There is a current series of adverts, I think ostensibly for O2, which rather than urging me to buy mobile phones fills me with the rich and true desire to penetrate the glass of my television screen with the corner of the coffee table. To start biting chunks off my own body, flicking and flinging them at the offensive flickering window into the world of corporate-cocksuckery. When something of real non-monetary value, a cherished song for example, is perverted into the charge of selling shit to impressionable idiots, it can really hurt (as Stewart Lee expresses so well in If You Prefer a Milder Comedian... - his former favourite song Galway Girl by Steve Earle butchered in the name of pear cider).
I've loved the song since childhood (admittedly with a pretty long hiatus between the ages of seven to twenty seven, at a guess), and blogged about it way back (150). It's Little Boxes, the satirical non-conformist 1962 folk song by Malvina Reynolds, and it's one of those perfect little works of art that should make advertising executives and marketing slugs tremble, avert their eyes and close their ears. Its sheer honesty, sincerity, passion, power and beauty should melt them like the Wicked Witch of the West doused in water, oh what a world, what a world. All responsible for the bastardisation of this song deserve their place in a hell especially constructed with them in mind; their very own realised room 101.
When did it become ok for artists to do adverts? In the 1980's when I spent my formative years no serious artist worthy of the name would have done adverts; adverts were for the corporate cocksuckers. In the 1990's it started slipping, just ask Bill Hicks. He knows:
By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising...kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I'm doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan's little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: 'There's gonna be a joke comin' up.' There's no fuckin' joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself...borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do something...rid the world of your evil fuckin' presence.
If you can ignore the dated pop culture references:
. . . "We're rock stars who do Pepsi Cola commercials!" Luckily Satan's dick has many heads, so all these little demon piglets can nuzzle up and suckle all at once. Here comes a fella named Vanilla Ice. Here comes MC Hammer. Here's Madonna with two heads. Suckin' Satan's pecker. Suck it! It's only you're dignity. Suck it! It's only your dignity! Suck it! . . . I am available for children's parties, by the way.
Now the demon seed of O2 and Satan is a disgusting twee reduction of Little Boxes to a hipster-bait jingle for a fucking telephone. I refuse to post the advert on this blog but it's out there; instead I'll post the original so you can bask in its quiet, gentle ferocity. And I'm off to patent my design for a new type of television remote control. It has a giant mute button that you wear on your forehead, and every time that accursed O2 advert comes on you can silence it by headbutting the nearest wall or pet.
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