Nina Simone - Sinnerman (Felix da Housecat Remix)

The original version is legendary, I’ve always loved it. It sucks when some bullshit cruiseline commercial hijacks a song you love(d) and destroys it, perverts passionate lyrics to sell shit to the medicated masses, it’s like walking down the frozen foods aisle in Bristol Farms and hearing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” playing over the intercom between John Tesh and Carrie Underwood, it makes you want to stab Nutty Swirl Drumsticks into your fucking ears, or into the heart of the Ad Director who thinks a song about counter-culture and heroin sets the perfect mood for the retirement-home crowd to play shuffleboard on a giant mall in the sea.

Sometimes it’s the artists, often it’s the record companies who hold the rights to the songs - I have no problem with good music being chosen for good advertisements, but the use is frustrating in cases where the message of the song is diametrically opposed to the product being sold (such as Mercedes Benz using Janis Joplin’s anthem criticizing materialism for a tv spot).

For a long time my attitude was a broad “fuck the man, fuck these dickheads stealing MY music!” and I stand by that for the most part, but in recent years something happened: the ad agencies - they have kids like me, like US, directing the creative, acquiring the media, creating the concepts. They get wasted at the same [type of] bars, they try to fingerblast their girlfriends at the same Kings of Leon concerts, they scour the same blogs for the new Daft Punk live bootlegs… it’s like having a man on the inside, sometimes it still sucks to have YOUR band, YOUR song played out by a holiday film trailer or a new mobile phone commercial, but in a lot of cases, it also gets some of the music we - the cool kids - love the recognition it deserves. Cadillacs gliding through downtown Los Angeles to Pheonix and Justice, Intel freestylers moving to The Teddybears, and Shiny Toy Guns, Apple Advertisements don’t just use cool new songs, they make bands’ careers.

This remix of Sinnerman is in a commercial - I’ve heard it probably a dozen times tonight alone, I’ve looked up at the screen a few, and I really honestly have no idea what it is for (a mobile phone, I don’t know which one), but every time the ad comes on it grabs my attention and is one of the few ads that doesn’t make me change the channel.