Oh, great gerrymandering jesus, blessedwolf! Perhaps Fred Astaire dancing with a fucking upright is slightly more tasteful than Einstein with the Moppet From the Netherhells [sup]TM[/sup], but that’s kinda like saying that Ishtar was slightly worse than Exorcist II: The Heretic.
Hideous is still hideous–we needn’t quibble over degree of badness.
I strongly disagree. It was tacky, but at least it was done in a tasteful, artistic manner. It’s a shitload better than some pseudo-Einstein saying that Coke and Pepsi are “a paradox. While molecularly similar…”
I agree that it was a sin to resurrect either of them at all, but I think the lesser of two evils is the hoover commercial, by an enormous margin. So there. 
At lease Pepsi didn’t doctor old footage of Einstein to make their ad.
I’m a huge Astaire fan, but it strikes me as particularly evil that they took footage of him from one of his old films and digitally inserted the damn vacuum cleaner, and did it all without permission from Astaire’s estate, IIRC.
The Einstein ad, IMHO, is more on the level of those cheesy Presidents’ Day sale ads you always see from car dealers, where you’ve got some actor dressed up as Abe or George. (If you’re not from the US and have never seen these things, consider yourself lucky.) Yes, the Pepsi ad offends me, but it doesn’t seem quite as bad as the Astaire ad, because it is not actually Einstein in the ad, just some guy dressed up as Einstein.
A quibble, perhaps, but a significant one, to my mind.
To get back to the OP, I have to say that while the Kiss Pepsi ad did digust me, it didn’t bother me quite as much as the Aretha Franklin one did, because I had a lot more respect for her as an artist. What bothers me about both of them, though, is that they’re actually signing about the fucking product, which I find hugely demeaning to the artists in question.
I realize that no one forced Kiss or Aretha to make the ads, it’s just depressing that they felt the need to do so.
In contrast, the Nike “Revolution” ad didn’t bother me that much, nor did the Microsoft ads with “Start Me Up”, nor do the recent Nissan ads (which use some very good music - The Who, The Cult, The Smiths, The Smithereens, Rush, Stone Temple Pilots, Heart, etc.), because they are at least using the original recordings. Admittedly, some of the Nissan ads loop the music to keep a particular instrumental bit playing, but it’s still essentially what the artist recorded.
It’s not like the bands went back and specifically recorded music for the company, they just gave them permission to use a recording which already existed. It just doesn’t strike me as being that philosophically different from the song being played on a commercial radio station.
If it’s really “all about the art,” don’t sign the damn recording contract to begin with.
I gotta remember to use “preview”…
That should have read, “I’m not a huge Astaire fan”
(not that I actively dislike him, I just don’t get worked up over dancing)
…and yes, I mistyped “singing,” too.
Gag me real hard with a vicious, spike infested spoon. Pepsi ads are bad enough but to fling KISS together with that demented Pepsi girl? What’s next? Rush with the weird child from the grape juice ads? How about the song “Only women bleed” for a tampax ad?
EWWW! Dear Goddess but I think I’m just going to abandon TV and watch my MST3K collection till the end of time. TTFN!
Now THAT would be the funniest sell-out ever! Please, somebody, put the feminine hygeine industry in touch with Alice Cooper!