Department of Musical Irony

I'm watching the Packers-Rams game, and during some interstitial segment Fox was showing a montage of Brett Favre playing. The audio track was Pearl Jam's "Better Man," specifically Eddie Vedder intoning about the impossibility of finding a better man. In context, this really doesn't seem like something one should be saying about a sports legend:

Waiting, watchin the clock, its four oclock, its got to stop
Tell him, take no more, she practices her speech
As he opens the door, she rolls over...
Pretends to sleep as he looks her over
She lies and says shes in love with him, cant find a better man...
She dreams in color, she dreams in red, cant find a better man...
Cant find a better man (2x)

I wonder if any thought goes into these things.

UPDATE: Next segment features "Here Comes Your Man".

Comments

She lies and says shes in love with him, cant find a better man...

For Bears fans this line serves as a poignant summation of the Rex Grossman era.

Posted by JB | December 16, 2007 3:48 PM

How about Levis using "Fortunate Son" from Credence. The first lyric "I was born to raise that flag, ooh that Red White and Blue" -- delivered with dripping irony about the betrayal of Americans by the Vietnam war.

Then the ad drops out every other lyric. So suddenly the song is about the patriotism of wearing jeans.

(sigh)

Posted by WinSmith | December 16, 2007 4:09 PM

In the twilight of his playing career, well before his gambling problems surfaced, there was a video montage done of Pete Rose accompanied by "Still the Same" by Bob Seger.

You always won
every time you placed a bet.
You're still damn good
no one's gotten to you yet.

You can't make this stuff up.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | December 16, 2007 4:14 PM

Matt why don't you ever post about something important, like the coming FISA battle? ever since you joined the Atlantic, we see more of this drivel. Is Sullivan pinning you down?

Posted by Jukl | December 16, 2007 4:24 PM

No-one thinks these things past the opening line. Microsoft used the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" to promote Windows 98, and plenty of people pointed out the appropriateness of the lyric "You make a grown man cry".

Not too long ago I saw a tourism ad for some getaway spot that used Devo's "Beautiful World", which has a refrain that goes "It's a beautiful world For you, For you, For you" -- but they left out the end: "It's a beautiful world For you, But not for me!"

Posted by James | December 16, 2007 4:37 PM

Oddly, I had the exact same thought during that segment. I also wondered if the earlier segment that used "Don't Stop Believing" was going to reveal that Favre was just a small town girl.

Posted by Aaron S. Veenstra | December 16, 2007 4:54 PM

For irony, you really can't beat Carnival Cruise Lines using Iggy Pop's paean to kicking heroin cold turkey, "Lust for Life." I had it in the ear before? Sign me up for shuffleboard!

Posted by Woody Bombay | December 16, 2007 5:03 PM

"Every breath you take" at weddings...

Posted by Matt B | December 16, 2007 6:02 PM

Every TV show in the late 90's played the Green Day song with the lyrics "hope you had the time of your life" for a sentimental purpose, without understanding the song's title is "Good Riddance"

Posted by Kolohe | December 16, 2007 6:07 PM

Also, "Our Country" is used as an homage to America in Chevy Silverado commercials, when its lyrics are clearly shots across the current administration's bow:

"There's room enough here / For science to live / And there's room enough here / For religion to forgive / And try to understand / all the people of this land / This is our country."

Posted by Media Glutton | December 16, 2007 6:35 PM

The classic example of this sort of thing, of course, is Reagan asking Springsteen for permission to use "Born in the USA" as a campaign song . . .

Posted by rea | December 16, 2007 6:59 PM

The theme of my senior or junior prom was "In The Air Tonight" by Genesis, a song about witnessing someone drown.

Posted by Pat | December 16, 2007 7:37 PM

I really liked the montage about how the receiver feels as he waits for the pass--scored to I'm Waiting for the Man.

Posted by dan | December 16, 2007 8:03 PM

That damn Green Day song sounded like such sentimental tripe, even if it did have a dark title.

Posted by Tom | December 16, 2007 8:25 PM

That's up there with the Starbucks Xmas album that featured Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.

Posted by brenda | December 16, 2007 8:26 PM

"interstitial" -- in a post about the NFL? Seriously?

Put your thesaurus away & stop feeling as tho you need to falsely intellectualize every blog post.

Posted by Oh Matt | December 16, 2007 8:54 PM

Ha! Wife of DCeiver said the exact same thing! She was speaking more from the perspective of a Pearl Jam fan than a football fan, though.

Posted by DCeiver | December 16, 2007 9:06 PM

My personal favorite are the Pepsi ads featuring "Brown Sugar" from the mid-1990's. Nothing like raping slaves to make one thirsty for Pepsi.

Posted by Reality Man | December 16, 2007 9:36 PM

Or those "Like A Rock" pickup truck ads. Seger's song is about how transitory that is.

Posted by low-tech cyclist | December 16, 2007 10:16 PM

I said the same thing to my gf. Even if "better man" hadn't been damning-with-faint-praise in the song, it's a bit of a vomitous thing to say about a football player. And I'm a Packer fan.

Anyway, to all those who claim that any other musical irony takes the cake, I SWEAR - and I have my two roommates as witnesses - that one night in winter of 1995-1996, we saw a Mercedes Benz commercial with the Janis Joplin song "Oh Lord Won't You Buy Me A Mercedes-Benz". I never saw it again, and assumed that someone had informed them it was the most horrible thing ever done in advertising.

Holy crap! I was just googling for a lyrics link, and I found the actual commercial on YouTube. You must see this. But not with any children in the room, or too soon after eating.

Posted by Chuck | December 17, 2007 12:49 AM

I'm sorry, but nothing can top slave rape as a way to sell cola.

Posted by Reality Man | December 17, 2007 7:01 AM

I'm sorry, but nothing can top slave rape as a way to sell cola.

I sometimes wonder if the song would have gotten airplay in 1971 if anyone had been able to understand the lyrics. I didn't know what exactly what Jagger was saying until I read the lyrics in a book somewhere, but maybe I was a lonely innocent.

I saw the Stones in concert a few years ago and Jagger sang, "you should've heard him just around midnight" instead of "hear him whip the women just around midnight."

I figure if you're going to sing a crowd-pleasing rock anthem about raping slaves, you should go with the original lyrics. No half-measures.

Posted by JB | December 17, 2007 7:25 AM

There are 3 verses to "Brown Sugar", two of which feature variants on "you should have heard". The middle one has the slave motif.

Every time I've ever heard the Stones play the song in concert, it has included the slave lyric. Since it's a song about the Stones own love of black music and an acknowledgement of their dicey rights to it, the verse makes perfect sense. You shouldn't make a mealy-mouthed homage to rudely appropriating a rhythm.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | December 17, 2007 8:06 AM

For pure, hallowed-out, pointless exploitation of a song for crass commercial purposes, I've enjoyed Nissan's use of the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." I suppose the message is that the buyer "won't get fooled again" by one of those other manufacturer's cheap SUV's that lacks the Pathfinder's style, power, and durability.

I'd like to see Mike Huckabee using John Lennon's "Imagine" at his capaign events without a hint of irony.

Posted by owenz | December 17, 2007 9:18 AM

The first two verses of "Brown Sugar" are both about slaves, aren't they?

Posted by John | December 17, 2007 11:38 AM

Pat, "In the Air Tonight" is not about a drowning.

Posted by hilker | December 17, 2007 4:44 PM

I didn't know what exactly what Jagger was saying until I read the lyrics in a book somewhere, but maybe I was a lonely innocent.

I didn't know what he was singing until, oh, five minutes ago. All I've ever heard clearly were the words 'New Orleans' and 'Brown sugar'.

I thought it was about, you know, a girl.

In my defense by the time I started listening to music the Rolling Stones were bunch of old guys and ignorable; it's always been a background song on a station I rarely listen to.

Posted by Brian | December 17, 2007 5:59 PM

Pat, "In the Air Tonight" is not about a drowning.

The explanation on Snopes makes "In the Air Tonight" an even more hilarious prom theme:

"'In the Air Tonight'... deals with his bitterness and frustration over the end of his marriage to his first wife..."

Sounds like fun, but if that's the gist I'd rather go to a prom with a "Blood on the Tracks" theme.

The best prom theme suggestion I've ever heard is still "Viet Prom."

Posted by JB | December 17, 2007 7:17 PM