I happened to be looking at some crappy rock lyrics site today (how are these things at all legal and not shut down by the god-damn RIAA, by the way?) and I noticed something interesting. For most of the songs I looked at, the “Ads by Gooooooogle” box in the left margin simply linked to various Big Media music download sites i.e. Real, Napster and etc., but if the lyrics for a particular song hit the right combination of keywords, all sorts of delightful ad-crap floated to the surface. For example, Tom Waits’ timeless fuck-the-world anthem, “I Don’t Want to Grow Up,” is all about keeping a healthy distance from the trappings of middle-class “success” e.g.
I’m gonna put a hole in my tv set
I don’t wanna grow up
Open up the medicine chest
And I don’t wanna grow up
I don’t wanna have to shout it out
I don’t want my hair to fall out
I don’t wanna be filled with doubt
I don’t wanna be a good boy scout
I don’t wanna have to learn to count
I don’t wanna have the biggest amount
I don’t wanna grow up
But fuck all that noise, Gooooooogle’s got the answer! C’mon Tom, don’t get upset, just “Regrow Your Hair Back” with RegrowHairBack.com. There’s also an ad for some other place called CrossesOnTheWeb.com but I can’t even fathom where they lifted that from the lyrics. Maybe it was the part about being “filled with doubt?”
Anyway, I kept poking around the site for awhile looking for other funny coincidences, but didn’t find anything really worth writing home about until I looked up “Koka Kola” by The Clash. I don’t know how those Coke fucks found this page, because The Clash were careful to spell all Koke and Koka-Kola references with a “K” but I guess when you’re a trillion dollar a year corporation doing business in 200-odd countries, you can’t afford to take any chances. So anyway, in case you were wondering, the funny part is that “Koka Kola” is largely about cocaine and it’s chummy relationship with the “advertising world” which in turn is responsible for marketing (read “pushing”) the sticky brown liquid to the rest of the world. And but so now the lyrics to this song have a huge ad banner with a little pixellated DJ shilling for Coke and American Idol next to them. Lost in the supermarket indeed.