You can’t get much phonier than this.
Pepsi collects about 15 teenagers who were targeted for lawsuits by the vicious RIAA, for downloading copyrighted music from the Internet. Pepsi put them into an ad with a few labels– “incriminated”, “busted”– over– get this– Green Day’s swipe of the Clash’s cover of “I Fought the Law”. Then one of the girls says that she is still downloading…. at iTunes! She didn’t say “but now I pay for it”. She says “legally”.
Did Green Day think most people have never heard of the Clash? Sounds like they copped the basic arrangement from them.
I Fought the Law? The gist of Pepsi’s smarmy little ad is that you should give your money to Apple and buy Pepsi and listen to your mommy and daddy– except they are probably downloading music too– and respect authority. It’s cool to be a serf.
But even this ad is not as smarmy as the one featuring a kid who is supposed to be a young Jimi Hendrix, trying to choose between a Pepsi and Coke.
I presume that permission was granted by some Twisted Trustees of the Estate of Jimi Hendrix. As I have said before in these pages, it should be illegal for anyone, trustee or not, to be able to sell the image, name, or likeness of someone who is dead. It should be covered by the laws about “rendering an indignity to a dead body”. If someone is long dead, it should be public domain anyway. For someone like Hendrix, it’s too contemptible for words. It is a terrible, terrible dishonor to his memory to suggest that he would sell out like this, that he would so allow his name and image to be tarnished, cheapened, and insulted like this.
This is far, far more disgraceful than anything Janet Jackson did at the Super Bowl. The FCC should look into it. Michael Powell should call his dad and ask him how big of a fine would be enough to compensate the general public for the indecency rendered to the body of Jimi Hendrix.
Next, we go after IBM for what they did to the Little Tramp.
Here’s the biggest irony: the MPAA and Recording Industry always claim that they are protecting their “original” creative works whenever they try to shut down a piracy site. Then they use an absolutely ripped off version of “I Fought the Law” to flog the idea.
Listen to the version by the Clash and then Green Day. Do we need to protect artists who rip off other artists so blatantly? [Added 2012-01-18]