April 24th: Light My Fire
For my first Friday music post, let's continue thinking about music, advertising, and alienation.
Take a moment to listen to the live performance of "Light My Fire" by The Doors. It wasn't long before General Motors obtained the rights to the same song for a Buick commercial, showing skimpily clad young women dancing around a Buick singing "light my fire" while throwing their hands in the air, perhaps in worship to the Buick.
From chapter on ideology in "The Desire for Mutual Recognition":
"When The Doors recorded 'Light My Fire' in 1967, alienated consciousness immediately sought to re-present that same song in muzak form as an utterly defanged and non-transcendent Buick commercial... the Buick commercial as ideology stated that the power of The Doors is not at odds with the social separation of the alienated world but can be reconciled with it, and will be so reconciled, and ought to be so reconciled: The message is that the fire in Light My Fire "cannot singe a sleeve" as Yeats put it in his poem "Byzantium". Ideology as a whole is the work by consciousness of the absorption of desire into social alienation in the service of desire's denial of itself."