House Band (Recession Special)

I wouldn’t have thought Jimmy Fallon’s house band could be an occasion for thinking about art’s place in the arcades of capital, but Drew Gardner did:

“That sound inevitably disappears into the music of a car commercial, and then reemerges just as fleetingly from the other side of the wormhole. One thing is for sure—we missed something. It could be argued that being paid to bookend chunks of dull schlock in this way is questionable, but it is equally possible that these alternative hip-hop framings of commercials render far more transparent the process through which the ads are constantly infiltrating our casual resistance, precisely by framing the sounds and music of advertising with the sonic intimations of a party we actually want to be at but can never quite grasp as long as we’re soaking in these disembodied images of consumption. You could also say that The Roots are just trying to do a good job while still being themselves in a brutal job market.”