Blessed be the Tie

It's Friday, so that means it's time for some mish-mash-applesauce. But before I get into things, let me begin by saying that the book Choosing Against War by John D. Roth is really excellent. It's from a small publisher run by a Mennonite couple called Good Books. They have all these amazing peace-making resources that are brief and extremely accessible. Choosing Against War is not so brief, but it is very accessible for everyone. It contains both excellent stories of peace-making and outstanding exposition of what it means to be a peacemaker and why all Christians should be. Plus it's only 10 smackers list price. So check out goodbooks.com, because they can use your support and they are sweet.

On the other end of Lake Snow-tip, I really hate it when companies use the same song forever in their advertisements (or adverts for our British friends). I know, this is two weeks in a row in the media. I will branch out like a green tree viper patiently waiting for prey sometime, but for now, my belly is full and I need to just coil up in a tree (sorry about the snake metaphor Trevor). The most dastardly offenders here are Pizza Hut and KFC (who are part of the same company...coincidence?). Pizza Hut uses some Smashmouth song, a band whom I could write an entire hate entry about. I don't hate the members of Smashmouth, but their music is the target of my deepest negative feelings. Why does anybody like them? They're terrible. They're worse than terrible. All of their famous songs are covers. They make a traveshamockery of music. Meanwhile, people really like them.

Then, like the slightly more handsome but worse-behaved younger brother, KFC, has been using a remix of Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd for about 36 years in their ads. If there's one band I hate more than Smashmouth, it's Lynyrd Skynyrd. I hate Southern Rock and L.S. is both the father to many bad bands and the worst offender. I think I like Neil Young mostly because of his feud with L.S. The only thing worse than a terrible piece of garbage song is a worse remix of said garbage.

I'm pretty sure there is a lot of music out there, last time I checked anyway, which means that either the marketing people at the Pizza Hut/KFC/Taco Bell conglomerate are beyond lazy, or these musical crimes actually work with the target market. I shudder to think of the latter as truth.

Coming in a close third is Subaru who uses some Cheryl Crow song. And here we have the unholy trinity of musical styles I hate. What a bad idea. Perhaps the only thing that could be worse than these three is Outback Steakhouse's recent assault on Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games by Of Montreal. I don't know if it's worse to use a currently terrible song until eternity, or to poorly rewrite the lyrics of an excellent song by a fairly unknown band so that it looks like you wrote great music but don't know how to write decent lyrics (i.e. "Life will still be there tomorrow" or "Every day is Mother's Day"). I guess God will be the judge.

Bringing redemption to the terrible world of marketing music are UPS (who has recently used the Postal Service), Cesar dog food (using the Magnetic Fields), Target (using Badly Drawn Boy), and the University of Phoenix (not just using the New Pornographers, but using one of my favorite songs by them). So thank you for bringing us a refreshing drink of life-giving water in the midst of our desert dehydration and exhaustion. Had you not come along, we surely would have died with sand in our eyes and despair in our hearts.