Eno Subway spot - D/Astronomically, Mind-F*****gly D?

Is this really different from sampling? It's an ad, which seems less "noble" than a song, but I'd argue it isn't always up to the artist to determine how best to use his music. Maybe years from now, we'll all discover Eno was the greatest incidental music composer of his generation.

I think that's well-established given the Windows startup sound. He may view the Subway ad as some absurd triumph, that's not the point, the point is that artists are being subverted, absorbed into a catalog of opportunity. Your points in re: Beethoven and the nature of performing/releasing music are good ones, and I think that's the "Calm down" response, but, you really have to see this ad to understand repulsively that sort of patience has been put to use by the clueless and/or careless. It's someone holding up a huge pair of pants they wore when they were fat, in slow-motion.

Music is surely only "swallowed" (ie swallowed forever) if a weak song in the first place? (usually because it has already made lots of collusions with pre-existing ad-strategies sedimented into the uncritically adopted forms and shapes of said song)The secret unspoken assumption being made by the ANTI-AD people is that ads are BY DEFINITION stronger art than the songs they tap into.

I don't know that it's much of a secret that television advertising reaches more people than would ordinarily hear a Brian Eno record. I guess that argument makes sense if you're talking about someone like Led Zeppelin and claiming their stock's been lowered in some way, but my concern, again, is about the loss of control, subversion at the hands of murky inter-corporate handoffs the artist could never foresee. There's nothing wrong with someone licensing a song to a movie or an ad - whether for artistic reasons or just plain fuckin cash - but that allows the parent corporation to take relative ownership of the rights to that song and pass it around to other companies as property.

And as to Eno producing Ufucking2, nobody is arguing his integrity is at stake. It's not about Eno, it's about, as the mighty Ms. Jackson put it, control. And not even "control," just reasonable expectation as to the bounds of a licensing agreement.

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Back up here -- I seem to have missed something about the end of the Fiction days. So are Parry and Cure no longer on speaking terms?

i think the actual music (not the legal agreement) has the power to transcend this subversion

DLeone in devil's advocacy shockah bore, out to look "right" rather than argue an opinion.

TrickDisc, how can music transcend the image of a once-obese man holding up a giant pair of pants as they blow in the wind, in slow motion. Can it transcend the Golden Arches, Wal*Mart/Tescos? If Oasis were doing Tescos adverts during their late-90s rebirth/relaunch, let's say we've got a sunny day in Trafalgar, loads of Come On and Join Us, We're the Young Nation kids running around to "Some Might Say" and telling the camera how they can get everything they need at bargain rates from Tescos, would those that romanticize Britpop have as easy a time?

x-post shockah!

Couldn't they have just used Four Tet?

about a year later i interviewed tony wilson: round about the time he was setting up the (also short-lived) factory too imprint. he said something like, look, if it gets the music out there, gets one person asking "what's that?" and discovering joy division, isn't it worth it?

admittedly, he's a chancer and a charmer. but he has a point.

ppl only have a problem with music they love on adverts because they don't like it being tainted in some way by the capitalist system (man). er: it already is. records exist to make ppl money, remember? can't recall which label(s) eno is/was on, but i sure as hell bet they weren't all altruists doin' it for the music and not the readies.

we live in a market economy. if you don't like it, take to the streets with a submachinegun. personally, i've grown to enjoy hearing odd songs on unlikely ads. i mean ... the FALL selling vauxhalls! still can't get over that.

simon

Any poss. that Lanois had anything to do with this? I can't load AMG on this computer, but was he a co-writer?

What was the year for the song/record?

It's interesting that ad jingles from the 70's and 80's are still remembered today (e.g. McDonalds, Oscar Meyer, etc.), but songs liscensed to commercials generally assume (or keep) separate identities. Does anyone say "Aphex Twin, he's the Pirelli tire guy, right?". Or about the Clash "oh, aren't they're the band who did that Levi's ad?". Does anyone remember or care about Babylon Zoo these days?

Similarly, I doubt that Eno's will be altered or tarnished by this ad.

And to be fair, you DO sound a touch worked up, Chris.

1) subways are f***ing lovely. seriously. they kick ass. this nice aussie dude's opened a franchise at the top of my street, and *man* are those things tast-eee. yeh ok if you want to pile 'em with cheese and mayo you can, but you can also get good lo-fat action if you want. 'tis up to you, lardlubber.

2) if this eno/windows thing is true, that's 1,000,000 times worse than any advert action. good god: a tasty sandwich vs the blight that has destroyed computing? wow, baldy: you really took the devil's shilling there.

surely eno is a mac man though and through? :)

S

"The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, 'Here's a specific problem -- solve it.' The thing from the agency said, 'We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,' this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said 'and it must be 3¼ seconds long.' I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time."

So have our assumtions about "sell outs" been overly filled with indie attitude or are the circumstances crucial?

if eno'd been paid the same amount of money to do a 3 second jingle for the world health organization, and you heard that noise any time you walked in a hospital, it'd be fine; and he'd get much worse flak if instead of microsoft it had been wal-mart or the cia or something.

as to the subway commercial, we're talking about a very obscure track. it's not like when nike used revolution 15 years ago - that was an outrage or at least a queasy postmodern milepost. i do sympathize with ott's argument, though. the issue is that when an artist makes a decision to license a track for a smart use, it's a shame that it can then be used by others for more nefarious purposes.

in all, licensing is very different from putting something on a disc and putting it out in public. our old understanding was, if you license something to someone, you are aiding & abetting their agenda, whatever that may be, good or bad, so be careful who you license to. now we see that any licensing at all can in theory let someone use your song against your ideals.

but i always think of that pretenders song "my city was gone" that rush limbaugh plays so much as bumper music on his show. just by releasing the track to the public, a total feminist vegetarian lefty is in a roundabout way making his job easier, his show slicker.

It would seem the issue of licencing has become more charged than actually simply putting out music of any stripe.

Presumably they do give somewhat of a fuck about. I mean assuming they didn't just draw song titles out of a hat and Eno's just happened to be one of them.