View current page
2 matchs for nilsson:
A while back I got really mad on hearing Harry Nilsson's lovely and quirky song "He Needs Me" in a shoe commercial and wrote a post where I used the F word a lot. Nilsson was an interesting musician and it was nice hearing "Put the Lime in the Coconut" in a Williamsburg bar recently. "You're breakin' my heart, you're tearing it apart, so fuck you" was also a groundbreaker in its day. Anyway, aspersions were cast on the Nilsson estate over the shoe thing and an anonymous commenter took me to task for it:
regarding your harry nilsson rant... i guess they don't call you moody for nothin'. after harry nilsson's money manager, Cindy Sims, stole everything from him and was sentenced to prison, Harry was forced to try to sell some of his songs for commercials... it doesn't surprise me that his songs are still being used now in commercials... after his fortune was stolen.Assuming this is true, sorry.
harry singing a ban deodorant ad...
One of the finest things about Paul Thomas Anderson's psychotic film Punch Drunk Love was the revival of the Harry Nilsson/Van Dyke Parks/Shelley Duvall love song "He Needs Me," from Robert Altman's pretty-much-forgotten Popeye movie. Duvall, as Olive Oyl, sings this ballad of co-dependency (hers, to Bluto) with a meek, charmingly off key voice, and Nilsson's perpetually ascending kiddy-song melody coupled with Parks' Charles Ives-cum-Max Steiner orchestation pretty much guarantee goosebumps. The song was the reason I bought the Popeye soundtrack years ago (but regrettably wasn't enough reason to keep it during a later vinyl purge). I was actually thinking about tracking it down again, so I could play "HNM" obsessively and see if the score contained other warped gems.
But now I don't care.
I heard it again today, in the movie house during the usual interminable string of pre-show ads. Fucking Nilsson estate (or fucking someone) sold it for a commercial, fast on the heels of Anderson's rediscovery of it--hawking what, I don't even know (shoes?); it was one of those concept advertisements where the product isn't mentioned, with a gaggle of teenage girls competing for the amorous attention of a buff tennis pro while Duvall sings sweetly in the background. (The next ad featured the Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want'," selling soda, I think.)
Fucking hell, fucking marketing culture, it wrecks everything it touches. (OK, Popeye wasn't exactly Ibsen, but it wasn't about selling tennis rackets either.) Fucking sellout artists (or their dependents), always needing more to live the lifestyles of "playas," destroying creative legacies and the unique auras of songs. Fuck.