The following video may not suitable for anyone with any sense of artistry. You have been warned.
I was a little surprised at how angry this made me. After all, U2 has sold themselves to Apple, ESPN, and the World Cup - so it’s not like they are above exploiting their music and themselves for commercial purposes. On the other hand, there’s an arrogance and a pretentiousness, even exceeding that of Bono, in changing the words to a fairly innocuous pop song in order to shill yourself to…. yourself. Look how great we are! We’re a big, huge, banking conglomerate that “gives people choices” by profiting from credit card debt - and yet, we’re too lazy to write our own song. We’re going to steal one from U2!
And then there’s the lyrics:
And we’ve got Bank One
On the run
What’s in your wallet
It’s not Capitol One
It’s us, so which card are you
Integration’s never had us feeling so goodAn we’ll make lots of money
Forever I can sing
About trusting and teamwork
And doing the right thing
We’ll live on our core values
While the competition crawls
Cause they want what we have got
But it’s only here
At Bank of America
I haven’t seen prose like that since Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”.
That is just horrible. Hey maybe you should have gotten into the game of rewriting songs for corporate commercials.