I think part of the point is that their only hit song namechecks the Minutemen, who were notoriously anti-commercial.
The discussion I linked to up there goes into the stuff you're saying up there, too.
It also links to this article on Apples in Stereo, their guidelines for selling out, and the whole phenomenon of indie rock in commercials.
quote:Fourteen years after Nike outraged Beatles fans, and the surviving Beatles, by using "Revolution" in a sneaker ad -- Michael Jackson controlled the publishing rights to the song -- the revolution is over, and the advertisers have largely won. Bruce Springsteen famously refused a reported $12 million to license his song "Born in the U.S.A." to Chrysler in 1986 and remains one of the handful of high-profile holdouts. (Others include Neil Young and Tom Petty.) But such opposition appears to be in retreat. "Artists no longer feel stigmatized about being used by corporations," says Cyndi Goretski, artists-and-repertoire manager in the licensing division of Warner Music. Counterculture anthems by the Who or Jimi Hendrix now sell cars. When Sting couldn't get airplay for his recent song "Desert Rose" or for the video, which featured him riding in a Jaguar, he licensed the video to the company to turn it into an ad. The exposure helped "Brand New Day" become his top-selling solo album.
But increasingly, agencies are looking beyond middle-of-the-road pop like Sting's and building brand identity for their clients with hip curios like the Apples. If you want to hear interesting, ambitious, challenging pop music these days, the place to turn is not mainstream radio but television -- and not MTV but commercials for establishment products like banks, phone companies and painkillers.
quote understand how entangled the connections between underground music and advertising have become, consider the Volkswagen commercial that used the ethereal ballad "Pink Moon," by Nick Drake, an obscure English folk rocker who died in 1974 after an overdose of antidepressants and who in the 1990's developed a cult following among indie-music fans. The Volkswagen campaign, created by a Boston agency called Arnold Worldwide, has been among the most adventurous in its use of obscure or forgotten music, pulling songs from performers as disparate as the jazz iconoclast Charles Mingus and the German new wave band Trio. To shoot the Drake spot, the agency hired Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who are known for their trippy, award-winning music videos for the alternative bands Korn, Smashing Pumpkins and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Such crossovers between making videos and making ads are common, further blurring the distinction between the two.
The original plan was to use the song "Under the Milky Way," by the Australian post-punk band the Church. But Lance Jensen and Shane Hutton, the writers, couldn't get "Pink Moon" out of their heads. During the edit, they tried it with the film. It clicked. The agency put the ad on the VW.com Web site, with a link for people to buy Nick Drake's CD online. Sales of the album jumped from 6,000 copies a year to 74,000. "He sold out without knowing it," Faris says.
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