I was watching a pre-season Mets game yesterday afternoon, and one of the commercials was for the new MLB 2K7 video game. I ordinarily wouldn’t have noticed, since I was simultaneously working with my back to the television, but when I heard “Breed,” I momentarily stopped to see what was happening. At first I thought I should be feeling something, because I remembered reading online that “Breed” was the first Nirvana song to be licensed for commercial use, but I quickly realized I didn’t give a shit, and returned my gaze to my work.
There really isn’t a point in getting upset about people selling Nirvana’s music to corporations. These days it’s impossible to sit through a commercial break without hearing a a Fall song (Mitsubishi?), or an Explosions in the Sky song (Chevy? Ford? Some car commercial), or Stephen Malkmus (Sears), or Jon Spencer (That one, what was it?). Admittedly, it’s a little weird that first time you hear it, but I don’t equate it with atrocities like jumping to a major label, or choosing to open for U2, or being The Arcade Fire. What’s more, there’s a huge number of independent musicians who compose music specifically for commercial use to pay their rent. It’s perfectly normal.
I don’t want to get hypothetical about what would have been if Nirvana didn’t end in ’94, but it’s 13-years later, and the music landscape has completely changed. We would be naive to think we would never hear a Nirvana song paired with a product for commercial use, and it’s nonsensical for someone to be precious about the legacy of a band who was a chart-topping, unimaginably popular band during their career.
And that’s my rant for the day. Give up the Nirvana preciousness and focus your energy somewhere else. Like the growing media attention surrounding the band Pot, and the recent headlines they’ve made for calling the band Kettle “black.”
Z wanted to contribute this joke:
“So, two snares and a cymbal fall of a cliff………….BA-DUM-CHIK!”
