead of running to jump on before the doors close you give a wry smile, slow to a stroll and calmly watch it pull away and head off into the distance.  Ah well.

Most people aren’t all that fashionable between the ages of say, ooh, about one and perhaps eighty-five anyway, but I am referring more to that point at which you suddenly realise that fashion is for the Yoof and you are no longer young enough.  Most of us, especially the indie types likely to be reading this, rejected large portions of the current fashion all the way through our youth anyway, either for reasons of modesty, taste, curmudgeonly refusal to join in, indifference, or myriad other reasons.  Famous one-line smart arse Oscar Wilde did, after all, brilliantly say that “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”

But even as kids, not being fashionable was a choice we made based on what the cool people were wearing – it was a current choice.  This 80s revivalism is actually rehashing fashions I already rejected nearly twenty years ago.  So suddenly, for the first time in my life, they are reviving fashions which I didn’t even like the first time around.  And that, my dear readers, is when you know that fashion has passed you by one final, irretrievable time.

Ben Folds – There’s Always Someone Cooler Than You
Billy Bragg – The Busy Girl Buys Beauty
Squirrel Nut Zippers – Flight of the Passing Fancy

And one more thing: Song, by Toad will NEVER wear skinny jeans.  Ever. Unlike virtually 98% of the people who do wear them I am well aware of the fact that I am the wrong build and my arse is far too big and I would just look like a total prat.  Do you wear skinny jeans?  If the answer is yes, please be aware of the fact that there is an empirically undeniable 98.3% chance that they make your arse look either too big or just not there at all and your legs look like carrots.  None of these are flattering.  You’re welcome, just thought you should know.

Pulp – Pencil Skirt Now these are sexy.
The Clash – Just the Right Profile

Firstly, for my non-British readers, who are Marks & Sparks? Well it’s short for Marks & Spencer who are a sort of lower middle-class British institution – the kind of department store that has been around forever and occupies a specially cosy place in our sentimental British hearts. It’s where more or less the entire country buys their socks and underwear, which should tell you all you need to know. They also have something of a reputation for their food, although I can’t honestly tell you why. I think that way back in the early days of pre-prepared foods theirs was a cut above the other crap out there, but I doubt that holds true anymore.

Anyhow, they’ve been struggling recently through being neither cheap enough to be bargain basement nor cool enough to be hip, and having a reputation as somewhere grannies shop. Jean-Yves somebody or other had a stab, before buggering off to turn the Millennium Dome into the sort of spectacular fiasco at which Britain truly excels. Now it’s the turn of a chap called, I believe, Stuart Rose to have a stab. This man is so unpleasantly wealthy that simply by paying proper taxes he could probably bankroll all the benefit fraud in the UK – but of course his accountants couldn’t have that – and he has set about making M&S cool again.

Part of this strategy has seen the arrival of pornographically breathy voice-overs in their adverts – some sultry tart pouting ‘Not just knickers, these are Emm and Ess knickers’. Honestly, she’s experiencing so much sexual pleasure as she says the words you assume the dirty bitch must be fiddling with herself even as she’s recording the advert. They’ve also applied this approach to food, embracing the recent ‘Mmm, even as I stir this souffle, you’re imagining me on all fours, giving you almost exactly the same look I’m giving you right now‘ style of gastro-porn brought to its trouser-tented pinnacle by the brilliantly filthy Nigella Lawson.

So, this weekend, Mrs Toad and I were watching an almost comically bad adaptation of Persuasion by Jane Austen and M&S obviously decided that the Jane Austen watching crowd was just their demographic so what should come on during the adverts but one of these dusky voice-overed (yes, I know that’s not really a word) Marks & Sparks ads. It was hilarious: ‘Mmh, succulent firm young stems… oooh, are you hard? lovely sprouting stems of.. oh this is getting me quite wet… oh firm young fleshy rods…’ All they were talking about was broccoli, as it happens, but I nonetheless was forced to excuse myself for five minutes for a quick one off the wrist in the downstairs bathroom it was all just so sexy. More to the point though, there was something disturbingly wrong in the juxtaposition of all this breathless moaning and the words being used – ‘firm, young, oooh..’ – to describe the produce in question. I’d imagine the adverts for imported twelve-year-old sex slaves from Thailand would sound much the same. ‘Oooh, tender young limbs. Firm, smooth flesh. Ahh, mmh… succulent meaty chunks..’ Oh no, that’s cat food

‘Not just anal fisting, this is M&S anal fisting.’

The Raveonettes – Little Animal This has the best opening line to a song. Ever.
The Raveonettes – Dirty Eyes (Sex Don’t Sell)
The Clash – Lost in the Supermarket