Bike culture is not for sale, sort of

Due to the return of football season and weekly Steelers games, I’ve started watching T.V. with regularity again, as is my usual routine. One of the difficult things which always takes me nearly until the playoffs to get used to is the commercials. This year, one of the few non-Payton Manning commercials that are played at this point in the season features a 20-ish dude trying to convince his lady to come to his loft-ish apartment, the whole of his argument based on his having basic cable and a working television. Nothing too exceptional there, premise aside (and even that holds water with me – heck, I’d probably go anywhere that has decent reception, let alone actual cable). The one interesting feature: in the backdrop of the guy’s remarkably clean apartment, leaned against the wall, is a Surly Steamroller bike, one of those newly hip fixed-gear bicycles that are all the rage with loft dwellers like, uh, me.

There’s always something vaguely disheartening about seeing something moderately unknown that you enjoy being employed as shorthand for urban coolness in a commercial for cable T.V. Folks of my age tend to call this the “Nirvana effect”, after the unexpected mainstream success of the grunge band that legitimized torn-up clothing and unnaturally died hair in high schools across the country. No one was sure whether it was an entirely good thing that school bullies now repected punks, goths and other groups that defined themselves largely by the contempt that they inspired in bullies. You could hear music on the radio that at least was in the same general universe as things that you listen to in your home. It held advantages, certainly, but made a lot of people wary, as though this was some kind of clever trick. Fifteen years later, as rap-metal-grunge and classic rock continue their stranglehold on the non-‘urban’ music stations, it remains to be seen how history will judge us.

It is certainly believable that this instance is some kind of trick too, a dastardly trick to take advantage of the cable-less cycling community. Several years out of high school now, I’ve been through several of cycles of things that I’ve had “first dibs” on having quietly infiltrated general pop culture. Heck, I barely bat an eye when they play Fugazi as the segue music on NPR – that I assume is just someone with decent musical taste getting to a position of power within the Public Radio music selection hierarchy. No, what I consistently find strange are the weird little references in commercials, often little cameos so subtle that you can’t imagine anyone not subconsciously on the lookout for such things to be aware of them. There are some overt instances such as the 2005-era Honda commercial featuring M.I.A.’s “Galang”, sure. But most of these things are on a level of blantantness akin to the track bike in the Comcast commercial. I’ll bet most of the people who saw that commercial didn’t even notice there was a bike in the background, let alone identifying the specific make and model of bike. Similarly with those iPhone ads that feature fairly obscure indie bands in the album lists being quickly flipped through, or the instrumental versions of songs by the Dead Kennedys or the Fall being background music for car ads. Most ‘normal’ people would not even notice these things; most of the ‘not normal’ people who would notice would probably be the cynical types that would interpret such things as cultural appropriation and would be even less likely to buy the advertised product.

So why do this? Do people find the Fall’s music appealing when it’s providing background sound for a SUV commercial, even thought would probably turn off the radio if it somehow they made it into rotation? Do bikes leaned against the wall in someone’s apartment build positive feelings toward the local cable monopoly and fictional consumers thereof, even if they honk and scream curses at actual cyclists when they’re out driving? Are there simply advertising executives who are trying to sneak non-country music into car commercials and imply that you can simultaneously subscribe to cable and exercise every once in a while? Did some production assistant figure out you can bill a new bike to a client by adding it onto the requisition list?

Who knows. I am taking the long view – if it convinces 1/10th of the people who discovered Nick Drake or Trio via car commercials that bikes are something owned and operated by people who are cool enough to not deserve to be run off the road, that’s something. As long as there have to be ads, they might as well have decent music and include nice bikes. I think.

Filed by d at September 23rd, 2007 under culture, cycling, music