Rant: Music in commercials

[gridlore]

There's a commercial for J.C. Penny's Valentines Day sale airing right now. Usual romantic -love-is-defined-by-material-goods crap, but that's not what sets me off and makes me reach for things to throw at the screen.

It's the music. A watered-down soft rock version of Nena's 99 Red Balloons

That's right, a song about global thermonuclear war is being used to sell fake pearls.


99 Red Balloons

You and I in a little toy shop
Buy a bag of balloons with the money we've got
Set them free at the break of dawn
Til one by one, they were gone
Back at base bugs in the software
Flash the message, something's out there
Floating in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by

99 red balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells it's red alert
There's something here from somewhere else
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
Focusing it on the sky as 99 red balloons go by

99 Decision street
99 ministers meet
To worry, worry, super flurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we've waited for
This is it boys, this is war
The president is on the line
As 99 red balloons go by

99 knights of the air
Ride super high tech jet fighters
Everyone's a super hero Everyone's a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify, and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by

99 dreams I have had In every one a red balloon
It's all over and I'm standing pretty
In this dust that was a city
If I could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here
And here is a red balloon
I think of you, and let it go

Well, that just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, how about you?

Comments

[isomeme.livejournal.com]

I gave up on the lyrics fight when Microsoft launched Windows 95 with an ad campaign featuring a song which (later in the track than the snippet they used) features the line "You make a dead man come". The horror.

(Speaking of which, the Slashdot community has proposed Dave Matthews' "Crash" as the ad theme for the next major consumer release of Windows.)

[aerothorn.livejournal.com]

Geez, it's almost like they WANT the next release of Windows to be really buggy instead of the perfect OS. Funny about that.

[kshandra]

It was "Start Me Up" by the Stones...and the bit that had everyone laughing was the line "You make a grown man cry." Which you must admit Win95 did on a regular basis....

[kengr]

Urk!

Hadn't ever seen the English version of the lyrics before