By Lynn Rapoport

WE WERE DRIVING along a dark country road with the top down. The air was warm and the stars were like fireflies, like globes of light. The night washed over us, soft and lovely. The road gleamed under us. We looked at each other and said nothing.

There's more, too, something about ineffable beauty. The star-dazzled darkness and the softly purring four-door convertible that carried in its motor soul all the gleaming wonder of the night. The song flowing out from under its smoothly gliding wheels, from the dark sweet sadness of the engine.

And Nick Drake talked to us from the grave, telling us sweetly that everything was fine, although it never was with him. The car, the kids, everything was on fire tonight, everything was aglow.

We got to the party, and the lights from the house fell harshly on our eyes. The keg loomed up messily and the crass, obvious noise of our contemporaries at play. We looked at one another, and Johnny turned the car – which had superb handling – around. We sped off down that dark country road, and "Pink Moon" floated upward, shining, ethereal, as the party noise dwindled and the darkness leapt over us and the stars came back on. My heart hurt, and I knew that life would be more splendid because of tonight.

• • •

I know it's wrong to glorify the past. It's doubly so when what's troubling you has been going on for so many years that the past is present. Bob Seger and his trucks. The Burger King commercials that tore "I Melt with You" out of my heart and slapped it down on the grill. Not to mention the ad exec-hours spent digging through crates for the love songs of the '60s and '70s.

Still, I long for the terrible days when Mr. Clean and Hamburger Helper were king. The days of housebroken jingles that rang in your ears in a sickly refrain, following you from TV set to refrigerator, refrigerator to stove range, stove range to dining room set, dining room set to electric toothbrush, and so on down to dust. They weren't cool, and they plagued your existence, and they may not even have moved much product, but what seems lovely about them now is that they couldn't really – and didn't, I think, presume to – move you. A talking rubber glove and a bald, gleaming cartoon muscle man hold a certain line, soldiers of mediocrity, of blunt, phlegmatic product placement. And if those days didn't truly, truly exist, if the ads had sinister undertones back then and I just wasn't paying attention, it still means something that jingles are what I remember, a majority of commercials that didn't try to connect with your soul, or even your soulfulness.

Now we have the swelling voices of AT&T telling us about our future and who's going to bring it to us, like watching Steel Magnolias in fast-forward. We have candy-colored bugs coolly spinning in circles around the songs we like to listen to in the dark.

Remember Muzak? Yes, it's still around, now being promoted as "audio architecture." Which I guess makes sense, because nobody really hears it anymore; they just walk through it like it's an office park. I remember trudging around the supermarket in black-clad 13-year-old disdain with my mother while the Cure bleated instrumentally over the P.A. system. I called it aural hell.

Muzak now seems funny. Like a national joke – the object of a scorn we can virtuously share in without reprisal. The very name is an admission of its ersatz nature. The "ak" transmits some unrestrainable cry of dismay.

Picking on poor, sad, dead Nick Drake to hawk your product is not funny. It's kind of evil. If not Chevron evil, then maybe, well, VW evil.

The Golf Cabrio commercial has an ersatz quality too. I don't believe in their happiness. I think they ended up back at that party when they ran out of things to say about the stars, when the CD changed. What I find more disconcerting is how the commercial attempts to adapt the song to its own needs. I guess we all do that with music, but it's usually in a more private forum – in your room, in your head, in the odd paradoxical privacy of the dance floor. Later you struggle for words, and the song proves too difficult to talk about without dribbling clichés. You make a tape for someone.

The ad's far-from-the-madding-crowd tale of four beautiful kids who choose the unbeaten two-lane blacktop tries with a heavy hand to confirm those notions of singularity. But how singular can you be if an entire nation of TV viewers is experiencing your lonely splendor because some ad execs recognized all of that unspoken feeling, appropriated it for the flow of commerce, and suggested that some of us could actually sing along if we liked? Sure kids, go ahead and try this at home! (They did the same thing with "Mr. Roboto" but more successfully. It's like they were actually able to sift through some guy's high school memories to find the one where he rocked out to that song while getting stoned with friends in a parking lot somewhere. Clean it up a little, and watch it go.)

Recognizing that the music of Nick Drake is something that could make your life a little better is not brain surgery or rocket science. I'm not suggesting a secret society of people who get it; it's all just there for the taking and the tastemaking, and to wish that away would be nasty and elitist. And I'm a hypocrite because for me, listening to Bob Seger singing "like a rock" in homage to a Chevy truck is actually quite similar to watching Mr. Clean get the stain out. But it's one thing to admit that people should be listening to Nick Drake and Spiritualized and maybe even Styx, and it's another to accept that one of the standard features of the 2000 model Golf Cabrio is that scenario – the song and the stars falling down, the glory of being in existence and made for better things. When Nick Drake puts stars in the eyes of the Gap-clad girl in the backseat, what do the viewers make of this manufactured experience?

I may live in a dream world and not get out enough. Sometimes when I'm gnashing my teeth and furiously holding forth about the latest appropriation, other people in the room are saying, "Actually, I kind of like that commercial ..."

My friend who's in a band tells me they're actively looking to get one of their songs in an ad. "It would pay for the whole album," he says. And I found a chat on tagmag.com where people were tossing around favorite songs in commercials. The Cabrio one was very popular, though none of its fans actually knew who the musical artist was. Great commercial. Great song. Can I find that at the Wherehouse?

Interestingly, they all knew the make and model of the car, which knocked a hole in my superior little living room theory that commercials don't mean what those in the biz think they do, that people get involved in the narrative and don't remember the name, that branding success stories happen somewhere outside of our televisions.

I guess the Snap commercial I saw recently sums up the rules of the game pretty well. "Louie Louie" performed by the Kingsmen accompanies a blank screen and then the words "No one knows what this song means." Garbled text bearing a faint phonetic resemblance to whatever it is Jack Ely's actually singing starts ticker-taping across the screen. And then the finish: "But we think he's saying ..." followed by the Snap logo introducing some new product. So I guess the lesson for places like VW and Snap and the ad agencies that theoretically keep them on the map is, they're saying whatever you "think" they're saying.

The lessons for artists are read your contract, enunciate, and don't ever die. For the concerned TV viewer, use your mute button and make popcorn during the commercial break.

For the record, I still love "Pink Moon." I listened to it three times while writing this piece. The kids in the commercial get in the way briefly, but the way it made me feel in the past is still there, and I know better than to try to explain why.

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