Issue 37: Don't Bother Me, I'm Thinking
By Medulla Vesuvius

Emasculated Frankenstein: The Case of Queen and Fitness Water

I am a fan of the music of Queen. I think Brian May’s guitar-playing is intelligent and I am always amazed at how recognizable his tone is, thanks largely to his genius idea of layering several recorded guitar lines into orchestrated, classical-sounding arrangements. And Freddie Mercury’s voice has virtually been unmatched in the pop music world as far as power and range are concerned. The man had a set of pipes. And don’t forget the harmonic sophistication that his piano-playing provided for in songs like “You’re My Best Friend” and “Bohemian Rhapsody,” among a slew of others.

Throughout the Queen catalog you can hear so many melodic gems supported by smart harmony. When it comes to the business of writing intelligent, yet accessibly beautiful pop/rock music, I think very few can match their legacy.

And that is why a recent commercial for Propel Fitness Water has raised my ire.

You’ve probably seen it. It’s called “Stress Monster” and features a bunch of people stressing out in an urban downtown while a giant, mechanized techno-blob runs the streets. But it’s not the visuals that catch my attention; it’s the music-Queen/David Bowie’s “Under Pressure,” one of my favorite songs by any artist. To put it simply: this is one of the most profane commercials I’ve ever seen or heard.

Here’s why.

It is not entirely because I shudder at a company’s choice to utilize “cool” music to hawk their wares. The idea is fairly simple: we want to sell something, let’s associate it with something else that has already proven successful and effective at getting people’s attention.

Rather, what really matters to me is how this company has used this song. Obviously, you can’t use a whole song unless you make a three or four minute commercial, (and let’s pray that innovation never sees the light of day.) So, there is going to be some editing done to the song-usually you’ll just hear a snippet of a chorus. But the editing done to “Under Pressure” for this fitness water commercial is just an egregious sin against the spirit of the original song. I hear jumps from the opening riff to parts of the chorus to the end of the bridge. The song is chopped up like some gross-out horror movie.

“So, what’s the big deal? It’s just highlighting the coolest parts of the song, right?” Well, not really. Not if you subscribe to the idea that a song is more than the sum of its parts. Look at the particulars of “Under Pressure” in this very cursory outline I made of the song’s structure:

As you can see, in terms of its structure this is a very adventurous, interesting song, like most of the Queen oeuvre, not your standard “verse-chorus-verse-chorus, etc.” A new musical line enters virtually every eight bars or so. And there are several builds of volume and intensity followed by release and a huge build at about the ¾ point, (Bowie’s singing “’Cause love’s such an old fashioned word/ And love dares you to care/ For the people on the edge of the night,” etc.) that releases immediately with the intro riff. All of this drama takes time to unfold, (4:03, to be exact), and is lost and the song emasculated when some ad exec picks and chooses their favorite little five-ten second bits to assemble a twenty-seven second Frankenstein version, devoid of any of the tension and release of the original. [The highlighted sections on the outline-“Freddie Improv,” “Verse,” “Chorus,” and “This is ourselves,” denote the areas where the editor grabbed the first few bars to make his/her version.]

But it’s not like this is the first time that a “classic” has been used to shill for the man. Led Zeppelin’s “Rock n’ Roll,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire,” Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life…” These have all been used to sell things as mundane as cars and Carnival Cruises. It has become acceptable for artists to license their music for these purposes without being labeled a “sell-out.” Hell, even cranky old Bob Dylan has sold Victoria’s Secret bras and songs by beyond-reproach indie darlings Wilco are finding their way into Volkswagon commercials.

While the question of whether art and commerce are the strange bedfellows they used to be is a subject for another time, I’m primarily disturbed by the liberty that the remaining members of Queen or their publishing company has allowed commercial producers with their music. I have heard a similarly ham-fisted chop-job performed on their classic “I Want to Break Free,” to sell…soda, I believe.

This is what makes this Propel commercial particularly ugly for me—art sacrificed so brutally on the altar of commerce.

Would you take apart a stained-glass panel and rearrange it to sell some consumer-thing? Would you take a single-inch square of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” to sell mineral water?

As an experiment, I decided to do my own editing job on a classic to attempt a similar commercial in the visual arena. Here is what I came up with:



I suppose the case could be made that pop music has always been a part of the marketplace and, as such, shouldn’t be held with the same reverence as, say, an Italian fresco. On the other hand, artists have been getting paid for their work for a long time: by the church, rich patrons, etc.

Maybe it’s a matter of accessibility. The easier it is to experience a piece of music, painting or what have you, the less its value. And with today’s technology, pretty much any work of art can be found in one form or another, thus creating an environment akin to a downward spiral, a situation where no art is sacred any longer.

Thus, the case of Queen and Propel Fitness Water.