In this series of concerts pairing Beethoven’s piano concertos with orchestral works by Arnold Schoenberg, Daniel Barenboim has found an inspired way of linking two musical revolutionaries who, though separated by centuries, are nevertheless kindred spirits.

The implication of this shared billing is that what Schoenberg did for the music of Brahms and Wagner, Beethoven did for the music of Haydn and Mozart – he made it ‘breathe the air of other planets’.  As if to underline these affinities, tonight in the Five Orchestral Pieces, Barenboim points up the underlying romanticism of Schoenberg’s string writing, which even as it leaves traditional harmonic language behind, is full of echoes of the 19^th century.

This series of orchestral miniatures dates from before Schoenberg began to reign in his free-floating chromaticism by introducing the twelve-tone system that would lead to the formal constraints of Serialism.  Loosed from the moorings of tonality, these pieces are shimmering and exotic, with none of the dryness of later works.  In the elegiac solo cello and viola of the second piece, for example, there is surely beauty enough to appease the most conservative of ears.

Yet, judging by the tenor of several conversations during the intermission, these century-old compositions can still provoke perplexity in modern audiences. Though essentially introspective, along the way they manage to be by turns witty, bawdy, barbed and viscerally terrifying.  As juddering stabs of dissonant brass jolt us in our seats, it’s clear Schoenberg still has the power to shock and unsettle.

Barenboim and the superb Berlin Staatskapelle seem utterly at home in this music, and able to flit between the sound-worlds of the respective progenitors of Romanticism and Modernism with ease.  The pleasure Barenboim, conducting from the piano with some wonderfully flamboyant gestures, takes in the verve and wit of Beethoven’s second concerto is palpable. This music is in his blood. He conducts without a score and plays with the spontaneous air of a man observed through his living room window on a Sunday afternoon.

For the fourth concerto, arguably Beethoven’s greatest, we are in for an altogether different order of music-making.  As Barenboim launches into the darkly mysterious opening, we are instantly reminded of just how daring this music was, and of how modern much of it still sounds. With its epic scale, its filigree light and shade, and its superabundance of harmonic invention, the Fourth is like many concertos within one – a dazzling tumult of ideas perfectly realised.

While Barenboim relishes the virtuoso passagework, his approach is the antitheses of the steely precision of a Pollini – his Beethoven is all about flow.  The ear may detect the occasional fluffed note, but Barenboim’s playing has an unerring and irresistible sense of pulse. He gets better and better, dashing off a scintillating take on the first movement cadenza and showing rapt concentration and poise in the magnificent slow movement. Come the third movement Vivace, Barenboim is on fire. By the time he hits the last note he’s won himself a lengthy and unanimous standing ovation.

Star as he is, at the peak of his artistry tonight, one stopped thinking of Barenboim altogether and thought only of Beethoven, as if the composer himself were at the piano. And that is the most we can ask of any musician.

Here is a voice that has had to swim the vast ringing spaces of Simon Cowell’s cynicism in order to reach us.

Perhaps this explains why for much of I Dreamed A Dream Susan Boyle sounds like she is singing in a wind tunnel. This is not helped by the fact that her much-vaunted vocal assets have been heavily treated – pumped up with the studio equivalent of Botox.  It adds to the artificiality of her already mannered vocal technique, which (perhaps at the insistence of her voice coach) consists largely of piling on layer after layer of wobbling vibrato.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t a voice here, of sorts.  On rare moments when Boyle relaxes into her natural midrange, you can hear it – a kind of long-breathed warble, with enough power to worry the edges off the custard creams in the church halls of West Lothian.

Contrived it may be, but Boyle’s Elaine-Paige-on-steroids singing style is at least preferable to the nasal histrionic whinnying that now seems compulsory for new pop acts.  The fact that she offers an antidote to the generic urban/RnB template surely goes a long way to explaining Boyle’s staggering popularity.

And there’s another saving grace: Cowell has been merciful – there is no opera here.  Instead the repertory ranges from predictable anthems like the title track, through contemporary stadium-pop and the odd nod to her church roots with the likes of Amazing Grace and Silent Night.

Boyle’s take on Wild Horses, the Jagger/Richards paen to the heaven-and-hell pull of heroin, is downright eerie. There’s even a stilted, bloodless rendition of The Monkee’s Daydream Believer that hooks the song up to an iron lung and drains every last dreg of Pop life out of it.  At times the track order is bizarrely incongruous – one minute Boyle’s going all breathy and Bette Midler on us for Cry Me A River, and the next, she’s wading into a pious rendition of Great Thou Art.

There’s a sort of implied biographical narrative underpinning these song choices, which seem to soundtrack Boyle’s years of thwarted ambition and strangulated passion as she stayed at home to care for her ailing mother.

It’s ironic, then, that Boyle, despite striving for effect to an almost fatiguing degree, seems incapable of investing any of these songs with a scintilla of authentic feeling. This is un-music, manicured with pitiless efficiency by Cowell’s production team, with any vestiges of what might have made Boyle’s singing distinctive carefully airbrushed out of the aural picture.

What I Dreamed A Dream exhibits most powerfully is an overwhelming self-consciousness, a morbid awareness of itself as product.  Even as it insinuates itself into our lives, soundtracking our weddings and work-do’s, this record is harbouring a sneaky secret: it’s not really on our, or the music’s, side at all.

Bitte Orca is such a record. That it’s also a strange and wayward affair is no surprise coming from a band whose last album, 2007′s Rise Above, was an attempt by frontman Dave Longstreth to remember and reinterpret the entire Black Flag album Damaged after not hearing it for 15 years.  But what makes Bitte Orca special is the way it manages to combine disorientating, mind-flanging weirdness with a joyous, entirely instinctive pop sensibility.

Instantly, listening to opener ‘Cannibal Resource’, it’s as if Dirty Projectors have rearranged rock’s DNA and installed a new songwriting logic. At once strange and familiar, the song offsets its swaggering rock bass and hand-clap percussion with odd time signatures, tangential guitar riffs and vertiginous modulations in pitch. Like the rest of this record, it pulsates with a supreme sense of freedom and confidence.

Things get better still with the gorgeous ‘Temecula Sunrise’, which soars along on the dovetailing Eastern-flavoured harmonies of singers Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian, providing the perfect foil to Longstreth’s caustic warble.  Their girl-group vocals see-saw away in the background as dissonant 12-string finger picking meets flurries of fuzzy, amped-up guitar.  This is pop freed of – or rather reconstructing – cliché, throwing us curve balls while simultaneously riffing off classic motifs from rock’s institutional memory.

In fact, tracing the influences in Bitte Orca is like writing tasting notes for a complex wine; every time you delve into it you’ll pick up a hint of something else. ‘The Bride’ has a lilting, water-borne quality that recalls Starsailor-era Tim Buckley. Elsewhere Longstreth, a music composition graduate, drops in jazz, classical, Middle Eastern and African influences, even a touch of 50’s doo-wop.  There are shades of Devendra Banhart, bluesy Led Zep/White Stripes power riffs, the circular grooves of Steely Dan and the voodoo boogie of vintage Captain Beefheart.  But above all this album rings with the influence of Talking Heads, whose David Byrne is a recent Projectors collaborator.

Then, as if to underline their ability to defy categorisation, the Projectors launch into the avant-R’n’B of ‘Stillness Is The Move’, a procession of booty-jiggling pop hooks filtered through something thrillingly alien. With a lyric paraphrasing Peter Handke’s poem from the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire, Coffman and Deradoorian’s helium-high vocals ride a Middlle Eastern guitar loop over a glitchy staccato rythmn.  Yearning strings enter the mix as the track builds to a plateau of blissed-out, mystic euphoria. It’s the coolest record Destiny’s Child never made.

This is an album about the longing for transcendence, the state of grace music promises but only delivers in rare glimpses. It’s indie music let off the leash, in which bookish white college kids attain heights of rapture of a kind normally reserved for black soul artists.

More ecstatic word painting follows in ‘Two Doves’, which plays on poetic imagery from the Old Testament text Song of Solomon. Its picked guitar and breathy violin stabs pay loving tribute to Nico’s cover of Jackson Browne’s ‘These Days’ from her album Chelsea Girl, even going so far as to lift a line (“Don’t confront me with my failures…”).  Deradoorian’s vibrato-laden vocal is vulnerable and deeply moving, all the more so for being placed in music that seems to have been mysteriously deconstructed and reassembled.

But it’s on the wildly segueing medley ‘Useful Chamber’ that the Projectors’ sheer reckless verve is at its most jaw-dropping.  A backdrop of morphing synths and chiming, spun-glass guitar is sprayed with sporadic blues riffs; this switches abruptly into a spoken passage, then bursts into a romping chorus plastered in blistering fretwork, before leaping into unearthly vocal modulations that sound like something from another culture, if not another planet. It’s like Ligeti crossed with the Beach Boys.

Old punks might dismiss all this as so much suspect prog-rockery.  But this record is on a relentless quest to transcend its own self-conciousness. The formal experimentation never distracts the music from its main purpose – to communicate urgent, spontaneous joy.

Bitte Orca gloriously reaffirms your faith in pop music’s protean and inexhaustible abilty to reinvent itself, be reborn and live again – even if it has to turn itself inside out to do it.

Said girls, LA trio Warpaint, have a distinct ‘shoegazer’ vibe,  flavoured with a hint of the sexy menace and mania of Throwing Muses and the tribal aesthetic of UK post-punk group The Slits.

Grant Lee Phillips’ long career to date has been bookended by brilliance. Fuzzy, his debut album with Grant Lee Buffalo, was one of the rock landmarks of the early 90s. Fourteen years and a string of solo records later, his sublime 2006 cover album Nineteeneighties paid tribute to classic acts from New Order to Pixies, proving Phillips was an artist with a musical voice so singular he could take on almost anything and make it his own.

Yet Phillips’ emotive, widescreen songwriting has always walked a thin line, at times becoming overblown and occasionally lapsing into stodgy blue collar rock. Sadly, while Little Moon offers glimpses of GLP at his best, more often than not it gives this side free reign.

Upbeat stomper “Good Morning Happiness” starts the show with a banality and leadenness that will likely leave you cold. The air-punching MOR of “Strangest Thing” could be late Springsteen, with some of the soft-focus upholstery of a David Gray track. Its reliance on clichéd lines like ‘You gotta believe in something’ certainly do it no favours.

The title track is much more likeable, as Phillips returns to the multi-layered, filigree realm he’s made his own. There’s a swooning, salon-like air to the song, with its languid piano, brushed percussion, intricate picking and lilting strings. While not exactly a work of searing originality, it’s beautifully performed and produced.

“It Ain’t the Same Old Cold War, Harry” is even better: a smartly-penned appeal to an anachronistic cold warrior – Truman? – to adapt to an ambivalent new world. With its marching-band swagger and trumping brass, it’s full of jazzy showtune insouciance.

“Seal With A Kiss” is a rushing, loved-up rocker cushioned on layers of springy organ. It’s middle brow, pool-hall rock, and it smells of flannel shirts and workman’s benches. Ryan Adams does this sort of thing far better. Trying a little too hard to be luscious, “Nightbirds” struggles under the weight of its own contrivances. “Violet” is better – a sweet, delicate ballad built on deft little guitar touches and snowdrop piano, as Phillips’ burnished voice curls like smoke between the notes.

As ever, it’s the textures of Grant Lee Phillips’ music that ultimately seduce. His sensibility is essentially baroque, his sound world full of tenebrous, labyrinthine emotional states. Even when the songwriting is less than brilliant, listening to a GLP song is like sinking into soft crimson fabric. A good example of this is “Buried Treasure”, which is no great shakes as a song but manages to win you over with its moody, intoxicating instrumentation. And if all else fails there’s always that languorous, lagoon-deep voice, so rich it could lend a modicum of grace and majesty to the recital of a shopping list.

But even all of this can’t save the cloying “Blind Tom”, a stab at Randy Newman-style musical storytelling that’s sticky with faux-emotionalism. Meanwhile “One Morning” is stuffed full of hokum about sunrises, rolling trucks and crying roosters. Musically and lyrically, it dusts off every country-folk cliché in the book.

Things get no better with “Older Now”, a maudlin affair drenched in soporific strings. You want to go with Grant on this one, but he insists on underlining everything in such heavy pencil you have to stifle a groan. When an artist starts croaking on about ‘angels in white’, it’s time to book that refresher course at the Gram Parsons School of Wasted Beauty.

Then he pulls a gem out of the bag. Closer “The Sun Shines on Jupiter” is a piece of archly playful dixie jazz that swings by in a ticker tape parade of deliciously droll lyrcis: ‘I dare say it’s sweater weather every single day,’ croons Phillips, suddenly transformed into a kind of butch Rufus Wainwright.

Little Moon sees a lack of imagination and an over-reliance on hackneyed musical and lyrical phrases threatening to eclipse Grant Lee Phillips’ indubitable talent. It also reminds us that on form, few can touch him. But throughout this album words like “worthy’, ‘crafted’ and ‘earnest’ spring to mind – and in pop music they never should.

Beards are strictly optional for this collection of traditional folk songs with a fresh, contemporary edge

The folk music of Great Britain and Ireland is a marvelous thing, but those that love it best haven’t always been its greatest ambassadors. Perhaps inevitably in a genre that’s all about continuity with the past, folk artists have sometimes been weighed down by excessive reverence for the source material, or straightjacketed by blind fidelity to a performing tradition.

Not James Yorkston. On this album of folk songs stretching back to the 16th century, his arrangements are authentic and historically informed without making a fetish of it.  Folk Songs is an object lesson in balance and understatement, the music emerging as fresh and clear as spring water.

Much of the material looks back to the 1960s folk revival, in particular the work of Ann Briggs, who covered a number of the songs included here. Pivoting on themes of class and property, this is folk music as a form of popular cultural resistance. The songs celebrate acts of social transgression, whether by poachers, or chancers who sleep with the nobleman’s wife, or feisty heroines who cross-dress to show men their mettle. They also tell of the grim retribution the poor could suffer when they crossed the line.

Yorkston lets the voices that haunt this music speak through him beautifuly, articulating every nuance of the songs’ vivid and poetic Olde English. The imagery is positively cinematic: in “Hills of Greenmoor”, an evocation of a hare-hunting expedition, we feel we’re riding alongside the narrator as his horse gallops down the hillside into a glen flecked with ‘dogs black and yellow, dogs black and white.’  After the guitar-picked introduction of “Martinmas Time”, we’re suddeny enveloped in a lovely rush of woodwind and violins that sounds like sunlight flooding a valley.

Unsurprisingly, a strong vein of melancholy runs through the record. The lovely “Just as the Tide Was Flowing” describes the daily vigil of a young sailor’s wife as she waits for the tide to bring her lover back. “Little Musgrave”, a haunting tale of forbidden love between a nobleman’s lady and a young commoner, is a masterclass in episodic narrative.

James Yorkston has every bit as much a purchase on this music as does a Martin Carthy, a Paul Brady or a Dick Gaughan, but his unique way with the songs may help them receive a hearing among new audiences. Never mind Alt-Folk –  the real stuff is here, and it’s never sounded better.

It’s seven years since the last installment of the Cornershop saga arrived in the form of the brilliantly-named Handcream For A Generation.  Almost a generation on, Tjinder Singh and co may be rearing children but they’re still bedroom-mirror romantics with one foot stuck firmly in the days of the Ford Cortina. If anything, the nostalgia dial has been turned up: Judy Sucks A Lemon For Breakfast is an album that often seems to be playing on a dansette in a glitterball-lit corner of Hanif Kureishi’s frontal lobe.

Opener “Who Fingered Rock and Roll” is a melange of vintage Stones riffs and spangly Bolan boogie that tethers its ‘yeah yeah yeahs’ to a punky message about the besmirching of our collective pop innocence. It’s followed by “Soul School”, a melodic, sitar-drenched tribute to 1970s adolescence, evoking long summer Saturday afternoons listening to seven-inch singles round your mate’s house.

The retro theme continues on the title track. It starts by walking an irresistible blues-boogie bassline, adds swinging harmonies, bursts of machine gun fire and – wonderfully – a bassoon, and culminates in a soaring climax of righteous soul vocals. Tjinder still has a knack of slinging around cool-sounding nonsense phrases (‘Up-blues rock is the outta town rock’, etc) pitched somewhere between nursery rhyme and revolutionary slogan.

“‘Free Love” is a sublime, strings-laden trip into traditional Punjabi folk filtered backwards through The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows”, while the single “The Roll-Off Characteristics (Of History in the Making)” breezes by on a magic carpet ride of honky tonk piano, crisp guitar licks and delicious chunks of burnished trombone. As he assures us that, ‘War ain’t nothing but bad technical plip-plop,’ Tjinder sounds more than ever like he’s singing the theme to a particularly hip children’s TV program.

“Operation Push”, a paean to the delights of dub and the era that produced it, piles on layers of echo chamber and jets of juddering sub-bass to celebrate ‘The last song that the world ever sung’.  After a straightforward cover of Dylan’s “The Mighty Quinn” (the Manfred Mann version was apparently the first single the young Tjinder ever bought), “The Constant Springs” meanders along passably, while instrumental “Chamchu” is an agreeable dub-bhangra soundclash.

By the time we roll around to “The Turned On Truth” – 17 epic minutes of blissed-out, redemptive gospel wrapped around a riff resurrected from “Brimful of Asha” – it feels like a cheeky, self-referential triumph, albeit far too bloody long.

Cornershop are still holding a candle for an idealised pop moment fixed in time and space; a semi-mythical golden age when melting-pot Britain was the musical crossroads of the world. This place has precise co-ordinates and Cornershop always know their way back there. They’re still writing love letters to their record collections, and there are times when Judy feels a little too much like a commemorative musical photo album.

But when the irrepressible Cornershop charm kicks in, such thoughts seem churlish. Judy is as wide-eyed and upbeat as indie pop will get this year, and when it sounds this fresh, Cornershop’s revolutionary retro is well worth a reprise.

No one approaches a Pere Ubu record expecting an easy ride. But David Thomas’s musical adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s notorious proto-absurdist play Ubu Roi – from which the band took their name when they formed in 1975 – makes for perverse listening even by their own standards.

This is probably as it should be. After all, the original provoked a riot in the theatre when it premiered in Paris in 1896. Ubu is Jarry’s bourgeois everyman – a grotesque, Punch-like figure, gluttonous, infantile, cruel and cowardly. Egged on by his equally unpleasant wife Mere Ubu, he spearheads a plot to murder the King of Poland, accedes to the crown, and sets about becoming the worst kind of despot.

What follows is a vicious political satire that parodies a number of Shakespearean plotlines including Macbeth and Hamlet. For a flavour of its surreal, farcical energy one need only consider the cast of characters, which includes the Polish princes Boleslas, Boggerlas, and Ladislas, The Whole Russian Army, The Whole Polish Army, assorted Lackeys of Phynance, something called The Disembraining Machine, and A Bear.

The songs on Long Live Pere Ubu! form part of a six act radio play adapted from Jarry’s text by David Thomas, joined here by ex-Communards vocalist Sarah Jane Morris as Mere Ubu. Needless to say, a seminal avant-garde work does not good music guarantee (apparently Paul McCartney read Jarry’s play while writing the lyrics for “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”).  But once you tune into its crazed frequency, Ubu! is an absolute scream.

Warm-up track “Ubu Overture” sounds like the reverberations of Satan’s tuning fork punctuated by filthy belching noises: “Merde…erer!” Thomas growls in a voice pitch with wickedness. “Song Of the Grocery Police” finds Mere Ubu in Lady Macbeth mode, exhorting her whimpering husband to regicide: ‘Kill them all / Have a ball,’ she urges, as he hankers pathetically after a ‘big sombrero’.  The darkly hilarious “March of Greed” is an inane stomp featuring a call-and-response routine between Ubu and his court of arse-licking sycophants. ‘I agree to everything,’ he shrugs happily as they cheer him along the fast-track to tyranny.

There’s no mistaking we’re back in the Ubu sound world – but along with the signature electronic dissonance and stabbing, post-punk guitar, there’s a touch of the gallows theatricality of The Birthday Party and the dustbowl holler of Tom Waits at his scratchiest. Most of all though, Ubu! resounds with the influence of Captain Beefheart circa Doc at the Radar Station or Ice Cream for Crow.

“Big Sombrero (Love Theme)” sees Ubu opening a ministerial meeting with the command: ‘Bring me the shitter hook / Bring me the finance book!’  Beneath Thomas’s coruscating, gravel-throated vocal there’s a cacophony of pig squeals and shrieks, hydraulic whirring noises, the sound of cold machinery in terminal dysfunction. ‘Now bring all of the judges in,’ he barks, announcing plans to tax the dead and declaring that dissenters will be tossed ‘into the pig-pincher.’

By “Bring Me The Head”, Ubu’s power is total – as his wife reports: ‘No more finance, justice or law / Into his belly he’s gobbled them all.’  For “Road to Reason”, a funky thrash of wire-wool guitar and frantic theremin, Thomas reverts to his trademark bubblegum baby voice to observe with satisfaction: ‘Everywhere you look you can see burned down houses and people bent double under the weight of Finance.’

The heart-knocking “Watching the Pigeons” describes Ubu’s defeat at the hands of the Russians, while “Snowy Livonia” underlines the pathos of the dethroned Ubu’s escape to France with a sad little refrain on electric piano. Perhaps the most deliciously twisted episode of all is “The Story so far”, eight minutes of sweating dream delirium that takes us on a trip into Ubu’s subconscious.  It ends with Ubu threatening his wife with an elaborate torture ritual whose delights include ‘penetration of the little wooden stick…extraction of the brain through the fingernails…not to mention the opening of the bladderine…’

On its own terms, as a bold experiment in fusing spoken word with post-rock, post-punk and ambient electronica, Long Live Pere Ubu! is an unqualified success.  Thomas’s adaptation of the play’s skewed, dark poetry is brilliant. But does it work as a pop record?  Intermittently, yes. Parts of it would clearly be more effective as theatre, and its weakest moments take it perilously close to Frank Zappa’s tiresome burlesques. At it’s best though, it’s trippy, twisted genius. Hardcore Ubu fans will love it.

Sarah Jane Morris’s self-consciously theatrical vocals do the album no favours. Her singing is mannered, thick with flabby jazz singer cliches. By contrast, the way David Thomas brings Ubu to life with his choked, sad, infantile little gurgle makes the character human, and therefore all the more disturbing.

As in all the best epics, at the end of the chapter there’s a new horizon. For the album’s closer, “Elsinor and Beyond”, we join Ubu as he sets sail on his escape boat. Perking up, the banished tyrant turns to his wife and says:  ‘I sense that many fine adventures lie ahead of us.’  Full speed ahead, Mr Thomas.

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.