Posted 6:06 PM by Gene

Among the other HIP things ad agencies do is to overexpose bad songs. Not having heard any of the ditties in this puff piece we guess they're rambling and tuneless, or else aspirational and tuneless. One comes from an album that's sold an astonishing "230,000" copies in twenty-one months. At least the one band has seventy members and "spreads [the wealth] around." What makes us cringe when it should make us laugh is that all these bands have a noble obligation writ in blood not to "sell out". Irving Berlin was recently ubiquitous in Madison Avenue's spew because he was a street busker almost from his arrival from Tsarist Russia. No accident: the worse the songs get the more we hear that selling them is selling out, for without that self-righteousness, that noble aura that comes from reading hundreds of ROCK mu-SICK cri-TICKS, all that's left is a song, a song worth nothing if you can't whistle or hum it, a song you can't whistle or hum without considerable help, a song whose selling is made that much more impossible by its "creators" refusing to "sell out".