The first CD I bought was But­t­hole Surfers’ Locust Abor­tion Tech­ni­cian. I was 15, 16, con­ced­ing to the mar­ket­place despite my sus­pi­cion that the com­pact disc was, in Steve Albini’s semi-​prescient phrase, the rich man’s eight track tape. Many of the first CDs I bought were, of course, trans­fers into the new format from back cat­a­logs of bands I liked. Over the years, I—& prob­a­bly you, too—have bought the same albums sev­eral times over, becom­ing some­thing of a con­nois­seur of the usu­ally infin­i­tes­i­mal dif­fer­ences among var­i­ous remas­ters. The second remas­ter of Sticky Fin­gers, for exam­ple, cuts off Mick Taylor’s solo at the end of “Sway” just a half-​second before it actu­ally fades out on the record. Only a crazy person would buy each new edi­tion of a novel. But I appear to be exactly as stupid as the record com­pa­nies hope I am. (At least until recently: these days most of my music takes the form of gifts from the inter­net.)

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,