One of my pet peeves is the bastardization of music for the purposes of crass commercialism. Specifically, using music whose sound invokes a certain mood that its lyrics don’t match—often times actively oppose—in TV commercials.
One example is the use of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon—a song many believe was either Drake’s suicide note to the world, or at the least a song about death—in a VW Cabrio commercial about driving on a summer night.
The latest affront is the LL Bean backpack sale commercial that features the Harry McClintock recording of Big Rock Candy Mountain which was on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? sound track. This song is about a hobo’s idea of utopia, not about recapturing some kind of lost feeling by going camping with your family:
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks
You’d think the people putting together these ads would actually listen to the music they choose before they put it in an ad that gets seen by millions on national television, but that bit of good sense is evidently too far-fetched. &_&