David Naugle cofounded Atlanta band Delarosa in 1996; his friend and fellow Atlantan Joy Howard sang and played bass for the group in 1998 while also a member of Seely, whose albums include Seconds (1997) and Winter Birds (2000). Naugle, a photographer and artist who creates sound-based installations, is based in Atlanta, GA; Howard and her husband live and work in New Jersey.
For our third CD, “Product Displacement,” we asked musicians to select an advertising slogan or jingle and “embed” it in a song, transforming and camouflaging it in a way that made it difficult for listeners to identify it or the product it was pushing.
The 10 musicians rose to the challenge and treated their choices—from totemic slogans of the past to obscure TV jingles—as building blocks for tunes having nothing to do with shampoo, credit cards, hamburgers, or dish towels. Some contributors directly addressed the issue of commercialism in their lyrics, while others buried these public artifacts in deeply personal songs.
By forcing the profit motive to sacrifice itself to art, the participants have reversed the all-too-familar scenario in which an advertiser uses a popular song to help sell something. The quality of the music demonstrates the propriety of the reordering.