culturecrammer

It’s Monday morning. Between the tracks on one of London’s greyest City-bound commuter routes, rain pummels rubbish. On a poster above the platform, trying to look amiable in an absurd pair of aviator goggles, is the man who invented punk rock, perhaps the most invincible icon of rock and roll’s anarchic spirit still living. Today though, he and several of the commuters have something in common, a bond if you will: they’re insurance salesmen.

The ad campaign for Swiftcover motor insurance has made Iggy Pop the poster boy of Sellout. With Pop’s long-suffering torso plastered across advertising hoardings, TV spots and online commercials, it’s as if the scarred hide of rock and roll itself has finally been scalped by The Man like a trophy pelt.

This campaign shouldn’t work. For starters, you’d think that any punter who attaches meaning or value to Iggy Pop would hold Swiftcover in contempt for trying to appropriate him and go out of their way to deny the company their custom. And as for the nonplussed masses to whom Iggy means nothing, surely they’re left wondering why a cadaverous talking scrotum is bounding around the screen trying to sell them an insurance policy?

But bafflingly, this unholy union has been a runaway success. As Tina Shortle, the company’s marketing director explained with satisfaction: ‘Iggy Pop and swiftcover.com have made motor insurance interesting for a change, increasing awareness of swiftcover.com and sending our sales soaring by almost a third.’

Then in April came a delicious irony: the Advertising Standards Agency ruled that the TV ad was misleading after it emerged that Swiftcover refused to cover musicians because they were deemed too high risk (a not unwise policy – the Stooges’ own drummer Scott Asheton once nearly killed the whole band by driving their tour bus into a low bridge, taking off its roof). After an embarrassing media hoo-ha Swiftcover revoked this rule. Despite the controversy Tina Shortle said the firm would stick with Iggy, adding: ‘Swiftcover.com chose Iggy Pop as the face of its advertising because he loves life.’

Let’s just remind ourselves who we’re talking about here. This is a man who, in his deranged and glorious prime, resembled nothing so much as the reanimated corpse of your smack-addled, transgender granny on steroids. Perhaps Tina would revise her view of Iggy as a life-affirming go-getter if she were transported back to 1973 and found him tapping a vein backstage, visions of swastikas in his head, blood coursing down the cigarette-burned, bottle-slashed horseflesh of his chest?

As for Iggy, I’d like to believe that he was compelled to do the Swiftcover deal for tax reasons (Bowie covered ‘China Girl’ in 1983 so that his friend, then facing bankruptcy, could use the royalties to pay off the taxman). After all, even the late Bill Hicks, who famously declared musicians who did commercials ‘off the artistic roll call forever’, made an exception for Willie Nelson on account of the staggering sums he owed to the IRS.

Whatever the reason, let’s hope it was worth it, because if the online messageboards are anything to go by, the ads have cost him at least as much in kudos as they’ve earned him in cash. Assuming Iggy even thinks about himself as a global brand, it’s hard to imagine a surer way to ransack everything he ever stood for. Iggy Pop has something no man can buy. He is the godhead, the totem of punk rock, his place in rock history everlasting and unassailable. What does he do with this priceless asset?  He sells it. In one 30-second piece to camera, he neutralises the charge of his iconic presence so that, like a soiled prophylactic, it can never be used again.

It’s tempting to interpret this breathtaking disregard for his own legacy as Iggy’s way of sticking two fingers up at the world in a cynical, rock and roll kind of way. But that doesn’t rub. After all, in interviews Iggy’s spoken of how, as the lonely, alienated teenager James Osterberg growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, music was the key that allowed him to escape the stultifying life his parents had planned for him. He of all people understands the soul-saving, talismanic power of rock and roll. Would he have been quite so inspired if his heroes (Sun Ra, Fats Waller) had appeared on his parents’ TV set selling washing machines?

Of course, none of this is new to pop culture. It’s what the Situationists called recuperation, the process whereby radical ideas and images become safe and commodified – or as The Clash more pithily put it, ‘turning rebellion into money’ – and it’s been going on at least since Elvis.  But with Iggy’s ad, it’s hard not to feel that one of rock and roll’s last outposts has fallen. Iggy was a cultural marker, a bright orange buoy bobbing on the perimeter of the corporate no-swim zone.  Now, thanks to Swiftcover, the heart-pumping bass intro of  ‘Loose”  will never sound the same again; nor will we hear the opening chords of “The Passenger ” without Iggy jiggling around our minds’ eye like a children’s’ TV presenter, rhapsodising about ease of access to his policy documents.

I have a theory that the marketing people know this. In fact, it may be time to posit the existence within the PR/advertising industry of a radical cell of cultural counter-insurgents – a kind of marketing Special Ops – tasked with mopping up every last pocket of resistance from the denuded landscape of our I-Pods. For this crack unit of arch-postmodernists, the cultural meanings we hold most dear are mere surfaces of play from which to launch their next assault on all that is vital and alive.  They specialise in appropriating songs or artists that represent attempts to comment on or transcend the culture, as if to prove beyond doubt that all will be consumed in a vast, suffocating tarpaulin of banality. That’s why Alice Cooper is flogging Aviva insurance and Johnny Rotten is busy spreading for Country Life butter. These loveable old dears are now quaint relics from a bygone age of signification.

Similarly, Blur ‘s “The Universal”, a song that serenades the falling away of meaning in a world of homogenous satellite TV consumerism, now soundtracks an ad for British Gas. After this, to hear Damon Albarn sing ‘Yes, the future has been sold,’ is truly to bite into the dark centre of a bitter chocolate bar called Irony. As for the car companies, from Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” (Volkswagen) to The Fall’s “Touch Sensetive” (Vauxhall), no song is safe.

So it’s in this same spirit, and to hurry the total annihilation of all forms of cultural resistance, that I nominate the top five candidates for future assimilation, in reverse order:

5. Nirvana – “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

We owe it to the memory of Kurt Cobain to use this deodorant ad-inspired grunge behemoth on a beer commercial, thus dispatching it back to the kingdom from whence it came.

4. Public Enemy – “Fight The Power ”

This anti-establishment classic is just the thing to bring a touch of revolutionary frisson to your brand. Prise it free of its context and suddenly it’s all about your right to wear a new line of trainer called ‘Black Panther’, fresh from the sweatshops.

3. Pink Floyd – “Money”

I demand that Roger Waters’ anti-capitalist tirade be used immediately to introduce us to a new kind of credit card.

2. Joy Division – “Atmosphere”

Ian Curtis’ visionary swansong lost its cherry to First Direct at the turn of the millenium. But its austere beauty can still produce goosebumps. To finish it off, let’s make “Atmosphere” soundtrack a heavy rotation, moody black-and-white ad for a unisex fragrance of the same name.

1. Bill Hicks

This is the one spoken of in hushed tones in the corridors of their tall glass buildings.  Fifteen years after his untimely death, the scourge of sellout is now ripe for recuperation.  Re-animate him via some CGI trickery, and Bill’s cool rebel stance could sell anything you’d care to name to the under-35s.