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Target and LL Bean Butcher Progressive Music Legacy
We all remember Nike using The Beatles' Revolution in a commercial, or when Wrangler used Creedence Clearwater's Fortunate Son (to make it look like a patriotic song, not the antiwar ballad it is). Now Target and L.L. Bean have co-opted 2 more progressive classics.
Target has recently released a TV commercial for girl's back to school clothes using Marlo Thomas's Feminist Children's song Free to Be You and Me in the background. Many may remember this song from their childhoods (released in 1974); it was the title song from a record meant to teach children that they were not bound by traditional gender roles. The song sings of a time when people will not be judged by their race, sex, wealth, or personal differences. In the commercial, as the song plays, 3 girls wearing different colorful Target outfits show them off at school; each confident, because they are "free" to choose their own style.
Possibly worse is the new L.L. Bean TV Ad which plays a Smithsonian recording of Wobbly Haywire Mac McClintock singing his original version of The Big Rock Candy Mountain. A member of the radical Union The Industrial Workers of the World during it's height during the early 20th century. He was a contemporary of song writer and organizer Joe Hill, and among the first to publicly sing Hill's The Preacher and the Slave. The recording of McClintock Singing was taken from an interview with him at the end of his life. He talks of the Wobblies and that the original meaning of "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" (the more commercial version was rewritten by Burl Ives). It was a ballad of how older Hobos would trick younger ones to help them survive with stories of the Candy Mountain where there are cigarette trees and alcohol springs. These stories were based in part on springs with lemon flavored carbonated water in the Western United States. Haywire Mac is also known for Hallelujah I'm a Bum. These songs humanized the homeless, now The Big Rock Candy Mountain is being used to sell expensive, yuppie, camping equipment; in Haywire Mac's own voice. He must be rolling in his grave.
To protest please write to both Target and L.L. Bean.
http://www.target.com/gp/help/
Aaron Strong is a shlameal who watches TV. You can reach him at aaronstrong@sbcglobal.net
26 Comments so far
Show AllOf all the co-optations - from "Born in the USA" to Che's image, to Lennon's "Imagine", the Wobbly song "Big Rock Candy Mountain" is the last thing I'd imagine that they would pick up.
Marx, in the Communist Manifesto comes to mind when he describes how under capitalism, "all that is sacred is profaned".
Myself, I'm thinking more of Horkheimer/Adorno's critique of the Culture Industry . . .
Aaron, Aaron, it's "schlemiel"!
Please correct your Yiddish!
schlemiel, schlamazel...
"Controlling the discourse" is the game we play, endlessly. Thanks to the author of this article, I've learned about the origin of The Big Rock Candy Mountain, and I'm a more aware person as a result. Kudos to him. We need to do this over and over through our society, especially with young people, who often know only the sanitized corporatized version of our history and where we have been, who we are.
Next it will be Dylan's "Blowin in the Wind" to sell hair driers.
Done, though not with "Blowin'":
"In 1994, Dylan licensed the "The Times They Are a-Changin'" to be used in an advertisement for the auditing and accountancy firm Coopers & Lybrand, as performed by Richie Havens. Two years later, in 1996, a version of the song by Pete Seeger was used in a TV advertisement for the Bank of Montreal." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Times_They_Are_a-Changin'#The_songs.)
And Dylan himself and his song "Love Sick" sold lingerie for Victoria's Secret: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/4670845.
As the man said: "It's easy to see without looking too far/That not much/Is really sacred." [It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)]
Dylan became irrelevant decades ago.
While watching a baseball game last night I heard this desecration of a wonderful song for the first time. I felt pity and sadness for L.L. Bean. To think " Big Rock Candy Mtn. " has been twisted like this shocking; shocking I tell you. It is another nail in our collective coffin: and we're already nailed done pretty tight. It is almost grounds enough to quit eating apple pie and to sell my Volt. I'll just stop shopping at Beans, instead. Their stuff is no longer Made in the U.S.A., anyway. Running around in the wilds, unclothed, is so liberating. Well, we'll always have New Balance-- wait, you don't say.
I don't watch television since the stations went off the air last year. But anyways, why write original music when you can just pay a royalty and copy it for commercial gain. LL Bean sucks because you can find the slave-labor crap at Walmart.
It's certainly appropriate to be playing 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' again.
This song was also featured at the beginning of the Coen Brothers "O Brother, Where Art Thou!"
Wow, I didn't know that about Big Rock Candy Mountain. From homeless to hype; that is rather annoying. However, coming from a long line of wise asses, I too make fun of certain songs on a regular basis. Am I being unfair to the advertisers? How can anyone be unfair to advertisers. Still, satire and parody does serve a purpose.
I, however usually ding the corporate, religious and military sides. However, equal time must be allowed, even in a pseudo democracy. I think I'll take on patriotic songs, just to level out the field.
I was toying with "Onward Christian Retaliers" but settled on our horrible, bomb bursting National Anthem instead.
"The Retail Mangled Spammer"
from stardust
Oh say can you see,
by the parking lot light,
What so proudly they sell
and the credit cards gleaming.
And consumers eyes gleam,
dollars bursting---obscene,
gave proof to the blight of the retailers' dream.
Oh, say can that corporate spin
please be defrayed,
Over advertising land,
And our culture, PLEASE SAVE!***
I recall seeing a poster in the early 80s with these lyrics imposed among musical notes:
♪This land is your land♫
♫This land is my land♪
in the window of a ... wait for it ... real estate office!
In the end, art can only be a draw for a politically revolutionary movement and cannot be politically revolutionary in itself; it can only be socially revolutinary through the indirect means of aesthetics and the personal influences arising from that.
L.L. Bean also worked to help defeat the referendum back in 1980 to close Maine Yankee, Maine's nuclear power plant. Leon Gorman, L.L. Bean chairman, former president and L.L. Bean's grandson, defends his pro-nuke actions in his Harvard Business School-published autobio, where he admits that he was also on Central Maine Power's board of directors. As a regular backpacker of the Mahoosuc Range back in the '70s and '80s, I remember how this local, supposedly eco-friendly company selling mass-produced crap to wilderness wanna-bes infuriated me; esp. seeing all the Boston & Cambridge liberal "no-nukes!" folks walking around in their L.L. Bean shit; each purchase helped to keep nuke power live on.
"no gods, no masters" --m. sanger
One of the VERY few times when I've actually enjoyed a company doing this was a few years back when Target used Canned Heat's Let's Work Together. It was and is a great song that didn't get much airplay when recorded.
LL Bean is a fraud. Their groovy catalog covers should really be featuring Chinese sweatshop factories where practically all their clothes are made, in stead of Loons on Maine Lakes... Now they have expanded their abuse of animals by making and selling products made from the American Buffalo. How vile can you get?
PS, I was disgusted to read an earlier comment about how LL Bean head honchos were supporting nuclear power some thirty years ago. I guess that qualifies under "saving Maine wilderness values," no doubt...
Corporations are evil. The bigger the corporation, the greater the evil...
I still listen to scores of AM-radio (aka Top Forty) hits from the Sixties and Seventies.
I guess the Lemon Pipers' "Green Tambourine" is more Pop than Rock, but its not-very-subtle "message" presages the rise of Corporate Rock as presciently as anything by Frank Zappa and the Mothers:
________________________
♪ Drop a dime before I walk away
Any song you want I'll gladly play
Money feeds my music machine
Now listen while I play
My green tambourine ♪
________________________
It amuses me that a sweet, even twee, lighthearted tune is really about the sometimes-painful truth that COMMERCIAL music is a COMMODITY.
I typically shun, or at least mute, ads featuring otherwise worthy tunes-- ESPECIALLY if they've been sanitized and mutilated by the advertiser. But I was OK with a Coke ad (?) a few years back that featured a few original bars of "The Weight", only because I assumed surviving members of The Band were paid well for it.
But having witnessed Michael Jackson's ownership of Beatles music, and Bob Dylan doing "Victoria's Secret" and Starbucks promotions, I resign myself to accepting the bitter truth that money indeed feeds their music machines. That doesn't mean I have to like it, though, or go along for the ride.
One of the worst and most ironic co-options was Mercedes-Benz's use of Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz" in a TV commercial, after Joplin's death of course. Watch it and weep: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjTuRDW2NHY
While we're at it, the US National Anthem ought to be changed to Paul Simon's "The Sound Of Silence".
Or "American Tune".
IMO, Simon ought to have sung "American Tune" instead of "The Boxer" when he appeared on Saturday Night Live on the first show following 9/11/2001.
He would've been torn apart by Giuliani and the police and firemen onstage, though. So I guess I can't blame Simon for going with the sentimental favorite.
America - No more culture than a Petri dish of Y. pestis...
Non Serviam - I will not serve.
This post and thread are the silliest things I have read in months (and CD has plenty of silly to go around).
Two pieces of popular musical pablum end up being used by capitalists! Oh, the HORROR!! Get over it already! Get a life!
You got to admit, CD takes themselves VERY seriously. And I don't really understand why they lump Target and L.L. Bean together. The former is well known for bankrolling vile fascists and despicable causes while the latter keeps a fairly low political profile and maintains at least a patina of social responsibility (and I've never seen evidence to the contrary... Does CD have any?).
Oh, but I forgot, they're corporations, and we must dance to the tune that ALL corporations are greedy and evil. Especially ones that sell "yuppie camping equipment"! EGADS!!!
The LL Bean example did strike me the first time I saw the commercial. Now whenever it comes on, I shut my eyes so I don't have to associate the song with images of yuppies at play. Although... maybe its actually a very subtle jab at those yuppies- no matter how hard they try and how many cozy LL Bean fleece hoodies they buy, they will never achieve the mystical perfection of that seashore.
The other example of this type of co-option of a song that really, really bothers me is the Totino's Pizza Rolls ad featuring a cutesy version of Kim Wilde's "Kids in America," the 80's New Wave anthem.
I don't see anything wrong with them using the songs. I was not alive when they were released and popular, and I only heard of them from the commercials. They are a refreshing 30 seconds among the crappy pop tunes or "hip" jingles corporations usually choose. Plus, the songs are introduced to a broader audience.
As for the companies themselves... I don't know much about Target. LL Bean is terribly overpriced, but from what I hear is that they have a really good return policy, and if anything you buy there breaks they'll replace it. I wouldn't buy anything from them though.