Sellout Watch: Bob Dylan and … “Forever Young”?
Dylan is an iconoclast’s iconoclast; has sold one of his songs to some unexpectedly strange company every once in a while to (in his mind, I suppose) keep us on our toes; and is getting quite old (68 this year) and can be given some slack. Still, the commercial below is jarring. It’s for one of those silly sugar-water companμies, the most celebrity-heavy product he’s ever sold one of his songs to.
The theme of the commercial, if I am understanding the ad agency’s point correctly, is that there are patterns in our cultural life… “Beach Blanket Bingo” at one time, “Step Up 2 the Streets” these days, Belushi then, Jack Black now etc. etc.
(Logically, that would mean we should be looking for something instead of Pepsi today, but the company I think is making the argument that it has reinvented itself. After all, it has a new logo.)
Two interesting things. Race is implicit in the ad; Pepsi can’t explicitly show Obama, so it settles for some black and white crowd footage and then color that could pass for cell-phone footage of Obama’s Chicago homecoming appearance.
Is it me or does the ad go seriously awry here? There are two many overtones that don’t quite jell. John Belushi’s Blues Brothers persona isn’t exactly the best thing to show; it wasn’t exactly blackface, but it was a clumsy and soul-absent caricature.
And while Will.i.am has demonstrated some growth as an artist, producer and activist it can charitably be said that he is something less than a epochal cultural innovator.
All that said, the worst thing is that an aging rock star has agreed to sell one of his most cherished songs to help promote one of the silliest products out there—and to have the novelty of his involvement increase the effectiveness of the ad even more, as Pepsi gets secondary coverage of the ad itself.
This is a case for the mighty Moby Quotient, and produces a very high figure of μ110. By that objective determination this is one of the greatest sell-out moves of all time.
The Moby Quotient, you ask? Details from the Washpost here, with a calculator here.
More on the Moby Quotient from Hitsville here.
4 Comments so far
Leave a reply
I was most horrified by Gumby turning into Shrek. There’s a sign of a downwards cultural spiral right there.
Has Will.I.Am become the most ubiquitous pop figure of our time? He’s everywhere.
Possibly equally jarring as the sight of Dylan selling out himself and his past was that of a company whose lawyer happened to be Richard Nixon, replacing its real history with a fake one implying the company was in the forefront of progressive, integrationist liberalism. The Guardian a decade ago had an article relating how the October 1970 plot against Chile’s President-elect Salvador Allende “was the direct result of a plea for action a month earlier by Donald Kendall, chairman of PepsiCo, in two telephone calls to the company’s former lawyer, President Richard Nixon.”
People have been calling Dylan a sellout since he SOLD his first album. Sold it to people who called him a sellout. Yeah, its usually his biggest “fans” who are the first to jump in with the pitchforks. I guess you’re not really a Dylan fan until you’ve had an opportunity to call him a sellout. News flash: you don’t own Bob Dylan. Stop over analyzing. Just relax and enjoy it. I prefer to enjoy my Bob Dylan CD’s with a Budweiser, but that’s just me.