Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Yet another reason I'm glad the Internet is here...

Because when you are sitting in front of the television and you see for the 100th time the Cadillac commercial that flashes through all those cars on that road with the great song playing in the background, and you decide you finally want to find your way to that music so you can listen to it in your car, instead of having to scramble off to get your bulky Radio Shack Realistic brand cassette player/recorder and sit there like an idiot waiting for the commercial to come back on so you can jump out of your seat, press the play and record buttons at the exact same moment and then carry the resulting evidence from door-to-door across your neighborhood, your town, your state – risking life, limb, significant annoyance and an army of “D” batteries asking people if they know the music and from whence it came... you can instead take a short and pleasant walk up the stairs of your home, go to Google.com and type “Iggy Pop Cadillac Commercial Song” and in less than a second get a search result that tells you the name, “Punkrocker,” and the band, “Teddybears,” and after another minute or so on iTunes have it downloaded to your computer desktop and portable iPod music player and drive to work the next morning with the result of this effortless quest happily blasting on 11. Went through the same drill a few months ago to find Regina Spektor’s “Better” off that terrific XM commercial, although finding that one took a fair amount of digging through obscure satellite radio message boards. What is that thing the Google guys say about organizing the world’s information and making it useful? It’s still early in the game but I have to say I think they are on to something.

*[Updated 2/28/07, used this same technique twice this week to identify the song on the iPhone commercial, "Inside Your Head" by Eberg (the only decent part of the track is the 15-second loop that runs in the Apple ad), and the one featured on the commercial NBC has been running every hour on the hour to promote its apparent Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip replacement, the Black Donnelleys - "Lost" by The Mudmen. The song is better than the show.

Studio 60 was chronically unfunny and a little too proud of itself (every time Amanda Peet opened her mouth for one of those painstakingly-crafted yet allegedly in-the-moment brilliant monologues Sorkin was basically telling millions of people, "See, you're dumb, you can't talk like this, you probably can't even think like this, so keep watching, maybe you'll learn something!") but I still kind of enjoyed it. Thought the first episode of Donnellys was just terrible. And I like Paul Haggis. This thing was basically, "Let's muss up the kids from the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, give them all forced 'from the neighborhood' accents and wrap an hour of television around dimly-lit rooms, romanticized violence and contrived narration. Yeah, that's the ticket!"]

1 Comments:

Blogger Sugee Andersyn said...

LOL I had to find out who sang the Mac Book Air commercial, the one where the laptop comes out of the thin envelope.. It's Yael Naim, a french singer.. "I'm a new soul
I came to this strange world
Hoping I could learn a bit bout how to give and take" So catchy!

8:01 PM  

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