Posts matching tags 'devo'
2003/8/15
In what is an echo of both the New Order Sunkist commercial and the self-jamming Nike billboards, anti-commercial New Wave band Devo have rerecorded their song "Whip It" for a cleaning product commercial. The ad shows middle-aged women dancing robotically whilst cleaning their suburban homes, while the music plays; the chorus has been changed to "Swiffer's good":
Devo agreed to perform the altered version for Swiffer advertisements because, Mr. Mothersbaugh said, "it was so absurd. We like messing with the boundaries between art and commerce."
Blatant sell-out, a clever subversion of consumerism, both or neither? It increasingly seems like the lines are blurred, every anti-consumerist culture jam becomes a viral marketing campaign and vice versa, with a hair's breadth of ironic detachment separating the cognisant from the suckers.
2001/4/20
A piece interviewing Mark Mothersbaugh, former member of Devo, SubGenius minister, and film-score composer:
To resolve some of the contradictions between his earlier band and his current line of work, Mothersbaugh said that for a while he would slip subversive messages into his advertising music. He claimed to have inserted a subliminal voice saying ``sugar will rot your teeth'' into a commercial for Gummi Savers. He said he also added ``avoid conspicuous consumption'' to a campaign for BMW and ``biology is destiny'' to a cosmetics commercial.
(He's now making ring tones for Nokia?)