Cisco Systems, maker of top-shelf advanced digital telecommunications hardware (including the Linksys wifi card I'm using right now) has a fabu new TV ad out, dramatically depicting what their advertising arm calls 'The Human Network'. It's a pretty hot ad, and you should definitely see it -- and especially hear it. Because in the now-well-established (but sadly not at all yet passé) custom of using Boomer-era hard rock anthems in patently commercial advertising, Cisco has decided that the best mid-century musical touchstone to help tee-vee watchers understand how The Human Network "enables people to make powerful connections—whether in business, education, philanthropy, or creativity" is ... "Baba O'Riley."
Yes, Cisco's marketeers deemed The Who's 1971 crashing rock-cum-electronic-klezmer showstopper -- commonly (but mistakenly) known to Gen-X'ers as "Teenage Wasteland" (and to Gen-Y'ers and younger chilluns as the opening title theme of CSI: New York) -- to be the most positive way to express how "The Cisco Digital Media System makes the integration of video into everyday life easier and faster, so you can enrich end-user experiences and provide real-time, relevant content."
Originally meant, 35 years ago now, by songwriter Pete Townshend to convey his own sense of the deeper philosophies of turn-of-the-century Indian mystic Meher Baba, who preached self-knowledge, extreme simplicity, and acceptance of fate; and pioneering minimalist composer Terry Riley, who espouses modal forms inspired by the likes of Stockhausen and La Monte Young, and has influenced notables such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass; the piece was composed by entering Baba's vital statistics into a synthesizer. It was originally conceived as part of a double-album magnum opus of interactive music, to be titled Lifehouse. Townshend's original concept would have developed from experiments in live shows, where they would enter the stats of random audience members and then improvise around it, but these experiments and the ambitious sequel to Tommy never came to fruition, and the piece ended up on the next studio album, Who's Next, alongside such enduring standards as "Going Mobile," "Behind Blue Eyes" and "Won't Get Fooled Again." Enigmatic and inscrutible, yet raw and relentless, it is rated among the Top 500 rock songs of all time by both Rolling Stone and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It has been covered by more than 20 artists, including Nirvana, The Grateful Dead, Guided By Voices, Pearl Jam, Blue Man Group and They Might Be Giants, and has appeared in the soundtracks of no less than ten films, as well as over a dozen television shows and commercials.
Exactly how the song's towering legacy and profound intent, with messages entreating clarity of purpose through simplicity, with concomitant warnings of the false path of materialism, interface (to throw in some IS/IT jargon) with the forward-thinking ambitions of one of the world's largest advanced applied technology firms is unclear. (As is also, I might point out, any connection to self-important, too-fashionable-to-be-believed fictional forensics detectives.) But the enduring refrain of "teenage wasteland" (which though the best known part of the song is for some reason not included in the ad) does seem to jive with my own sense of how a lot of this hot-shit whizbang telecom hardware is being applied by a lot of Cisco's end users. Though a little old for the appellation myself, I nevertheless freely admit to inclusion in its larger sense. I'm not ashamed of that, but I'm also not looking for The Who or anyone else to supply the theme music for my consciously adopted modern urban lifestyle, in a manner producing irony of nearly unimaginable magnitude.
This isn't the first time that a big company has made what seems like an odd choice in found music to back advertising. Mercedes frosted a lot of hipper consumers, including many of the Boomers they were trying to target, by their incredibly inappropriate use of the late Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz," a searing invective against materialsm that while sarcastic, many of us assumed was sufficiently plain-spoken that even the densest Mercedes exec couldn't possibly ever think that the song was meant to flatter them, their product, or their customers. (A memorable Sylvia comic of the time had the title character proposing a retaliatory boycott against the upscale carmaker.) Though the offenders and offences are too numerous to list, the trend has been prevalent enough, and offensive enough, that The Onion saw fit to give their own take.
Mercedes's Joplin gaffe is hard to top, but surely there's even deeper offence available for the countless truly clueless and crass marketing morons out there. I could spend the next few hours or days thinking up many ideas, but I'm interested in hearing what others have to suggest. Hit it.
