Let’s take Viagra and jam

First of all, has anyone here tried to play the upright bass after taking Viagra? It’s not possible.

If you haven’t seen this commercial, or an edit of it, it features a band singing about Viagra to the tune of ‘Viva Las Vegas’. This may be the only thing worse than a song you like being co-opted by a TV commercial: a TV commercial covering the song and inserting its brand name into the lyrics.

So instead of getting ‘Viva Las Vegas’ stuck in your head, you wake up with ‘Viva Viagra’ playing in your brain, and you can never hear the original again without hearing the new lyrics imposed on top of the old song.

Once in a while a bigger band, like REM, will refuse to ever have their music featured in ads and face pressure from people who make money off of licensing music to change their minds. Through the mists of time I would have to declare bands like REM the clear winners for not diluting the value of their music. Ad campaigns like HP’s have body slammed the Cure’s ‘Pictures of You’ to death, and God help me if I ever hear Oasis / AT&T’s ‘All Around the World’ one more damn time. I dare you to play it again. Go on. I dare you.

A commercial campaign will grind up and spit out a music track in just about two week’s time. After that the song is thrown into a dumpster in a supermarket back-parking lot after hours while no one is looking. Or the ad campaign drives around until it finds an apartment complex with a communal dumpster, and just chucks the song in there. I mean, they don’t know they don’t live in that complex, right?

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