Photoillustration by Michael Renaud

One of the most controversial songs released so far this year is called "Whispers & Stories", by a British group called Sniffy Dog. But Sniffy Dog isn't a band or a DJ, it's a "music and sound design" firm. And "Whispers & Stories" was, going by appearances, commissioned by an advertising agency to sound very much like "Take Care", the last track on Beach House's 2010 album Teen Dream. "Whispers & Stories" allegedly came about because Beach House refused to license "Take Care" for a Volkswagen ad for the Polo to powerful UK advertising agency DDB UK, after being asked on a half-dozen occasions this past March. The commercial was originally written with "Take Care" in mind as its soundtrack.

The rejection came not because Beach House's Alex Scally and Victoria LeGrand are against such sync deals on principle. This 2010 Guinness ad featuring "10 Mile Stereo" suggests that they're game, and the band approved "Take Care" for use in a scene in the FOX sitcom "New Girl". For the band, it's more a matter of controlling the subsequent functions of their work than profiting from it. Scally recently told Pitchfork's Jenn Pelly that the "New Girl" use was acceptable because "it didn't come from some person whose job it is to seek out 'hot new bands' and get them into shows to improve the brand." The band was convinced that its song would complement that particular episode's cancer-scare narrative, so they signed off.

The Polo ad has a narrative, too, just not a very interesting one. In Volkswagen UK's YouTube upload of the ad, they describe it as "the evolving relationship of a protective father and his daughter." The story moves from birth to young adulthood in 90 seconds, culminating with a shiny new red VW Polo serving as a surrogate protector for the daughter going off to college. "Take Care"-- get it? It's easy to understand the band's weary reaction to this pitch.

Nowadays, ads co-opt hipness by using trendy music to 'wink'

at a demographic, flattering their tastes and hoping

to translate that goodwill into a purchase.

And after all, the lyrics to "Take Care" are about not being able to care for someone at the present time, which doesn't exactly fit the doting-father arc. When Scally and LeGrand saw that VW had commissioned "Whispers", they were pissed, and understandably so. The song sounds a lot like "Take Care"-- that's what Sniffy Dog prides itself on-- but a lawsuit against Volkswagen and their ad agency is likely a financial impossibility, and besides, the law is notoriously fuzzy on matters of musical ownership and recreation like this. Either way, Beach House weren't conflicted at all: "A feeling and a sentiment and an energy has been copied and is being used to sell something we didn't want to sell," Scally plainly told The New York Times.

It's precisely the nature of the feelings, sentiments, and energies of Beach House's music that can illuminate the frequently overlapping worlds of corporate advertising and indie music in the 21st century. The relationship between music and large-scale commerce is of course nothing new. Pop music historian David Suisman notes that the palatial Wanamaker department stores in 1910s-era Philadelphia and New York hosted live concerts and piped-in music, partially out of a pedantic desire to better society, but more directly "to lure shoppers inside and create an environment that seemed edifying in a way that the crudeness of commerce might not be." Pop music has been smoothing the rougher edges of capitalism ever since, alchemizing outlandish narratives in attempts to persuade the public into believing that caramelized soda water can unite the world in perfect harmony, that a labor-exploiting shoe manufacturer is revolutionary, and that a moonlit cruise in an affordable German car trumps hitting up a raging collegiate kegger.

That last ad, directed by music video godheads Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris for the Cabrio, launched the legend of long-departed cult icon Nick Drake while helping solidify Volkswagens as hip vehicles for a rising class of 21st century yuppies. The "Pink Moon" spot was part of the "Drivers Wanted" campaign spearheaded by Boston firm Arnold Worldwide, which successfully relaunched Volkswagen as a hip brand in the mid-1990s. That campaign took place during, and in some ways accelerated, a huge shift in the broader landscapes of music and advertising that, for many opportunistic artists, put the two on opposite sides of the same promotional coin (see also: Moby's Play). For a while, it even seemed like VW was making a play to be the new radio, just as corporate consolidation was killing the airwaves. Anyone care to admit plunking down $10 at the Volkswagen website for the eclectic group featured on Street Mix: Music from Volkswagen Commercials (Volume 1), on which "Pink Moon" shared space with tracks from Spiritualized, Styx, Hooverphonic, and Charles Mingus? Seems quaint at a time when Converse and Mountain Dew actually have their own labels.

Volkswagen's successful attempts at harnessing cool to sell otherwise pretty dorky (though reliably engineered) automobiles has a history that goes back more than three decades prior to the "Pink Moon" ad. Seeking an entry into the U.S. market and a significant rebranding of The People's Car from its initial Nazi connotations, Volkswagen hooked up with the original American version of DDB, the same firm responsible for the Beach House-esque ad.

Spearheaded by Bill Bernbach, DDB's initial Volkswagen campaign led the way in changing the language of advertising-- the "Creative Revolution," as advertisers like to refer to it. As Thomas Frank documented in The Conquest of Cool, Bernbach's VW campaign introduced hipness and irony to the advertising world, a firm breaking with the 50s scientific model of pitching cars as new-every-year rockets to the future with meaningless qualities like "Quadra-Power Roadability" and "Finger-tip TorqueFlite." Volkswagens were small and plain. They floated. They could be repurposed. They weren't trying to hide anything. With Volkswagen, Bernbach and DDB didn't reinvent capitalism, but they found a new way to tweak it. (An early episode of "Mad Men" aptly demonstrates what a curveball their strategy was.) When the VW campaign took off, it was no longer enough to sell cars-- or anything-- as a way to fit in. Everything was now unique and cool, and consumers were being made aware that marketing was a sham. Buying a Beetle put you above the fray.

A half-century later, The Wall Street Journal claims that DDB are still trying to "telegraph coolness and credibility" via Beach House. Needless to say, the landscape has changed significantly since the 60s. The Polo ad isn't trying to wink at people and tell them they're unique-- quite the opposite, really. It's saccharine about the importance of the middle-class (straight, white) family, and the symbolic value (safety) that a car can give it. Sniffy Dog's simulacrum of Beach House's music is meant to be subservient to the ad's visual content while simultaneously telegraphing a demographically vetted emotion in a hip way.

Ad firms are often posed with the same existential crises as

musicians trying to rise above the din: How to make people

take notice through a work that's familiar enough to not alienate everyone, yet different enough to stand apart from the pack.

In a statement released after Beach House publicly protested the ad, a VW spokesperson said the corporation was seeking "something from the dream-pop genre" for the ad. Clearly, few people who would eventually see the ad are going to understand the cultural context of "dream-pop" or even know who Beach House are. This is the point. While for most, the music serves as pleasant-enough wallpaper for a weepy car ad, for a certain target demographic, it's a dog whistle. DDB is betting that those who do recognize the style of music will ideally transfer that positive feeling-- hip yuppie nostalgia-- to the car itself. This is how ads co-opt hipness nowadays: They use trendy music, which is never in short supply anymore, to "wink" at a demographic, flattering their tastes and hoping to translate that goodwill into a purchase.

Not all hipness is equal, of course. While gorgeous and complex in its own right, Beach House's music-- or music that sounds just like it-- is also, in a parallel universe one tab over in the browser, very much suited to selling things. There are parallel lives certain sounds can live, completely independent of original intentions, and in worlds that are both everywhere at once and completely out-of-touch. "Much of the power of Beach House's music lies in the way it forgoes simple, this-means-this storytelling in favor of communicating indescribable emotions," wrote Lindsay Zoladz in her Pitchfork review of their latest album, Bloom. Switch a few words around, and this perfect evocation could have emanated from DDB's pitch meeting to Volkswagen. Which is not to belittle Zoladz's criticism, nor to build up ad-speak as any more than means-to-an-end capitalist labor. Instead, this connection highlights the idea that critics and marketers often seek the same positive criteria in art.

This is also a legacy of DDB in the 60s, a period when advertisers started thinking of their work as art-- instead of client-driven work-for-hire, or focus-group-vetted science. It's how creative types like those on "Mad Men" convince themselves that their unique ideas are what's best for their clients, whether Jaguar knows it or not. Madison Avenue and the musical avant-garde are portrayed as radically separate spheres in "Mad Men"'s 60s: Don shuts off "Tomorrow Never Knows" before it ends, Harry Crane doesn't recognize the Rolling Stones when trying to recruit them for an ad. When the AMC reality show "The Pitch" came on after "Mad Men" this season, however, the disjuncture was striking. Now, ad firms and indie cultures are often speaking much the same language, downloading the same music, attending the same concerts.

The creative types at the heads of these new firms are often posed with the same existential crises as musicians and labels trying to rise above the din: How to make people take notice through a work that's familiar enough to not alienate everyone, but also just different enough to stand apart from the pack. It's a tough balance to strike, and few on either end of the creative spectrum do it well. The crucial aspect of the second part of the equation--the "just different enough" component-- is widely understood to derive from artistry, however defined. Advertising creatives and groups like Sniffy Dog think of themselves as artists, and the best ones are able to compartmentalize their crude capitalistic moves in very practical ways-- but, for artists like Beach House (and their fans), those same tactics can reek of ripoff. And that's the rub with the overlap between music and advertising in the current moment: you can't get away with buying difference.