Time and again, beloved songs have been trotted out to sell cars. Led Zeppelin for Cadillac, the Buzzcocks for Toyota, and the Ramones for Nissan. The Clash even popped up in a Jaguar commercial. Viewers with an attachment to a particular track might find themselves feeling betrayed, especially those Gen-X fans of underground music for whom liking music outside the mainstream was part and parcel of their young identities. But given that record sales aren’t what they used to be, who isn’t pleased that Pylon is seeing some money from that new Lexus ad?
-To suggest that Iggy Pop must be held to the same rigorous staunch-indie standard as Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye, a man who wouldn’t do interviews with publications that derived income from tobacco advertising, is wishful and ridiculous thinking. If Iggy doesn’t have the sheer successful breadth of his late collaborator, David Bowie, he’s a multimedia entertainer in the same mold, and nobody griped much when “Starman” ran in an Audi Super Bowl ad earlier this year. Ingolstadt has dipped back into the erstwhile Ziggy Stardust’s well, this time fishing out the Pop-fronted Stooges’ “Search and Destroy,” the venomous, hair-raising lead track from the Bowie-produced Raw Power album.
-Iggy’s been selling his songs for years. He even recently appeared with John Varvatos in a Chrysler 300 spot, shot in front of Varvatos’ Bowery store in Manhattan—a space that was once home to CBGB’s. This isn’t even the first commercial go ’round for “Search and Destroy,” as the song famously figured in a Nike ad from twenty years ago. But at least that clip featured a close-up of somebody puking. But this? This is some sanitized, milquetoast, Styrofoam junk.
-The clip leads off with some guy who isn’t Scott Asheton (because Scott Asheton is dead) banging on the drums somewhere that doesn’t look like a place where Iggy would’ve slathered himself in peanut butter and hurled himself into the audience. Nobody is smoking cigarettes. We get a brief shot of somebody who might be young Mr. Pop on a screen. A lady wears VR goggles in a fancy house! We see some jackhat at the New York Stock Exchange with his face on the cover of Wired. Mission control people get amped on a Mars landing. The debate club wins! There’s a football hit! We cut to the players excitedly re-watching it on a tablet. And finally, a self-satisfied schnook strikes the Jesus Milhaus Nixon pose onstage at a developer conference to rapturous applause, while Audi offers their inane new proposition: “Intelligence is the new rock ’n’ roll.” It’s a grody, tone-deaf repackaging of affluent life as some sort of rebellion in the name of capitalism.
-Of course, modern culture is a pastiche of what came before, all scrambled together like some alternately brilliant and horrible outtake from Paul’s Boutique. N.W.A. was threatening as all hell in 1990, a turbulent voice from the sun-baked, violent streets of the L.A. basin. In 2015, the ad campaign for Straight Outta Compton featured two different targeted social media campaigns. White audiences saw the biopic pitched as the origins of businessman Dr. Dre and actor Ice Cube, while black viewers were confronted with the letters “N.W.A.” immediately. A group of poor kids from Compton rapped themselves into the fabric of the nation’s consciousness; for one reason or another, Americans of all stripes wanted to see a film about them. Perhaps, then, seminal gods of the independent underground would package nicely with modern aspirational tech culture?
-Twenty years before Dre, Ren, Yella, Cube, and Eazy released their first album, a quartet of louts fronted by an Ypsilanti trailer-park lunatic emerged from southeast Michigan with a new and violent sound. Nobody much cared, save for a few social misfits who treated the Stooges’ records as sacred texts. They strode forth as apostles bearing a sonic scripture of disaffection and volume, becoming the Sex Pistols, the Necros, Naked Raygun, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, Mission of Burma, The Melvins, Mudhoney, and Nirvana. Kurt Cobain cited Raw Power as his favorite record. Kurt Cobain has also been dead for nearly 22 years. Iggy, having survived against incredibly long odds, became everybody’s favorite lovable rock ’n’ roll uncle, a figure finally rendered safe for mass consumption.
-The campaign seems to suggest that in the angst-free future, we’ll all be happy with our STEM educations, and our excessive student debt will be magically erased by a major influx of venture capital, at which point we’ll all buy self-driving Audis. As our cars ferry us homeward, we’ll pop hydrocodone to take the edge off all the Adderall we snorted in the break room. As it does in the ad, “Search and Destroy” will play at an appropriately low volume, gently reminding us that we crushed that code today, bro.
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The played-out assertion that “X is the new Y” reeks of the hashtag set’s intellectual laziness, which isn’t a particularly great way to sell purported smarts. And lest we forget, rock ’n’ roll at its best is a transcendent force that’ll nigh-on explode your heart. Google’s self-driving car did not do that. It did not even introduce mild palpitations. The last Audi this writer drove that came close to replicating the effect of a righteous sonic soul-lashing was the janky old Sport Quattro, with its hilarious turbo lag and refreshingly analog driveline. Even then, the combination evoked Kraftwerk more than it ever did Black Flag. A modern Audi S7 is a lovely place to sit, goes like stink, and is safe as pasteurized milk. But perhaps that’s the problem. An old Chevelle SS was all noise, violation, and bias-ply smoke, as in-the-red as James Williamson’s searing guitar, despite being slower through the quarter mile than the fire-and-forget Audi.
-Guitarist Vernon Reid once said something to the effect of, “Music is made by those who music saves.” Modern German luxury sedans are made in factories. They get you from place to place, offer varying degrees of driving enjoyment, generally include state-of-the-art technological features, get traded for new German luxury sedans as they come off lease, and wind up in wrecking yards when they become too expensive to repair. Live fast, render yourself economically inefficient young, leave an aluminum/steel corpse to rot in the sun. It’s a cheap and shoddy simulacrum of life’s bloody, sexy, cosmic wonders. In short, it’s a disposable world of synthetic detritus best scored by Coldplay. Trying to set it to the flesh, bone, and broken glass of the Stooges just makes you look dumber than you seem to think rock ’n’ roll is.
- -from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com/no-fun-audi-fails-miserably-at-appropriating-the-stooges/
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