If you’ve watched television in the last couple of months, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen one or more of the versions of the commercials in the recent Cadillac CTS ad campaign. If not, here’s one for you.



Now, I first saw this commercial a few months ago, and what immediately caught my attention about it was not the fact that the car had a 40 GB hard drive or a pop-up nav screen (hey - neat!), nor that the woman in the commercial (Kate Walsh) is every so slightly sultry, but that the song that was selected for the commercial was from one of my favorite bands from way back when, Hum. If you’re not familiar with Hum, they were a harder rock band from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois that had their heyday in the early to mid-90s. I really liked Hum, and in particular, their album Electra 2000, which was an integral part of the soundtrack to my college years.

Hum started out as an indie band, releasing their first 2 albums, Fillet Show and the aformentioned Electra 2000, on the 12 Inch and Martians Go Home record labels, respectively, but was then snatched up by RCA Records as part of the major label’s signing binge for heavier bands in the 90’s that started with Helmet, continued with the likes of Shudder to Think and Jawbox, and quite possibly ended with Hum. While I didn’t care for their two releases on RCA as much as I did their earlier material, they did get a bit of press when Howard Stern became enamoured with the single “Stars” on their first RCA release, “You’d Prefer an Astronaut,” which is the same song featured in the Cadillac ad.

So, why I am writing about this, you might ask?

It’s actually not why you might think…

I’m not writing about this because I think Hum are “sellouts” by agreeing to have the song in a Cadillac ad. Far from it. In this article from Billboard Magazine, Hum’s frontman, Matt Talbott, says:

In this case, Talbott got an email out of the blue from “some guy at an ad firm asking about using a song for a commercial,” but it didn’t say which song or which potential client. “I said, ‘Yeah, sure, whatever man,’” Talbott recalls, assuming the email was a hoax. “But he wrote back and told me more, and when I knew it was for real and that it sounded like a large campaign, I called my lawyer.”

Further, Hum is no longer an active band, so it’s not as if they’re going to start rolling to award shows in pimped out Escalades and remixing “Stars” with Diddy. Basically, it just seemed like an odd choice for a Cadillac commercial. Hum was not a band like The Flaming Lips, many of whose songs are either featured in countless commercials already and whose sound is more polished and commercial friendly, nor like Moby, who had every single track on “Play” featured in some commercial or another. Fans of Hum are not exactly the core demographic of people that are in the market to buy a $35,000 vehicle. Hum flat out rocked, they rocked hard, and again, according to Talbott, they’re really just a bunch of “meatheads.” Here’s a clip of them performing “Stars” live to prove it.



What is really encouraging to me about this is that it seems that the people who work for ad agencies are now more my age, and seemingly have similar tastes in music to me, and thus, they are in a position to give bands like Hum and Stereolab (featured in another car ad a few years ago) exposure they wouldn’t have otherwise received, either because their labels weren’t as skilled as they should have been in marketing these bands or that the bands themselves didn’t feel like “selling out.” to get more sales. Whatever the case may be, Hum’s inclusion in the Cadillac ad has been a positive phenomenon for the band. Again, from the Billboard article:

Now, that distortion-laden, riff-heavy song is experiencing a rebirth thanks to its usage in a Cadillac TV commercial. 29% of its 26,000 digital sales have come since mid-September; the week ending Sept. 16, the cut experienced a 118% increase in weekly sales, followed by an 87% uptick the following week.

All this said, it seems that I might have found a reason to start watching commercials again, a behavior which has significantly decreased since owning a DVR: to see what songs a “with it” ad agency employee might squeeze in unnoticed. You never know. Maybe we’ll hear The Jesus Lizard in a Geico commercial. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a shuffleboard date with Iggy Pop on a Carnival Cruise liner.