…through no fault of their own (although perhaps due to the fault of their creators/owners of rights).
One of the great things about music, is that it’s like a scent - it can instantly conjure up memories and sensations unique to you. But there’s a flip side, where that association has coloured the song so much that you can’t shake it.
For me, the Lou Reed song Perfect Day - a…perfectly good song, probably about smack knowing Lou, has forever been associated in my mind with the BBC Children in Need effort, a valiant enterprise no doubt, but it’s now shelved away with ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ and ‘Feed The World’.
Advertisements deliberately pick up on this, much to my annoyance. I can’t listen to The Fratellis without thinking of iPods. For Apple, this has been a rousing success for their product, but for me robs the songs of any other meaning I would otherwise have found…not that I can blame the artists for ‘selling out’ without being a hypocrite, as if some company wanted to give me silly money for using one of my songs I’d be asking where to sign.
That said, people like The Rolling Stones should know better - they have enough money after all. I’ve fortunately largely missed their previous songs in ads, no doubt ‘Start Me Up’ would have lost quite something if I’d first have heard it in association with Windows. But whenever I go to the cinema there’s always a damn ad for Sony Bravia (I had to look this up, so not a success like the iPod), where the lovely piano piece ‘She’s Like a Rainbow’ is played while plastercine bunnies jump about. Now I can’t listen to it without picturing those damn claymation vermin.
I can’t listen to Dylan’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door either, as it takes me straigh back to a very crappy time in my life I’d rather forget.
Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Simple Man always make want a beer.
Oh wait a minute, thats a good thing.
I can remember the drinking games done to AC/DC’s Have a Drink on Me. Now that really is a bad memory. Although it is one of their many songs that gets turned up loudly when it comes on the radio.
the Lawrence Welk theme song gives me horrible memories. Gawd, I hated that show, which Mom and Dad loved
I can’t hear Night Rangers’s Sister Christian without thinking of that crazy tense scene in Boogie Nights with the firecrackers going off randomly while the drug dealer (played by Alfred Molina) is waving a pistol around.