This might be the reason I don't watch much television

I never thought I'd see the day that one of my favorite bands from my college days, The The, would be promoting anything for mass consumerism. Why would I think about it? I was 19 when that band came into my life, and didn't think about anything beyond how in the world I was going to pass College Algebra if I still couldn't fully grasp fractions, or how I could schedule my classes so that I could go to Fat Dawgs for 75-cent pitchers of beer every Thursday and Friday at 3:00, or to state the obvious, how I could figure out the exact meaning of priorities. Stuff like that.

It's forgivable that in youth, you never really think about your music one day being the background for a commercial. My first surprise moment was when Volkswagen chose Trio for one of their commercials. Though Trio wasn't a life-defining band for me, my eyebrows still went way up the first time I saw that commercial.

When I heard Led Zeppelin pushing Cadillac, my eyebrows went up even higher, and I turned my head to see if anyone else thought this to be at the very least, very odd. Though I am all about Zep today, I admit that I really ventured into them during high school as they were a little before my time when they broke out onto the scene in the early 70s. And I can't say that the band served any real backdrop for me growing up, though I did harbor serious fantasies of Robert Plant (let me say right here that, next to Roger Daltrey of the Who -- whose poster I had hanging above my bed at the age of 12 -- Plant had the best hair in rock, and I was one of many, many female Zep fans too young to grasp the music but not too young to be immune to that hair). Still, I think the band in its entirety is undeniably genius, the essence of rock and roll music, with few true contemporaries, and, given their now legendary status, find it sadly ironic that their music was sold as a jingle promoting Cadillac.

Led Zeppelin and Cadillac? Icons in different industries, I admit, but if the pairing doesn't furrow your brow in confusion, then you were born after 1980 or you've listened to country music all your life. And if you lived your teen years or early 20s in the 70s and that Zep commercial prompted you to run out and buy a Cadillac in effort to hark back to your free-living hippie days, all I can say is that you need to face the mirror and drive something more sensible because your neighbors, if not your children, are embarrassed. Of you and for you. Seriously, they are.

I get a visceral feeling of musical betrayal when I see the M&Ms commercial and hear The The. It's a personal issue with me. The The? That band was from a period in my life where I was discovering that there was music outside of what was dictated to me through my radio. That discovery was monumentally liberating for me. And that song in particular. This is the Day? What are they trying to say with it now? This is the day I become an M&M? This is the day I become an M&M with a mohawk? This is the day I become an M&M sitting on a copy machine making copies of my little M&M butt? I have to change the channel. There was a time when the Soul Mining album was the soundtrack to my life and that one song was the highlight of the entire journey, the song that told me things can change and that might be today.

In all of my angst of growing up and figuring out who I was, Soul Mining was a journey of validation that I was not alone in my questions of definition and desperation to fit in somewhere. I played that album over and over and I crawled inside the lyrics and peered out at the world from the perspective I understood there. The single line, Can you still walk back to happiness, when there's nowhere left to run? resonated with me.

Having said all that, I'm sure it's not difficult for you to see that it's a bit much for me to accept that I now watch an animated piece of candy taking butt shots on an office copier with The The playing in the background.

Something has gone horribly, horribly wrong with music and commercials. What next? Nina Hagen promoting Dannon yogurt? Siouxsie & The Banshees promoting Cover Girl mascara? Will some plucky young advertising executive soon find Front 242 and Hummers to be a good match?

Seriously, it's one thing that Bob Seger sold Like a Rock for Chevy Truck commercials, but something else altogether creepy and unnerving when real people morph into animated M&Ms as The The sings about this being the day my life will surely change.