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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2025
As practised by Nicholas Cook, Philip Tagg, and Nicolai Graakjær, the analysis of advertising music has largely concentrated on how advertising works to communicate meaning. Within media and communications studies, such a focus is seen as a distraction — albeit a fascinating one. For Sut Jhally, for example, advertising has pernicious social and ecological effects and advertising scholars’ goal should be to understand ‘what work advertising does’ in order to mitigate them. This examination of a Ford automobile advert featuring Nina Simone’s ‘I Wish I Knew …’ (1967) shows how music analysis might contribute to this pressing project.
1 Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford University Press, 1998).
2 Nicolai Graakjaer and Christian Jantzen, Music in Advertising Commercial Sounds in Media Communication and Other Settings (Aalborg University Press, 2009), p. 9. Not yet available while the research for this article was carried out, the new Oxford Handbook has perhaps overtaken Graakjaer and Jantzen’s book as the first port of call for advertising music research: Deaville, James Andrew, Tan, Siu-Lan, and Rodman, Ronald Wayne, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Advertising (Oxford University Press, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Tagg, Philip, ‘Music, Moving Image, Semiotics, and the Democratic Right to Know’, in Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music, ed. by Brown, Steven and Volgsten, Ulrik (Berghahn Books, 2006), p. 163 Google Scholar. This ‘critical thinking’ skill is something Tagg teaches his students, but he argues that such musical education should be as widespread as it is for verbal texts.
4 Michel Bosquet (André Gorz), ‘L’Idéologie sociale de la bagnole’, in Écologie et politique (Galilée, 1975), pp. 77–87; first publ. as ‘Mettez du socialisme dans votre moteur’, Le Sauvage, September–October 1973, pp. 9–13; transl. as ‘The Social Ideology of the Motorcar’ by Patsy Vigderman and Jonathan Cloud, in André Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Black Rose Books, 1980), pp. 69–77.
5 That’s not to say manipulation or even outright deceit does not occur: just look at the Volkswagen emissions scandal.
6 A reader pointed out that it is capitalism rather than advertising that is the real scourge of our age. While this is undoubtedly true, ‘capitalism’ is an emergent phenomenon and attempts to act against it (anti-capitalism) are likely to just be absorbed straight into it. Far more effective, I would suggest, are attempts to target, understand, and work to undermine the specific material practices such as advertising from which the slippery beast of capitalism arises.
7 Liz McFall, Advertising: A Cultural Economy, Culture, Representation and Identity Series (Sage, 2004), pp. 27–33.
8 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paladin, 1973; orig. publ. as Mythologies (Éditions du Seuil, 1957)), p. 159.
9 I don’t think Cook or Graakjær would deny there is a connection between mental representations and material reality, it’s just that it’s effectively ignored in the theorization (if not in their analytic practice).
10 Her genealogical study was pre-empted by, for example, Thomas Frank’s book about how advertising has exploited (and hence largely neutralized) counter-cultural movements and followed by others, such as Michael Serazio’s about guerrilla marketing. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (University of Chicago Press, 1997). Serazio, Michael, Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (New York University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.
11 Cronin, Anne, Advertising Myths: The Strange Half-Lives of Images and Commodities (Routledge, 2004), p. 114 Google Scholar. Cronin phrases the question more ambiguously: ‘what is the work of advertising?’ but her goal is move away from concern about how effective ads are at selling — which of course is what concerns advertisers — and instead to focus on ‘the social impacts of advertising.’
12 Foucault, quoted in Serazio, Your Ad Here, p. 11. Serazio’s emphasis. Foucault actually wrote (in English) ‘structure the possible field of action’ (correctly cited in Serazio). I can’t understand this formulation (and Foucault was clearly uncomfortable speaking or writing in English), so I have amended it to better reflect what I think he meant: namely, ‘structures the field of possibilities for action’.
13 Bethany Klein, As Heard on TV: Popular Music in Advertising (Ashgate, 2009); Taylor, Timothy, The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meier, Leslie M, Popular Music as Promotion: Music and Branding in the Digital Age (Polity, 2017)Google Scholar.
14 As mentioned, I am using Cook as broadly representative also of Tagg’s and Graakjær’s methods. In Nicolai Graakjær, Analyzing Music in Advertising: Television Commercials and Consumer Choice (Routledge, 2015). Graakjær certainly incorporates effects into his discussion in a way that Cook doesn’t — particularly those effects empirically tested by music psychology: memorability, attitude to product/brand, intention to purchase. But the ‘analysis’ of his title is still largely directed at communicative meaning, in its pure cultural, subjective, mental form divorced from its effects, as defined by Cook.
15 Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, pp. 3–4.
16 Clarke, Eric F, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 A ‘properly ecological approach’ takes ‘as its point of departure, the whole-organism-in-its-environment. In other words, “organism plus environment” should denote not a compound of two things, but one indivisible totality. […] [I]f […] we are prepared to treat form as emergent within the life-process’ then ‘we do not […] have to think of mind or consciousness as a layer of being over and above that of the life of organisms, in order to account for their creative involvement in the world.’ Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill (Routledge, 2000), p. 19. Clarke bases his ecological approach on James Gibson’s notion of ‘affordances’ which, while they obtain as relations between subject and object (mind and life), they still preserve the unecological dichotomy in the relation.
18 For another case study, see: Brooks, Marc, ‘ Mad Men as a Sonic Symptomatology of Consumer Capitalism’, Music & Letters, 102.2 (2021), pp. 317–46, doi:10.1093/ml/gcaa091 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 For Andrew Wernick, all cultural products are now suffused with the promotional imperative—there is no such thing as pure content, entertainment, art: Andrew Wernick, Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology, and Symbolic Expression (Sage, 1991).
20 Ads do often go wrong, of course, and accidentally elicit reflective engagement: the most obvious recent example is Pepsi’s poorly executed ad in which Kendall Jenner pacifies a policeman at a Black Lives Matter demonstration by handing him a can of Pepsi. Aesthetically it jars, unlike the Ford ad discussed here (and I consider the question of why it doesn’t jar below), but the Ford ad is ethically far more problematic — especially given it not only trivializes BLM but the ecological catastrophe as well — precisely because it is so ‘transparent to meaning’.
21 My understanding of Susanne Langer’s philosophy, which forms a crucial part of the theoretical discussion below, has been immeasurably strengthened by Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin, The Philosophy of Susanne Langer: Embodied Meaning in Logic, Art and Feeling (Bloomsbury, 2020).
22 Luke Windsor argues convincingly that representational signs — linguistic, musical, fashion, etc. — are just as much part of one continuous reality as anything else in perception: Windsor, W. Luke, ‘An Ecological Approach to Semiotics’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 34.2 (June 2004), pp. 179–98, doi:10.1111/j.0021-8308.2004.00242.x CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 McAllister, Matthew P. and Galindo-Ramirez, Elysia, ‘Fifty Years of Super Bowl Commercials, Thirty-Two Years of Spectacular Consumption’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 34.1–2 (2017), pp. 46–64 (p. 52), doi:10.1080/09523367.2017.1336162 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Serazio, Your Ad Here.
25 McAllister and Galindo-Ramirez, ‘Fifty Years of Super Bowl Commercials’, p. 58.
26 On ‘flow’, see Williams, Raymond, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Routledge, 2004), pp. 77–120 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Another prominent example of this dual emphasis on tradition and future can be found in Ford’s millennial advertising event ‘Global Anthem,’ which cross-promoted Charlotte Church’s album with the song ‘Just Wave Hello.’ One of the largest ad campaigns ever seen, reaching one billion people in one hundred and ninety countries on 1 November 1999, it nostalgically gazed back over Ford’s twentieth-century heritage, while looking forward to its global future with its seven newly acquired marques.
28 Bernie Woodall, ‘Ford Marks Turnaround Juncture with New Slogan’, Reuters, 25 January 2012 <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ford-slogan-idUSTRE80O02O20120125> [accessed 20 June 2024].
29 John Reed, ‘The Outsider Who Pulled Ford Back from the Brink’, Financial Times, 28 March 2012 <https://www.ft.com/content/cdd3f41e-7804-11e1-b437-00144feab49a> [accessed 20 June 2024]. The slogan was still in use when I checked in Winter 2020, but at the time of writing Ford seems (Spring 2021) to have reverted to its old ‘Built Ford Tough’.
30 Dale Buss, ‘“Go Further” Brand Message Is Aimed at Ford’s Employees, Too’, Forbes, 14 June 2012 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/dalebuss/2012/06/14/go-further-brand-message-is-aimed-at-fords-employees-too/> [accessed 20 June 2024].
31 Mindi Chahal, ‘Ford Looks to “Disrupt Itself” with Focus on Driverless Cars and Shuttle Services’, Marketing Week, 1 December 2016 <https://www.marketingweek.com/ford-aims-put-autonomous-vehicles-road-2021/> [accessed 20 June 2024].
32 In the manner discussed at the beginning of this section, the Ad Meter serves to legitimate promotional culture on behalf of advertising in general. It is not an industry tool, such as Nielsen.
33 Greg Jarboe, ‘Top 10 Super Bowl Ads for 2017 Depend on Which Metrics You Use’, The SEM Post, 7 February 2017 <http://www.thesempost.com/top-10-super-bowl-ads-2017-depend-metrics-use/> [accessed 20 June 2024].
34 Woodall, ‘Ford Marks Turnaround Juncture with New Slogan’.
35 Tom Ewing, ‘Why Did WPP Lose Ford? Start with the Advertising’, Campaign, 19 October 2018 <https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/why-wpp-lose-ford-start-advertising/1496693> [accessed 20 June 2024].
36 The creativity required is in overcoming the inertia of habit and vested interests. It is pretty clear how the reorganization of the infrastructure needs to proceed — and it doesn’t involve, pace Ford, more electric cars. ‘We will need comprehensive policies and programs that make low-carbon choices easy and convenient for everyone. […]. That means cheap public transit and clean light rail accessible to all; affordable, energy-efficient housing along those transit lines; […] bike lanes in which riders aren’t asked to risk their lives to get to work; […] urban design that clusters essential services like schools and health care along transit routes and in pedestrian-friendly areas; …’ Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (Penguin, 2014), p. 91.
37 Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, p. 4.
38 Communication is a much broader phenomenon than Cook’s definition allows. Aren’t poison-dart frogs communicating their poisonousness to potential predators through their bright colours? They are surely not even aware of this, let alone doing it intentionally.
39 Kelsey Mays, ‘What Were the Best-Selling Cars in 2016?’, Cars.com, 5 January 2017 <https://www.cars.com/articles/what-were-the-best-selling-cars-in-2016-1420692870639/> [accessed 20 June 2024].
40 Ian Thibodeau, ‘Ford’s Vehicles Not Sole Focus of Super Bowl Ad’, Detroit News, 30 January 2017 <https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/ford/2017/01/30/ford-superbowl-commercial/97241512/> [accessed 20 June 2024].
41 Graakjær, Analyzing Music in Advertising, p. 84.
42 Ibid., p. 85.
43 Graakjær refers to this amalgamation of direct and indirect address as ‘voiceover +’: Analyzing Music in Advertising, p. 84.
44 I presume the comparatives are adverbs modifying a missing verb ‘to move,’ as in ‘to help you move faster, easier, better through life’ — in any case, this sentence jars somewhat with my version of English grammar.
45 Middleton, Richard, Studying Popular Music (McGraw-Hill, 1990), p. 222 Google Scholar; quoted in Graakjær, Analyzing Music in Advertising, p. 94.
46 This is a two-way process, with the music also closing down the potential meanings of the image.
47 Graakjær, Analyzing Music in Advertising, p. 90.
48 Several internet sources, including Wikipedia (at the time of writing) and the Washington Post article cited below, mistakenly date the song’s composition and first performance earlier.
49 Billy Taylor and Teresa L Reed, The Jazz Life of Dr. Billy Taylor (Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 147–48.
50 All the songs on the album come in at under three minutes, and were probably designed for radio play.
51 UK film-lovers (not relevant in the context) know this version particularly well, as it served as the theme to BBC1’s flagship Film … programme for nearly four decades.
52 For example, see her impassioned performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976, —available on YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq3sdF0YXkM> [accessed 20 June 2024].
53 Alison Gunn, ‘The Life of a Song: “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”’, Financial Times, 28 November 2016 <https://www.ft.com/content/2ae1f31c-b339-11e6-9c37-5787335499a0> [accessed 20 June 2024].
54 Graakjær, Analyzing Music in Advertising, p. 44.
55 The Hyundai ad, for example, targets right-leaning consumers by combining pride in the US military with commitment to family. Troops on deployment are relaxing watching the Super Bowl. ‘Hyundai’ singles out three soldiers and leads them to their own private viewing booths where they can watch the game on a gigantic personal screen. Then they realize that their families are projected on the wall behind them. ‘Watching the Super Bowl is amazing. Watching it with the ones you love is better.’ The tears, very much helped by expertly deployed music, inevitably flow. Hyundai runs a special ‘military program’ through which active and retired military personal can get discount on automobiles (although this is not unique to Hyundai), and they are also committed to hiring (or rehiring) veterans.
56 As Graakjær points out, advertisers are always mining the back catalogue for gems supposedly untainted by commercialism; Graakjær, Analyzing Music in Advertising, p. 47. On the equation of black culture and cool, see Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), p. 74.
57 Jenefer Robinson, Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art (Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 322–47.
58 On the vexed, and by no means settled, problem of ‘authenticity’ in music, see Allan F. Moore, Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song (Ashgate, 2012), pp. 259–71.
59 Many analyses are attentive to music’s processual or durational character in experience. Robert Walser, for example, in his analysis of heavy metal stresses the difficulty of capturing the dynamic, affective experience of music in static print, and makes strenuous efforts to find ways of conveying it. Walser, Robert, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Wesleyan University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
60 Douglas, Mary and Isherwood, Baron, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 62 Google Scholar, 10. (All emphases added.)
61 As Raymond Williams observed, advertising had ‘passed the frontier of the selling of goods and services and … become involved with the teaching of social and personal values.’ He went on: ‘it is clear that we have a cultural pattern in which the objects are not enough but must be validated, if only in fantasy, by association with social and personal meanings which in a different cultural pattern might be more directly available.’ Williams, Raymond, ‘Advertising: The Magic System’, in The Culture Studies Reader, ed. by During, Simon, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 1993), pp. 410–26Google Scholar (pp. 421–22).
62 Williamson, Judith, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (Marion Boyars, 1978), p. 12 Google Scholar. Williamson’s book is about still, music-free magazine adverts; nevertheless, her insights are directly transferable to TV commercials.
63 Ibid., p. 13.
64 Ibid., p. 14.
65 Ibid., p. 41. Williamson here is making the self-same argument her recent critics make using Foucauldian governance.
66 On ‘thinking-feeling’, see Massumi, Brian, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (MIT Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
67 Raymond Williams on Gramsci’s understanding of ideology, quoted in Steve Jones, Antonio Gramsci (Routledge, 2008), p. 4. (Emphasis added.)
68 Tony Schwartz, The Responsive Chord (Doubleday, 1973), p. 24.
69 The scare quotes for ‘information’ and ‘record’ indicate that these are inaccurate metaphors that erroneously suggest the brain works like a library archive or a computer database. I shall sketch out below how a fully ecological (i.e. non-representational) resonance theory of brain function works below.
70 This is not to say that advertising doesn’t also make significant use of negative affects.
71 For more on how adverting music composers learned to exploit the affective capacities of music to make us feel things: see Chapter 4 of Taylor, Sounds of Capitalism, pp. 101–26. Note that even though the composers Taylor quotes talk about ‘emotion,’ the examples show that they are really thinking more generally about affect.
72 See Taylor, Sounds of Capitalism.
73 Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, ed. by Constantin V Boundas, trans. by Mark Lester and Charles J. Stivale (Bloomsbury, 2015).
74 Świątkowski, Piotrek, Deleuze and Desire: Analysis of The Logic of Sense (Leuven University Press, 2015), p. 18 Google Scholar.
75 It is non-subjective since although sense is the in-act knowledge/cognition that allows the individual to carry on acting (successfully), but it must account equally for what all other mutually implicated actors might do (or rather the affect traversing the meshwork of actors). It is also non-objective, concerning movements (as the resolution of intensive differences) that pass between and across objects, including their hindrances and enablements. The potential outcomes it registers, then, are not relations between subjects and objects betokening subjective intervention in a world of passive objects, but an envisioning of all the ways in which mutually conditioning movements might continue to evolve.
76 More properly, the sense-event is the full topological space of configurations of the elements at play that includes the path being actualised through the present, so also includes alternatives that it is impossible to get to from the current state of affairs. As mentioned, one’s sense is highly vague and restricted compared to the full virtual (in certain cases, scientific equations or computer simulations can massively improve upon what our perceptual apparatus alone can manage — e.g. in the case of climate change.
77 Protevi, John, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic (University of Minnesota Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
78 This is exactly the type of meaning that Wittgenstein said that ‘we [analytic philosophers who only admit discursive/mathematical logics] must pass over in silence’.
79 ‘Pure duration, that which consciousness perceives, […] is not a quantity, and as soon as we try to measure it, we unwittingly replace it by space.’ Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. by F. L. Pogson (George Allen, 1913), p. 106.
80 Musical semiotics differs quite markedly from linguistic semiotics and so, for example, we don’t have ‘denotation’, but rather a much vaguer ‘connotation’, and the syntactic rules covered by ‘signification’ vary by style, and are much laxer in their application.
81 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, Music and Discourse: Towards a Semiology of Music, trans. by Carolyn Abbate (Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.
82 Indeed Langer even quotes from Ivy Campbell-Fisher’s 1950 article ‘Aesthetics and the Logic of Sense’, which like Deleuze’s work, is concerned with non-discursive logics. ( Langer, Susanne K, Mind: An Essay in Human Feeling, vol. 1 (John Hopkins Press, 1967), pp. 85–86 Google Scholar.) This convergence shouldn’t be surprising. On one hand, Langer’s strand of Anglo-American philosophy had always pursued these alternative logics (Cassirer and Whitehead, the most well-known) and the pragmatists had a ‘radical empiricism’ (William James) which is consonant in many ways with Deleuze’s ‘transcendental empiricism’. On the other hand, Deleuze was explicitly drawing on Anglo-American or analytic philosophers in his attempts to draw away from the Saussurean views of language predominant in France at the time (his notion of ‘sense’ partly derives from Frege’s Sinn).
83 This is a point that is easy to misunderstand and shows Langer working implicitly with a Bergsonian view of time. Each musical ‘work’ (really the virtual Idea actualized in any rendering) comprises a single musical symbol (or ‘art symbol’), which incorporates any of the signs that carry discursive meaning.
84 Langer, Susanne K., Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (New American Library, 1948), p. 218 Google Scholar.
85 Susanne K. Langer, Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), p. 139.
86 Langer, Suzanne K., Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), p. 26 Google Scholar.
87 Ibid., p. 27.
88 Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 263.
89 Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, p. 23.
90 Clarke’s affordance — in terms of which types of moving image a given piece of music affords, or vice versa — is still a kind of parallelism.
91 Cook prefigures the argument here (or rather follow Chion’s argument) through his insistence that while ‘conformal’ or ‘complementary’ models can have some explanatory purchase in certain situations, multimedia is primarily characterised by ‘contest’.
92 There is, of course, no such thing as a ‘typical target viewer’ — target groups, defined by ‘lifestyle’ for example are marketing inventions — although there is some evidence that marketing brings such self-identifying people into existence. And agreeing with the constructivist view of music, this analysis cannot be other than a personal response. (And it constitutes, I might add, a perfectly legitimate form of empirical research; see, for example, Cook, Nicholas and Clarke, Eric, Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 5.Google Scholar) But, as discussed, the personal is entirely conditioned by the social and I have sufficiently informed myself of the ideologies at work here to be able to make a ballpark appraisal of how many viewers are likely to understand the ad. Moreover, even though I am ardently anti-car (as you might have gathered) and think the ad’s overt message contemptible and dangerous, I still find it entirely convincing at the level of feeling. (I am, therefore, in no way claiming a privileged position outside the structures of feeling I am attempting to describe — the most serious criticism levelled at researchers now discredited ‘effects theory’ or ‘mass society theory’.) Many viewers, then, are likely to be more favourably disposed to automobiles, and can therefore be expected to experience the ad even more positively than I do. I make no claims to speak for all viewers, but only try to convince the reader, in combination with their own sense of the ad, that many viewers are likely take the ad in a way roughly similar to my description here.
93 Chion’s word in Audio-Vision for the generative (metaphorical) difference between sound and image is ‘en creux,’ which is variously translated as ‘in/into the gap,’ ‘phantom,’ ‘negative,’ and ‘absence.’ Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. by Claudia Gorbman (Columbia University Press, 1994). I follow Chion in not requiring any cross-modal ‘enabling similarity’ or ‘affordance’ to glue modes together. That doesn’t mean there can’t be (common sense) ‘conformance’ or ‘complementarity’ between modes as discussed by Cook.
94 In his 1968 version, Billy Taylor contributes further to the intensification by raising the key from F to A♭ at almost exactly the mid-point (bar 53 out of 108 bars, excluding the free piano intro); Simone’s version remains in B♭ throughout.
95 A reader of an earlier article I wrote made this complaint when I cited Langer — but Langer pointedly does not fall into the affective fallacy: she insists that music follows, or makes intelligible, the logical form of feeling not that it induces the feeling in the listener (or is the expression of the composer’s feeling).
96 If we follow Deleuze and say sense is expressed in atemporal infinitives, the sense of this aspect of the music is ‘to be free’ or maybe more correctly as a relation of becoming between ‘to be trapped’ and ‘to be free’.
97 The use of the song was felt to be inappropriate by some: Caitlin Gibson, ‘Ford Used Nina Simone’s Civil Rights Anthem in a Super Bowl Ad, and Some People Are Not Happy’, Washington Post, 6 February 2017, <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2017/02/06/ford-used-nina-simones-civil-rights-anthem-in-a-super-bowl-ad-and-some-people-are-not-happy/> [accessed 20 June 2024]. Simone herself would certainly have abhorred the ad, as someone quoted in the article says. Here we start to see how problematic our heuristic notion of a ‘target viewer’ is. While I find this advert highly offensive when I reflect upon it, I do not feel offended by it as I watch it, as I suppose the commentators in Gibson article must do.
98 John Shepherd, “Music as Cultural Text’, in Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought, 2 vols, ed. by John Paynter and others (Routledge, 1992), II, pp. 128–55 (p. 149).
99 The classic criticism of music in modernity — most memorably articulated by Nietzsche in Der Fall Wagner (1888) — is that its traditional ritual function has been instrumentalized, turning it into a technology of manipulation capable of generating profound feelings of belonging in the absence of any genuine community.
100 Also common is to situate the brand within a certain demographic by appropriating its music; that’s not going on here, except perhaps a general hipster appreciation of classic jazz.
101 You might be thinking: hang on, doesn’t that just describe all music? Not at all. Chris McDonald — citing Adorno’s discussion of how the ‘gentlemanly competition’ of bourgeois life is matched by the relations between the instruments in 19th-century chamber music — argues that ‘Rush’s musical interplay displays many of these same structures and meanings, and its embrace of middle-class individualism is enacted, almost homologically, in the way songs like “Tom Sawyer” are musically constructed.’ McDonald, Chris, Rush: Rock Music and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown (Indiana University Press, 2009), p. 72 Google Scholar. The same is true of much rock and heavy metal music, which displays exactly the same ‘heroic individualism’, in which each instrument is given its chance to lead, or each instrument has its own individual line.
102 And with blues-influenced rock bands such as Cream, The Rolling Stones (except in their singles), and Led Zeppelin.
103 Although Simone herself is probably playing the piano throughout the recording, it is nevertheless heard as a separate voice complementing the others. Instead of distributed creativity, we might also think of this type of music in terms of ‘nomadic subjectivity’ — i.e., the locus of causal agency is continually on the move.
104 It is quite common to draw parallels between jazz improvisation and Deleuzean concepts. For example, see Todd May on John Coltrane in Todd May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 154–57.
105 Click tracks were only really used in film scoring in the 1960s, and it is difficult to imagine Simone’s band could have achieved this looseness if using one. Nevertheless, the beat is unerringly steady the whole way through.
106 If you listen to the soundtrack of the ad without the image, this doesn’t happen: Simone’s voice and the voiceover jostle confusingly for attention. It seems that the direct relevance of the voiceover to what one is seeing in the images makes it easier for the perceptual apparatus to single out and focus on the voiceover.
107 Nina Simone was friends with Carmichael, and moved in the same circles of Black revolutionary intellectuals.
108 Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (Vintage Books, 1992; orig. published by Random House, 1967).
109 To clarify: I discuss the ‘would’ of ‘how it would feel to be free’ in two ways in this section: there is the ‘would feel’ of every ad, which describes the sense any ad gives of how it would feel to use the product. Then, in this specific ad, there is a would-ness, a subjunctive quality, to the freedom being promised.
110 Taylor and Reed, The Jazz Life of Dr. Billy Taylor, p. 154.
111 The ‘Idea’ is ‘the conception of subjective experience, the life of feeling’ and can be ‘perceived by one initial intuition’ that is inseparable from its symbol.
112 Nye, David E., American Technological Sublime (MIT Press, 1994), pp. 33, 36Google Scholar.
113 In other words, the ad comes close to producing what Lawrence Grossberg calls an ‘affective alliance’ amongst the geographically dispersed participants in the ritual. Gilbert, Jeremy, Common Ground: Democracy And Collectivity In An Age Of Individualism (Pluto, 2014), p. 152 Google Scholar.
114 I have already noted certain black commentators’ justified objection to the use of this iconic civil rights song, so this frictionless absorption is by no means universal. But my evidence for this statement extends beyond my own personal experience: there are no negative or positive comments from either left- or right-leaning viewers regarding the political content of the ad or the song under the YouTube clip. This is in stark contrast to the Audi or Kia ad, which both upset the US right. What I found surprising was that, what I experienced (viscerally) as thoroughly offensive greenwashing in the Kia ad was also given a free pass on YouTube.
115 As I have said, this is an exploratory article, and I make no claims to have covered all bases here.
116 Here I agree with Maturana and Varela’s notion of ‘natural drift’ in which it is not the ‘fittest’ that survive (not Darwin’s phrase anyway), but those that are merely good enough. Maturana, Humberto and Varela, Francisco, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Shambala, 1987)Google Scholar.
117 They don’t always do this: there is plenty of evidence for foragers causing localised ecological collapse. Plus, there’s no need to romanticize non-agricultural societies here: the native Americans engaged in cruelty, torture, mutilation, war, slavery before any Europeans arrived.
118 I follow Ingold’s understanding of ‘environment’. For him ‘organism plus environment’ form an ‘indivisible totality’ (the ‘sentient ecology’) which should be thought of as an open-ended process through time. There is only one ecology, but different organisms (like Leibnizian monads) offer different perspectives on the open whole. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, p. 20.
119 I should also emphasize that these felt ideologies are promulgated by companies and their proxy advertising companies purely to sell more products: advertisers select their methods on a pragmatic basis as to what works, and are unconcerned (as institutions, not as private citizens) about the consequences — about how what they are doing shapes the field of what is possible.
120 Becker, Judith, ‘Rhythmic Entrainment and Evolution’, in Music, Science, and the Rhythmic Brain: Cultural and Clinical Implications, ed. by Berger, Jonathan and Turow, Gabe (Routledge, 2011), pp. 49–72 Google Scholar (p. 67).
121 Helena Simonett’s research on the Yoreme provides an excellent example of this. Helena Simonett, ‘Of Human and Non-Human Birds’, in Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Nature, Environment, ed. by Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe (Routledge, 2016), pp. 99–108.
122 Again, this is what Grossberg meant by an ‘affective alliance’.
123 ‘[A]lthough music today is loosed from its original integral structural roles in society […] one can nevertheless detect multiple robust ties to its initial roots.’ ‘[M]usic’s most important social uses today are, arguably, at the level of the macro-economic: to sway emotions for entertainment and distraction and to condition and persuade people to buy things …’. Ellen Dissanayake, ‘Ritual and Ritualization: Musical Means of Conveying and Shaping Emotion in Humans and Other Animals,’ in Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music, ed. by Steven Brown and Ulrik Volgsten (Berghahn Books, 2006), pp. 31–56 (pp. 49 and 50).
124 A symbol is the whole set of sonic relations in time, rather than detachable linear signs through time. We can think of (a piece of) music as an inseparable interrelationship of rhythms — where we define rhythm more expansively as ‘a relation between tensions rather than a matter of equal divisions of time’. Dengerink Chaplin, The Philosophy of Susanne Langer, p. 213. In which case, ‘harmonic progressions, resolution of dissonances, directions of “running” passages, and “tendency tones” in melody all serve as rhythmic agents’: Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key, p. 209.
125 Deleuze’s ‘cinema’ books (Cinéma 1: L’Image-mouvement, 1983; Cinéma 2: L’Image-temps, 1985) do this, for example, although the contribution of music, or even sound, is underdeveloped in his discussion.
126 A recent example is For All Mankind (2019–present), which is extremely well-crafted, highly enjoyable television, but which entrains its viewers in the American Technological Sublime, and uses music (by Jeff Russo) very successfully to achieve this.
127 I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (Routledge, 2003; orig. [n.p.] [n. pub.], 1924).
128 To see how this might happen by explicitly subverting the ‘(re)solvable’ gaps or puzzles supplied by current lifestyle ads, see: Brooks, ‘Mad Men as a Sonic Symptomatology of Consumer Capitalism’.