By Michelle Goldberg

IT WAS CRAZY how quick it happened. One moment, Nick Drake was the high-holy angel of melancholy indie rock, the very spirit of beautiful losers who never get paid. Seconds later, it seemed, buying a Drake CD in a hip record store would earn you condescending sneers from a snotty clerk. If you felt like listening to him, you'd probably only play two of his three records. Not because the third wasn't as shivery-exquisite as the others, but it was now marked and degraded. See, these days the record Pink Moon comes with a sticker brightly, crassly proclaiming, "As heard in the new VW Cabrio commercial."

Even if you're not a Drake fan, you know the commercial I'm talking about – the one with the four dewy-eyed demographic exemplars cruising in a convertible down a country road with a full moon shining, reaching a party, and then turning right back around to drive some more as the wispy, impossibly bittersweet song "Pink Moon" chimes from the stereo. Since that commercial came out, sales of the eponymous album are way up. Douglas Wolk reports in Salon that Pink Moon, which sold fewer than 5,000 copies when it was released, was recently Amazon.com's fifth-best-selling record (it's currently 184th, while nothing else by Drake is in the top 1,000).

This new popularity should be a good thing for those who think that beautiful music deserves to be spread as wide as it can go. It doesn't feel like a good thing, though; it feels like a loss, and it points to the way commercials keep robbing the world's best songs of their magic. The vampiric power of ads to drain meaning from music remains constant, even if the concept of selling out is obsolete in a culture with fewer and fewer divisions between the underground and the mainstream, art and commerce.

Of course, we all live in Warhol's world now, and the cutting edge is the grail of both the avant-garde and the advertising industry, which are increasingly difficult to distinguish from each other. At vw.com, there's a link to a glowing review of the "Pink Moon" commercial that appears not in a trade mag for the ad business but in the Philadelphia Weekly, an "alternative" paper – meaning that it most likely ran along with articles about local underground theater and grassroots musicians. Joey Sweeney gushes purply about the spot like Greil Marcus creaming over Sleater-Kinney. "I'm not overstating when I say that the 'Milky Way' commercial is my own personal 'Weeping Indian,' a piece of advertising so grand in its approximation of human nature and, yea, revision of it – these people are Norman Rockwell characters; we see them as we would like to be – that it seems to approximate the way we are as well as any piece of literature or music or other 'real' art," he writes. "Struggling against its vacuous birthright, 'Milky Way' supersedes advertising. You might make fun, but I like to think of it as a text." While the maudlin bloat of Sweeney's prose demands that you do, indeed, make fun, he's right in supposing that in the whorehouse of pop culture it's dishonest to insist on an arbitrary distinction between "real" art and marketing.

As the Frankfurt schoolboys at the Baffler have argued so elegantly and repeatedly, the idea that consumer capitalism and underground art are naturally opposed to each other is a fallacy. Ever since the '60s, Baffler editor Tom Frank writes in his book The Conquest of Cool, "the counterculture served corporate revolutionaries as a projection of the new ideology of business, a living embodiment of attitudes that reflected their own." Frank is obsessed with the notion of hip consumerism, "a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the falseness, shoddiness, and everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption." Alternative culture, with its myriad fetishes and hyperactive trend cycles, is a perfect model of capitalism on overdrive, not an alternative to it. To sour on a song because it appears in a commercial is to participate in this system. The belief, after all, is that when a record is discovered by the squares it loses its value and needs to be replaced. Thus, in a twisted way, a hated commercial still sends the indie kids shopping.

Besides, now that advertising has become our country's most ubiquitous cultural expression, the aesthetic atmosphere is actually improved by the incorporation of good music. If you're going to be subjected to the Philips Magnavox recordable CD player spot again and again, isn't it better to hear Talvin Singh's sublime southeast Asian-flavored jungle than some generic prefab version of urban club music? Biking down Market Street, isn't sullen Liz Phair or sassy Macy Gray a nicer sight on a Calvin Klein billboard than Kate Moss or a shrill, glossy moppet like Britney Spears?

Beyond that, isn't it nice that some once neglected geniuses are finally getting paid? Alex Abramovich reports in feed.com that the Minutemen licensed a track to Volvo to pay the medical bills of their dead lead singer's father. How can you argue with that?

And if you worked for an advertising agency, wouldn't you want to use the songs you loved? The creative imperative is powerful, and marketers, just like anyone else, want to put their own stamp on the things they make. A generation of people weaned on underground culture are now working on Madison Avenue, and it's natural that they'd bring their aesthetics with them. Unless you're in Fugazi or something, you can't blame them.

So why did I feel like I'd been slapped when I turned on the TV the other evening and heard Hooverphonic's "Renaissance Affair," one of my favorite songs in the world, playing in a new commercial for some special edition of hue of Volkswagen bugs? After all, while the Belgian group are somewhat underground, their music has always been polished and enamored of a kind of jet-set glamour, so to accuse them of betraying anything by licensing "Renaissance Affair" would be absurd. Besides, I'm glad that the band are getting lots of money, which means they'll probably make more albums. And yet for now I can't stand to listen to that passionate, celestial, enveloping song that I once played over and over. With another favorite song corrupted, the world feels just a tiny bit colder, a sliver worse.

This isn't the first time a song dear to my heart has been colonized by the auto industry. A lifelong Smiths devotee, I can still remember feeling shock and horror when the first chords of "How Soon Is Now?" boomed from a Nissan commercial. That commercial still makes me sad, not because I lost respect for the band but because the music and the message fused together irreparably. When I hear that song now, the plaintive self-mocking pain in the line "I am human and I need to be loved" is superseded in my head by the image of a sedan spinning jauntily.

Does a song have a limited amount of energy, and can that energy be exhausted? It would seem so. The injury that indie snobs feel when their pet bands are discovered by the larger world is real, no matter how obnoxiously expressed. There's a reason some people guard their favorite music like something delicate even if they also spread it as a gift. The sense of possession, of a song speaking to and for you, is one of the things that create such emotionally intense bonds between music and its fans. A mutual feeling of emotional ownership binds musical communities together.

So when a song's following spreads, some of those who first loved it feel a vague kind of jealousy that congeals into rejection and contempt. That jealousy comes from a sense that a song's power isn't always infinite or replenishable, and that when it's diffused too widely it gets weak and thin. Usually this is a slow process. Some early fans of bands like Belle and Sebastian or Stereolab may have fallen out of love with the groups once they became the darlings of college rock, but for many more the music's spread was gradual enough to be painless, so others' gain doesn't necessarily feel like a deprivation.

Commercials are so powerful that they monstrously distort this process. When a song appears in an ad that's played over and over again, the company absorbs its meaning. In a way, "Pink Moon" now belongs to Volkswagen, and not just because of a licensing deal. When most people hear that song, they're going to think of the VW Cabrio instead of whatever inchoate sentimental yearnings that sublime bit of folk-blues might otherwise have conjured. To me, "Renaissance Affair" was all about wistful rootlessness, about being high on velocity and yet missing something left behind. That's gone now. Instead, the song is about Vapor, a new color of Beetle. The name is eerily appropriate, since the commercial unhinged the song from its emotional context and sent it sailing, weightless, into the realm of manipulative affect.

At vw.com you can actually buy the Drake song and download some of the others. They're part of Volkswagen culture now, which is to say that they're part of the Volkswagen brand, signifiers of the kind of insouciantly stylish lifestyle that the German company wishes to project. Listening to "Renaissance Affair" once lent normal moments the heightened, dramatic pulse of a movie. Now when I play it, I feel like I'm somehow buying into a car company's vision of cool. This puts me, without a doubt, in an eternally reactive posture, abandoning my favorite music and searching for something new whenever some ad guy and I share the same favorite song. Better that, though, then holding too tight to songs that can now only aspire to be the soundtrack to the commercial of your life.

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