A letter to The Nation from Tom Waits regarding an article written by John Densmore of The Doors called Riders on the Storm on the subject of artists allowing their songs to be used in commercials.

Corporations are hoping to hijack a culture's memories for their product. They want an artist's audience, credibility, good will and all the energy the songs have gathered as well as given over the years. They suck the life and meaning from the songs and impregnate them with promises of a better life with their product.

The original article details the trials of staying true to the music when companies offer millions for the rights to use songs in advertisements.

Apple Computer called on a Tuesday--they already had the audacity to spend money to cut "When the Music's Over" into an ad for their new cube computer software. They want to air it the next weekend, and will give us a million and a half dollars!

Apple runs ads with images of Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein, John Lennon and Martin Luther King Jr. implying that Apple too thinks different, implying that they are a revolutionary company changing our lives for the better.

This is the nature of advertising, masking the blasé, basic corporate goals, to improve product sales and increase shareholder value with smart, romantic, sexy images of what their product can do for you. Nike sells sneakers using the Beatle's song Revolution, while child labor pumps out their product at pennies a day. This is the reality of advertising, hide the truth behind pretty faces and mask the corporate need for product conformity behind co-opted counter culture. Culture sells...

I walk into the Apple store in New York, and I have to ask myself, "What are they selling here?", because it is definitely not a computer. They are selling an image, a style, a hip counter culture. Sadly, this culture is neither counter nor hip, but canned and served up cold to the scores of people ready to eat it. Sure, Microsoft is a cold corporate software giant, but Apple is cut from the same cloth, they just tie dyed it, and cut holes in the knees, and called it a revolution.

Advertisers today are repacking the revolutions, movements, art, music and styles of yesterday (and today), and serving them up in bite size packets for easy consumption. And in the process, diluting the significance of it all.