Straw Man

Something I wrote in a snit a few years back: "Marketing culture wrecks everything it touches" (after encountering Harry Nilsson's song "He Needs Me" in a mawkish Nike commercial)

is being construed by an Internet interlocutor as

"High popular art must never cross the line to be used in low popular art contexts" (a paraphrase but I think that's the gist).

"He Needs Me" worked ironically in Altman's Popeye when Shelley Duvall sang it about wifebeater Bluto, and it worked in PT Anderson's Punch Drunk Love when sung over shots of Adam Sandler as a more contemporary rageoholic. It did not work as an anthem for a school girl's ordinary crush on her tennis coach.

Somehow saying this has been translated into "drawing a hard line" between high and low Pop (whatever those are). That was not my meaning. Dissing commercials doesn't necessarily mean proclaiming anything as "high" or claiming that it's inviolable. By and large commercials do suck--few dispute this. It's more a question of honesty than aesthetics.