• battlefield-13a_01battlefield-13a_02

  • Walk On The Wild Side Riff Destroyed By HP

    John Biggs

    Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

    Monday, February 14th, 2011

    First we quote the immortal words of our national poet, Lou Reed:

    Candy came from out on the Island
    In the backroom she was everybody’s darlin’
    But she never lost her head
    Even when she was browsing the Internet on a WebOS-powered Touchpad tablet.

    Oh, that’s not how it went? Sorry. After HP completely subsumed the riff of one of music’s seminal songs of change and rebellion in order to sell uninventive electronics – and given that they didn’t get this song for free and that Lou Reed deigned to sell it to them – in my rage I seem to have forgotten the real words.

    Apparently this commercial aired during the Grammys, which is fortunate because I didn’t have to watch it live. However, I have no idea how this mismatch of music, image, and voice could have been more offensive to anyone with a remote interest in classic rock.

    This is akin to when William Burroughs appeared in a Nike commercial but even then it was kind of funny to see that cadaverous old man say “The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body.”

    Personally, I think they should do the William Tell routine with the tone-deaf morons who made this commercial.

    blog comments powered by Disqus