Music to Lose the Average Meast

Every other week, it seems, another middling "indie" band makes the jump from obscurity to semi-demi-kinda-noticedhood on the strength of one catchy but vapid dance-pop-rock track played ad nauseum during commericials, movie trailers and filler during sports broadcasts.

I guess I can't blame them for the vagaries and practicalities of the music industry. Crappy bands can't sell crappy albums because people don't buy albums as much anymore, so the bands have to sell the rights to their one halfway appealing track to advertisers, making it ubiquitous in all the wrong ways and taking the risk that your song is associated with the latest Dane Cook flick.

The latest such example is "Cobrastyle" by The Teddybears. If you're not familiar with the song by name (I wasn't), all you need to know is the opening Da Da Dum riff played about six times followed by someone drawing on the lyrical genius of Kid Rock with a slur of a Bomb Ba Bomb Diggities and so forth. The song has already made its way onto the trailer for Employee of the Month, Fifa '06 and that commercial for Bones that Drew loves ever so much.

Last night, in a usual stolid attempt to appear hip, ESPN used the song about 10 times during Monday Night Football in its commercial bumpers, as they did with the similarly grating, similarly ephemeral Ok Go track "Here It Goes Again" a few weeks ago. This perhaps wouldn't bother me so much if the thrumming guitar riff was used to drown out Theeeesman, but as such, it's annoying as hell.

Because I'm not a member of the hipsterati, I'm not going to profess to having better alternatives for songs leading to commercials. Bill Simmons did a column about this during the playoffs last year, but offered nothing more than Pitchfork Media fodder, with the likes of Bloc Party, Stellastarr*, LCD Soundsystem, Louis XIV and a bunch of other lame shit with whiny lyrics. Will Leitch shakes his emo bangs in thundrous approval. I mean, you know a genre is dead when it takes on a uniform gangly aural aesthetic.

Being a damn lazy ape, I'm going to leave it up to our commenters for suggestions. Anything from The Power and The Glory gets you banned.