Adverts: where great songs go to die
In the UK, the once glorious opening of ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ by The Beach Boys has become so synonymous with Lilly James trying to flog me shit from Sky that I can no longer listen to it without being pierced by sour thoughts of all the things I can’t afford. Worse still, beyond the painful ties to capitalism, being bombarded with the same 25-second segment of a song at least once a day for what seems like the last two years has entirely nullified its impact.
‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, like thousands of other great tracks before it and many more to come, has been rendered a mere traffic rumble of noise in the content congestion of the modern world. This, sadly, will only get worse. Most copyrights last for 70 years before art enters the public domain which means we are on the brink of thousands of masterpieces from the golden days of the 1960s being used freely to flog a rich array of products.
‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ may well be used for anti-flatulence medication, ‘These Boots are Made for Walkin” will soundtrack a sales pitch for Sketchers, and ‘California Dreamin” will accompany lovely shots of a Vrbo retreat in the Napa Valley. And each track will be tainted to an almost tangible degree for a torturous period in the name of marginal profit.
On top of that, many artists – from Neil Young to Bob Dylan and Stevie Nicks – have begun selling the rights to their back catalogues. While it has been claimed that some have stipulated that they want their art to remain advert-free, countless masterpieces are no doubt on the perilous brink of being used to soundtrack phrases like “Forget everything you know about slipcovers”. This nearly always destroys the song for a short time.
Scientifically, we simply become bored with songs we hear too frequently. In essence, it is akin to eating the same meal every day. Our body craves a wider range of nutrients. With overexposure, the brain no longer gets what it needs from a song, so it just becomes noise rather than a novel spike of endorphins. This is fine for the advert, which benefits from a sound being associated with a product – it’s not looking to blow your mind with a wallop of emotion the way the creator of the track once intended – but the flipside of great music becoming mere noise is far from ideal.
Alas, science is only half the issue; sociology has a lot to do with it, too. While there have certainly been some artful adverts in the past, they are now so ubiquitous and honed down to repetitious snippets that we register them in a more cynical way in the age of economic crises. So, like setting your favourite song as your alarm tone, it’s not only ruined by overexposure but is somehow disembodied and imbued with an unpleasantness. It’s not a song anymore. It’s a joke that you’ve heard countless times before.
However, human reaction as a whole is not intellectualised. Beyond the stated whys and wherefores of the problem of classic songs in adverts, the conceit is that you simply end up uttering, ‘Oh, not that bloody track again,’ linking songs to Sky Mobile where once you thought of great BBQs of bygone years. That’s not a fate that should have ever befallen a breakthrough ray of sunshine like ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ that has now sunburnt a sorry generation who’ve been subjected to searing overexposure.
So, dear adverts, I beg: please go back to employing jingle writers and leave off ‘Blackbird’ (even if it’s an odd whistle cover version). After all, jingles serve as far more effective earworms, and the instant association every reader is about to make as I write ‘Bada ba ba bah’ proves it.
