Cartunes

What do washed up, warmed over and heroin fried musicians do when they’re between a rock and a hard place? Sell their songs. Or someone else does. Sometimes the artist is long dead and no longer needs quick cash for 3 a.m. coke runs. It’s only a matter of time before we hear the first warbled, drawn out notes of White Zombie’s “More Human than Human” while some gas (or ethanol maybe) guzzling truck spits mud at the TV screen. I’m not complaining car commercials spoil these sleazy auto mechanic rock songs; the distortion and chugging chords of “Iron Man” made me cringe well before Nissan filled every commercial break with some Sabbath. If you’ve watched even one quarter of a football game in the last 4 months you know what I mean; “Iron Man” really does live again and he drives a Titan.
Present and future automobile advertising execs: please spare us. Your audience did nothing to deserve hearing “Black Hole Sun” again. The summer Soundgarden spewed this monotonous melody all over us was hot and miserable. Not miserable because of the heat, but because Chris Cornell and co. wouldn’t shut up about it. And that nasally back up singing when the track winds down made me want to melt like the Barbie doll in the video.
But I digress; only when a song has been beaten into our heads by the airwaves, MTV, and some butthead next to me at a stoplight is blasting the blasted tune with the windows of his ’89 Camaro down in the winter, is said song officially dead and doomed to live on as a novelty in some stupid car ad. Too bad they don’t make Camaros anymore. Mark my words, the washed out riffs of “Come as You Are” will beckon teenage girls to “Come buy a Car, hurry up, you have no choice, Nevermind that Dead Musician in the trunk.” And Courtney Love? Mitsubishi stockholder.