It’s been around for a little while, so now’s a little late to be bring­ing this up, but anyway I’m curi­ous for the DE-​pinion: Surely I’m not the only one baf­fled by the fact that Dunkin’ Donuts offers tuna salad sand­wiches. It looks so gross! First they adver­tised tuna salad on a bagel, now they’ve got it smeared on a crois­sant too! Or wait, I’m not baf­fled at all. I have a little “piano theory.” It goes some­thing like this (this is how I think the ad works): “Oh, man, that looks so nasty, why would anyone want that shit from Dunkin’ Dough­nuts?! But, now that I think about it, I would like a dough­nut!” See, they inten­tion­ally gross you out with the tuna, and that forces you to think about what isn’t gross, and then you’re in the mood for that, and by “that” I mean “dough­nut.” What do you call this method? It’s not exactly reverse psy­chol­ogy, is it?  That would be too simple.  I’m so con­fused.  Why am I post­ing this?  Help!

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,