I was watching some TV tonight with my dad, when I saw the current ad for University of Phoenix, featuring one of my favorite New Pornographers songs, “Bleeding Hart Show.” You might know I am a huge New Pornographers fan. Mostly for their delicious pop music and use of Neko Case in the creation of said music.
Listen, while you read:
Anyway, indie bands in commercials can be a heated topic. Most indie fans are also anti-TV, anti-advertising and anti-corporation, making it a pretty heinous crime to allow underground music to be in TV advertisements for major corporations.
But hey, Flaming Lips play as Land Rovers thrash over the earth. Modest Mouse has sold mid-range four-door sedans once or twice. Goldfrapp sells diamonds and reminds us its time to Holiday shop at Target.
And heck, Steve Jobs has crafted a corporate image by playing indie-rockers and poppers behind his gadgets (wonderful gadgets, mind you). Brendon Benson, I’m most recently looking at you.
So, even as silly as University of Phoenix is, I guess they can use good music too. Very likely, some young, creative ad-type in Portland had it on his iPod and his boss liked it and that was that, it was in a commercial.
I wondered though, how an artist comes to release a song to a corporation like UP, which, honestly, I don’t know a whole lot about. Turns out, neither did Carl (A.C.) Newman, the Porns’ main man, who told Pitchfork back in 2007:
It’s one of those things that just, you get a call, and somebody said “hey, the University of Phoenix wants to use the end of “Bleeding Heart Show” in a commercial.” And I thought, “eh, fair enough.” And I really honestly didn’t know that University of Phoenix was a huge online university. I actually thought it was, like, the University of Phoenix; like, every city has its big university, you know? And I thought, “oh, it’ll show in the Southwest.” It seemed kind of odd to me, like, I’ve never heard of a university having a TV commercial, but I thought, oh well. All of a sudden, people started saying “I saw your commercial during ‘Saturday Night Live’” or “I saw your commercial during ‘American Idol’,” and I thought, “what the hell is up with that?” Then I began to realize that, well, I guess we inadvertently signed up to be in a big commercial. How about that?
(Read the whole interview at Pitchfork, as Carl goes on to slam Of Montreal for allowing their song to sell Outback steaks.)
With that explanation, it’s hard to get upset over the whole thing. Especially seeing it’s kind of silly to be upset about something as trivial as a band in a commercial. Unless a song was ever used to sell a Billy Mays product. That man needs no music.