Pitchfork

Today's subjects in the Great Sellout Debate: Brighton's brightest, sampledelic popsters the Go! Team, whose "Huddle Formation" (from the Pitchfork-adored Thunder, Lightning, Strike) appears in a commercial for the Honda Civic (scope it below). Fair enough-- you can't sneeze at a television these days without getting snot all over some indie jam.

But here's where things get sorta controversial (oooh!). As alert Pitchfork reader Jeff Immer brought to our attention recently, the Go! Team have, in the past, quite plainly vocalized their distaste for licensing music to television advertisements. As founding Team member Ian Parton explained in a July interview with Kansas City (MO) weekly The Pitch, "I think music should be kept special, and I don't think selling it for a commercial is a good way to do that."

Parton claimed the Team had already turned down offers from Nike and McDonald's at that point, and also told The Pitch, "If there was a band I liked and I saw them advertising something, I'd probably be disappointed, and I'd look at that song a bit differently."

So the Civic commercial came as quite a surprise to devoted Go! fans. Rather than grumble about it on his MySpace blog, however, Immer went straight to the Go! Team's message board and politely asked the band what was up with the ad.

Less than 24 hours later, he received a response from an unnamed member of the Go! Team (as confirmed by their publicist). "This is a fair comment," the reply began, "and I knew people would be disappointed (including me)."

"[We've] certainly [had] no change of heart - I hate bands who do adverts. I've turned down lots in the past - forgoing potentially lots of money. It got to the point where the people who publish go team songs were getting so fucked off that being dropped was looking very likely - they weren't making any money. theres a limit to how many times people will take a No."

As the Go! Teamer continued, "I'm not worried about fucking people off but the trouble is that for the second album we need a publishing company to clear the samples (which is what a publishing company does) before it gets released to avoid the mistake of the first album. It would be a serious handicap to have an album full of uncleared samples.

"basically this ad was a concession so that there would be someone to clear the samples. Hypocritical i know but its [sic] a tricky thing to navigate through when you make sample based music. it's a minefield."

Well, at least they had to be bullied into it. It's a bit sad, actually. And it's great of them, despite the shame they seem to feel over it, to be so forthcoming. Anyway, if sacrificing one Go! Team song to temporary commercial tarnishing means 10 more sample-packed party exclamations may be born, is that really so bad? Hmm. Let's see: