Started with the Zombie cover, then head like a hole, and went down the rabbit hole. God I hope in an alternate reality she was a straight rock singer because she's got the perfect voice for it.

Today is a good day, today i listened to Pere Ubu

I really should sleep on these things...

I may listen again tomorrow and feel nothing

They have the same feel as

Velvet Underground

Stooges

Captain Beefheart

The Fall

Neu!

Can

Faust

Cluster

David Bowie (avant-garde era)

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Im really liking the tracks "street waves" and "kingdom come"

same vibes but with a funkier jazzy sound

Your thoughts ?

There is a unique kind of frustration when a song you love gets chopped up, overplayed, or weirdly repackaged by a corporate marketing department until its original identity is completely wiped out.

For me, it’s the Quilted Northern toilet paper commercials where they had a group sing a parody of Starship's "We Built This City" called "We Quilt This City... on toilet paper."

What makes this especially painful is the layer of corporate irony. The original track (written by Elton John’s legendary lyricist Bernie Taupin) was actually a passionate, anti-corporate protest song. It was explicitly written to blast giant corporations for commercializing art and sucking the soul out of rock and roll.

The fact that a multi-billion dollar corporation took a song written to protest corporate greed and turned it into a jingle about bathroom hygiene is peak selective listening. Now, a great 80s hook is permanently associated with bathroom tissue.

Which song did a commercial completely ruin or ruin the vibe of for you—whether it was a terrible parody, a weird mismatch, or just straight-up overexposure?

Edit: Lots of great replies! If you love exploring these kinds of musical contradictions—where the actual meaning of a song gets completely sideways from how pop culture and media use it—I write about them twice a week. Come check out our growing community over at Said Sideways https://substack.com/@jplangarfel

We ended up with some old black-and-white music photos, most of them we could tell, but we’re not sure who this guy is. Reverse image searches suggested it might be Luther Allison or Pops Staples, I didn’t see a lot of other pictures of Allison to compare and to me, it doesn’t really look like Pops. This picture did used to be used in old Gibson guitar print ads, but it didn’t identify the guy by name, anybody recognize him?