In the current day, no advertising campaign is complete without a celebrity gurning through your television screen with a bulging faceful or a clasping fistful of the product in question. Whether it’s Gary Lineker’s pathological lust for stealing crisps from children or Jason Donovan’s valiant attempts to pretend that Iceland food is anything other than physically repellent, companies are falling over themselves to be associated with the latest big noise.

Lineker and Donovan’s forays into the advertising world have avoided significant criticism, mainly because fans of Gary Lineker or Jason Donovan are the kind of people who only criticise technological advancement and youth, but, for more artistic and respected figures, it’s a different story. This week, Yoko Ono was heavily criticised - for once - after allowing John Lennon’s image and voice to be used in a Citroen advert.  The advert features Lennon complaining about those who “copy the past” and “look backwards”, presumably to promote Citroen’s brand-new idea of a horseless carriage.

This is, by no means, an isolated incident. Whenever an acclaimed musician so much as mistakenly coughs up a distinctive brand of food they are rounded upon by fans with a rabid tenacity, condemned as a phony, a sell-out, a slave to ‘the man’. For example, take faux-incestuous rock oddity Jack White. In 2005, White took some time out from recording albums in the style of an angry witch in a tin to write a song for a Coca Cola advert which was met with the undiluted rage of indie kids across the globe. So much so, in fact, that their shaman, Noel Gallagher, publicly criticised White and quipped that he resembled “Zorro on doughnuts”. Acerbic stuff, Noel, but still preferable to looking like Ringo Starr on Thunderbirds.

More recently, we’ve seen Iggy Pop release a series of infuriating car insurance adverts which, essentially, all follow a similar plot of Iggy Pop bellowing “CAR INSURANCE!” over and over again whilst displaying his torso which is, somehow, both sinewy and gelatinous like a mutton blancmange. Also, Bob Dylan attempted to up his sex appeal by starring in an advert for Victoria’s Secret, yet only achieved the creepy air of a man who’s lurched in to a lingerie shop to snoop around and to buy a bra for a wife who only exists in his mind. And, last year, Jonny Rotten was part of an advertising campaign for Country Life Butter but, to be fair to him, I suppose that could have been because the first syllable of the product sounds a bit like a swear word.

Bill Hicks once claimed that “If you do an advert then you’re off the artistic register forever” and, judging by the violent condemnation all of these figures received for their commercial exploits, many would agree with him. It’s certainly jarring to see a counter-culture hero such as Iggy Pop reduced to an insurance company stooge. However, the line between commercialisation and music has become increasingly blurred since a caveman charged an admission fee for a performance of rhythmically smashing a boar skull to pieces with a stick. For musicians to ‘sell-out’, their intentions would’ve had to have been purely artistic in the first place which, in the modern industry, is not the case.

Jack White was commissioned to write a song for the Bond franchise, Dylan is paid every single time someone covers one of his thousands of songs and Rotten reunites The Sex Pistols whenever they’re short on funds. However strong their desire to create is, a popular musician is never detached from commercial gain; advertising is merely another way, rightly or wrongly, to capitalise on their success and ‘selling-out’ is nothing but a romantic notion no longer applicable to the mainstream music industry. Just don’t get me started on that Andy Warhol and his seedy dealings with Campbell’s Soup. Corporate whore.

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