...There could be snakes in here: come, see my inconspicuous consumption (songs about products)

"The Believer: You wrote some Lacanian-style quotations for last fall’s Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. How did that come about?
Slavoj Žižek: Oh yes, I was helping someone who helped me once. It was easy, he sent me a series of provocative images, and I just wrote silly Lacanian statements about them. My critics attacked me, 'how can you conscientiously accept money from such a company?' I said, 'with less guilt than accepting money from the American university system'."

"We only rap about things we like. I'll mention Cheetos because I like them, but if I didn't they wouldn't be in our songs."
- Damon Dash

Product is everywhere, an integral part of life and chat. Product placement is still repugnant - see Polanski's BMW nonsense for a painful example - and the ethics of advertising are indeed deeply murky. But the brainwash theory of advertising - as put forward by Baudrillard and Naomi Klein and Fight Club and swallowed by many like me - is based on a muddled view of commerce and of human nature. Moreover, it has proved endlessly exploitable by the corporate forces it demonises. So let's put aside for a moment whether deception is inherent to the commercial sphere, and whether our minds are polluted by hypersexual hypercommercial saturation.

People like things, and should admit this to themselves (even if it's not the only sort of thing they like). When musicians eschew this massive bit of contemporary life, they lose something. Products are at very least the most concrete particulars of lyrics. Perhaps the worst thing about the MOR lyrics of (e.g.) James Morrison is not that they are clichéd, but the dumb airless abstraction of them.

Anyway, this list is not songs written for ads, nor ones used in ads, nor even anti-adverts (e.g. This Note's For You by Neil Young; "Don't make another Rickenbacker" by the Dressmakers; "Deathcafé" by Oi Polloi). It is bands using products to express themselves, not the other way round. The choice is not one between being a venal shill or a chaste Marxist.

1. Corona - Minutemen
(you could for instance summon a cultural moment, express your cultural guilt)

2. My Adidas - Run DMC
(song of the joy of ownership - a real, if transitory, thing)

Obviously synecdoches are generally acceptable: see the use of 'vaseline' for all waxy lubes (and so also for gay sex); 'valium' and 'prozac' for all psychiatrics (and so also for modern alienation); etc.

3. Rum and Coca-Cola - Andrews Sisters
(Back then they wouldn't pay you anyway. Note that Jack Daniels is of course shorthand for being krazy.)

4. Shop Vac - Jonathan Coulton
(it's easy to avoid product-placement nausea if you set it amidst enough pathos)

5. Golden Boy - Mountain Goats
(also if you pick an obscure product. This song is product as apotheosis.)

6. Whiteness thy name is Meltonian - Half Man Half Biscuit
(and also if you are absurd about it. HMHB are the kings of artfully concrete lyrics: e.g. one song ending with the baffling chorus "Sturmey-Archer Campagnolo", x9)

7. Driver Education - Indigo Girls
(if products quickly make you dated, they also let you evoke an era)

see also 7'. Village Green Preservation Society - Kinks
(childhood products as institution; capital killed by new capital.)

8. Drink Nike - Future of the Left
(Can be used to communicate a character's culture (here, elderly alienation). see also)

9. Mercedes Benz - Janis Joplin

(compare The Jeep Song by Dresden Dolls: few more perfect expressions of that thing where you nervily see an ex in utterly specific objects)

10. Kodachrome - Paul Simon
(nerds too are safe)

11. Little Red Corvette - Prince
(In line with the long tradition of driving-as-sex songs. Cadillacs in particular seem to get free rein from all sorts of bands.)

12. Wearing My Rolex - Wiley
(the key to a good product song is to invest objects with meaning without losing yourself. And to 'bubble' (< bubble bath = laugh.) see also.)

13. Can It All Be So Simple - Raekwon
(the fledgling rapper uses posh drink and flash to expand his sense of self)

13'. Pass the Courvoisier Part Two - Busta Rhymes
(the established rapper does placements without much hypocrisy - since most never much pretend to be any more than a clotheshorse lashed to its cultural present.)

13''. All I Need - Jay-Z
(or he'll have his own shit to plug anyway)

14. Diet Mountain Dew - Lana Del Rey
(like MCs, postmodern pop divas carry their consumerism lightly)

15. Wallet - Regina Spektor
(she wants to describe this stranger tersely: and somehow the material trace can suggest his spirit!)

16. In McDonalds - Burial
(Just like old feelings spurred by an unwelcome meeting in a public place, Aaliyah's vocal, out of nowhere)