Whenever I try to listen to my favorite punk and hardcore
music on YouTube, it’s always preceded by an ad for Cadillac: and not the kind
you can skip over after 5 seconds, either. It’s not that they’re so bad or
anything (although seeing the same one over and over again for hours before
each and every song I want to hear does get a bit grating: maybe they ought to
fix that issue by mixing up the ads a bit?), but wow, what an inappropriate ad
to go before ‘80s punk stuff, whose main objective was to rip on materialism
and consumerism and corporate America! I mean, here we’ve got one of the
all-time best-known symbols for affluent American materialist consumer success:
a Cadillac. You just can’t get much closer to spitting in the face of the punk
bands than commercialism, especially an advertisement for a luxury car, something that is about as representative of what these bands were against than anything possibly could be. It’s ironic, isn’t it?
