How did music associated with rebellion, Woodstock Festival, and the rejection of consumer society become the soundtrack for commercials by Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, Renault, and Chrysler? This podcast is based on Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb’s latest study, From Woodstock to the Soundtracks of Automotive Television Advertising: The Strange Journey of Folk-Rock Counterculture published on SSRN papers, a platform for sharing and accessing research papers, which examines the appropriation of 1960s and 1970s folk-rock by automotive advertising. The author analyzes fifty campaigns aired between 1991 and 2026 that featured songs by Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, David Bowie, The Clash, and Nick Drake. The paradox is striking: songs associated with political protest, pacifism, nonconformity, and criticism of industrial society are now used to sell cars. Jimi Hendrix appears in seven campaigns within the analyzed corpus. “Purple Haze,” “Foxy Lady,” “Little Wing,” “All Along the Watchtower,” and “Voodoo Child” accompany advertisements for Mercedes, BMW, or Volkswagen. However, the article goes beyond the concept of mere commercial appropriation. Drawing on Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Thomas Frank, and Fred Turner, Gimello-Mesplomb examines the shift in the meaning of these songs once they are incorporated into advertising discourse. Protest becomes “cool,” nonconformity—a way to stand out—and the desire for freedom—an individual promise attached to the product. Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” shifts from a critique of the impossibility of communication to a promise of silence and comfort in a car. The Beatles’ “Come Together” transforms the idea of community into an image of technological integration in a BMW. At Chrysler, Bob Dylan’s rebellious image is embedded in a patriotic narrative celebrating American industry. The podcast then explores Thomas Frank’s concept of “hip consumerism.” As early as the “Creative Revolution” of the 1960s, American advertising had learned to sell individualism, nonconformity, and the rejection of convention. Criticism of consumption could thus itself become a driver of consumption. Fred Turner’s work expands on this interpretation. Turner distinguishes between two strands of American rebellion: the New Left, focused on political action and institutional change, and the New Communalists, oriented toward individual transformation, alternative communities, LSD, and technology. According to the article’s interpretation, car advertising retains the promise of personal liberation while removing the demand for institutional change: “change the system” gives way to “change oneself” and protect oneself from the system. This trajectory echoes the process described by Theodore Roszak and later by Fred Turner in their studies of the encounter between counterculture and technological culture. Some of the libertarian and communal ideals of the 1960s provided the language of freedom, autonomy, and emancipation, which was later adopted by the entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley and technology companies such as Microsoft (1975) and Apple (1976), founded during the twilight of the hippie movement. The automotive industry is following a similar path: an industrial product becomes a promise of personal autonomy. Gimello, therefore, does not reduce this story to a simple “betrayal” of the counterculture by capitalism. His thesis is more unsettling: from the very beginning, this culture contained an ambivalence that enabled its later transformation into market values. From Woodstock to the car dealership—the podcast is less about the disappearance of rebellion than about its transformation: about how the market has learned to sell former rebels the memory of their own rebellious youth. Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.
