Brad Paisley’s ter­rific new record, Amer­i­can Sat­ur­day Night, arrives freighted with con­tra­dic­tions. So does all good pop music. But they’re rarely announced as starkly as they are on “Welcome to the Future,” a song seem­ingly designed to illus­trate the prim­i­tiv­ity of the tra­di­tional model of licens­ing pop­u­lar songs for use in adver­tis­ing described by Greil Marcus in Lip­stick Traces:

At first, [Michael Jackson's] will­ing­ness to imme­di­ately trans­form ["Billie Jean"] into an adver­tis­ing jingle seemed like a slap in the face to every­one who loved it. But months later, when the con­stant air­play bought for the com­mer­cial allowed it not just to replace but almost to erase the orig­i­nal, one could hear “You’re a Whole New Generation” [the Pepsi anthem that reworked "Billie Jean"] as a new piece of music…. When he sang the line, “That choice is up to you,” dra­ma­tiz­ing the consumer’s option of Pepsi versus Coke, he made it sound like a moral choice.

“Welcome to the Future” ren­ders this entire process super­flu­ous. The song arrives already trans­formed into an adver­tis­ing jingle, its verses a hymn to the won­ders of com­mod­ity cap­i­tal­ism at its most beneficent:

When I was ten years old
I remem­ber thinkin’ how cool it would be
When we were goin’ on an eight hour drive
If I could just watch TV

And I’d have given any­thing
To have my own PacMan game at home
I used to have to get a ride down to the arcade
Now I’ve got it on my phone

Glory glory hal­lelu­jah
Wel­come to the future

My grandpa was in World War II
He fought against the Japan­ese
He wrote a hun­dred let­ters to my grandma
Mailed  ‘em from his base in the Philippines

I wish they could see this now
The world they saved has changed, you know
‘Cause I was on a video chat this morn­ing
With a com­pany in Tokyo

Every day’s a rev­o­lu­tion
Wel­come to the future

I had a friend in school
Running-​back on a foot­ball team
They burned a cross in his front yard
For asking out the home­com­ing queen

I thought about him today
Every­body who’s seen what he’s seen
From a woman on a bus
To a man with a dream

Wake up Martin Luther
Wel­come to the future
Glory glory hal­lelu­jah
Wel­come to the future

Pais­ley man­ages here, with­out naming a single brand, to outdo hip-​hop at its most brand-name-dropping: he clearly has Apple’s iPhone in mind (I assume he only car­ries Black­berry to swim), while to under­score the song’s rephras­ing of Marx’s dictum that “The cap­i­tal­ist has played a highly rev­o­lu­tion­ary role in history,” Brand Obama brings his Pepsi logo to the final verses. The song deftly unveils the lev­el­ing func­tion of cap­i­tal­ism: it is not simply that the civil rights move­ment demon­strates one way in which the world has changed, while video chat demon­strates another, but that these are the same devel­op­ment. What Debord called “the human­ism of the commodity” leads directly to a black Pres­i­dent, and vice versa.

Pop music may be the com­mod­ity that can most effec­tively con­tain a cri­tique of its own com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion, but it remains a com­mod­ity even when one obtains it for free, here in “the future.” There’s noth­ing ironic in this process: the logic of cap­i­tal leads inex­orably to the point where com­modi­ties do not even need to be sold—and not only inso­far as they are them­selves entice­ments to buy fur­ther com­modi­ties. (Which is not to deny that the record industry’s pathetic and despi­ca­ble response to a failed model of pro­duc­tion and profit reg­is­ters the upheavals of a real, and richly deserved, crisis.) But it is pre­cisely to this extent that “Welcome to the Future” encodes its own cri­tique, par­tic­u­larly with the seem­ingly casual “slip” in the last verse, whereby the car­i­ca­ture to whom the rad­i­cal Martin King is con­sis­tently reduced gives way to an invo­ca­tion of the Protes­tant founder (my bet is Pais­ley had in mind Luther’s oppo­si­tion to lend­ing at interest).

If Agam­ben is right to argue that cap­i­tal­ism is directed “principally toward the alien­ation of lan­guage itself” (and my own response is: prin­ci­pally?), a great pop song can expose that alien­ation, for a few min­utes, so thor­oughly that even the most rig­or­ous lis­tener might enter­tain the fan­tasy that the ide­olo­gies the song ren­ders trans­par­ent are stand-​ins for ide­ol­ogy as such, and the future sounds like chim­ing guitars—”every day a revolution” in Agamben’s sense, main­tain­ing “the exis­tence of poten­tial­ity with­out any rela­tion to Being in the form of actuality.” This task might well prove impos­si­ble; songs like “Welcome to the Future”—its very title a suc­cinct state­ment of the paradox—clarify how much depends on refus­ing to assume it is.