The Smiley Smile Message Board

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHRVoshCwrw

There's something odd about Dylan's face in the ad...

This is really sad . .

very sad indeed....

His face looks odd because some idiot decided he had to be wearing as much make-up as Joan Rivers.

it might be more than just makeup...

.

Could have been worse  :P

I liked it.

I'm pretty sure you're right about it being just due to makeup he was wearing.

He was on the cover of Rolling Stone in September and he looks perfectly fine.

Agreed.  He looks great (glad to see the end of the country/western look he's been sporting for a decade plus), he's a dynamic narrator, and it was about as "counter-cultural" a move as he can make at this point.

You're not serious..? This spot is not only poorly written, it's everything but "counter-cultural".

Did you miss the ad where they were selling Greek yogurt set to an old Dylan song? I couldn't believe my ears and eyes as I watched a bear raiding a convenience store looking for Greek yogurt as Dylan's music played in the background.

It was the Dylan Super Bowl for whatever reasons this year.

"I Want You" was the song. The game was so boring, I found myself wandering/thinking who was the advertising person who thought of - of the zillions of songs - "I Want You", and how that person had to "sell" that song to a large table of people with quizzical looks on their faces.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing.  I couldn't believe what I was hearing.............let the swiss build your watches, let the germans brew your beer......

Made me recall the Victoria's Secret ad from a few years back featuring Bob and Adriana Lima with Love Sick playing over the scene.

Does Bob have any other commercials other than the ones mentioned so far?

I wonder.  Does Bob have a producer/manager who helps him decide when to do a commercial, which commercial,  and how it will "fit" his persona in a positive way?

Aside from the money, I wonder why he chooses to do a commercial.   

Because he is Bob Dylan and he'll always do things that people are uncomfortable with and that are not expected of him.

I'm serious.  I won't argue with your observation regarding the writing, though I didn't think it was any worse than anything else presented during the Super Bowl.

But, it is most certainly "counter-cultural", in that the media suggests the prevailing culture is "progressive"-left of center.  And this spot was most certainly not that.

He's spent his entire career working against his "type-casting" as some sort of cultural arbiter.  Progressives want a new Pete Seeger?  He goes electric and poetic rather than acoustic and message-driven.  Then he disappears for a few years and comes back with country albums, pointing backwards.  Ten years later, he goes Gospel, pointing right.  A few years back he shows up in a Victoria's Secret commercial, suggesting he's no progressive feminist and now he's promoting a message of American capitalism.

I think he's "counter-cultural" primarily because he keeps irritating the folks who think they can define culture through the media.

Bob had a facelift, it isn't just make-up.  He had the kind of face that was sagging with age and he finally got it pulled up. Heck if Brian Wilson can get one, and I suspect Paul McCartney had an eye job (a bad one), why not Bob. I think he did the ad to support the union. Though the money didn't hurt. I'm sure his royaltiesbaren't what they used to be.

The rebel becomes the pitchman, Bob has officially done everything! 8)

I'm pretty sure Bob would be glad to hear that, to be honest.

Agreed, I was excited when I saw the ad because only Bob would do something this different at this stage.

Good points.

Not disputing this, but...where did you read or hear that? I missed it. You can see his hair was dyed, but a facelift? ???

Those are good points, but I think there's a difference between being a maverick/iconoclast and simply doing something that sucks and is pointless.... and just to sell shitty cars at that.

If he did it for the union, cool. But where's the evidence for this?

I just looked at the ad again. If he didn't get a facelift,  the stylists must have used facelifting tape to tape the skin of  his face back and up. Lucille Ball was famous for using tape and elastic bands to get a facelift look without a facelift and other actors and actresses used to do it, too. There's an interview with Bob from "60 Minutes" on YouTube where you can compare his face. He had very deep folds of skin from his nose to his mouth area, which are very common as people get older. He also had a jowly, loose jawline. If you watch the Superbowl ad, you'll see his skin folds are gone and his jawline is smooth and lifted up, with no jowls or extra skin around the chin as he used to have. His face in recent years to me looked almost "melted." Now it looks a lot tighter. Make-up can't do that. I guess it will be more obvious if he does more public appearances if his face in the commercial is permanent or the result of using tape and elastic bands to temporarily lift it up.

Working link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlSn8Isv-3M (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlSn8Isv-3M)

An odd ad for sure.

Dylan's song "I Want You" being licensed in the ad for yogurt had f***-all to do with any union.  ;D

The man's a capitalist.  ;)

The fee to use songs like that in ads can be six-figures and up, depending on the artist.

His being a capitalist is beside the point.... I think it has more to do with taste.... Yogurt and cars? Lame enough things to get fans nitpicking.

At least there's John Densmore refusing to have anything to do with sullying The Door's name unless it's for something interesting at least (according to him)

That's the thing, Chrysler has a recent track record of bringing in artists to advertise their cars who many would not expect to see advertising cars, much less anything. They had Eminem, Clint Eastwood, now Dylan, and a few more I'm probably leaving off. I think they have a massive advertising budget which is being used to grab the demographic they're shooting for that particular season. Connect the line of cars to the celebrity endorsing them, and you get the man's-man tough guy Clint Eastwood for that sector, the Detroit badass rapper Eminem for that demo, and now Dylan for the counter-culture boomer group (not to mention the hipper youngsters who dig Bob's music and aura).

Like you said, none of them make a Chrysler 200 run beyond 14,000 miles without needing some kind of repair job under factory warranty, but the ads always look and sound slick as hell.  ;D

 ;D ;D ;D ;D

Yeah, now they just need to hire Larry Mullen Jr or someone as a mechanic in a commercial and make taking the shitty thing to the shop look cool!

Hell, Lou Reed did almost make those Honda scooter things look somewhat less that hideous!

Yeah, and that was 10 years ago.

That's an interesting thought.  Personally I don't really get into poltical music, or the whole 'counter culture' thing but I've never thought of Dylan like that.  I've never thought he was pretentious or hypocritical which is my two biggest problems iwth political music or the 'counter culture' thing.  So I've always felt he was very authentic. 

So maybe, just maybe, he's the rare example of somebody who does whatever the hell he wants and not does what he thinks people want him to do or expect of him... or do the opposite of what's expected, or people think for the equal shock value that garners.

Maybe he just does what he feels like doing and there's no politics, or statement being made.

BTW, he was on an episode of Pawn Stars about a year ago.  Swear to god.

I've never really had a problem with it.  Story time!

I read an interview with Lisa Marie Pressley once, and they asked her why the hell she married Michael Jackson.  She explained that when Michael asked her out, she thought he was a weirdo... but he sat her down and calmly explained himself to her.  she said once you talked to him a little bit, he was pretty normal so it wasn't really that weird to her.


So, back to Dylan.  Even if Dylan isn't a sellout and isn't in it just for the money... even if he wants his music to be respected, and no amount of money will make him whore it out.... what if the meeting went like this?

"Mr. Dylan, we're huge fans of your music.  I've been to 10 of your shows personally, and my favorite song is "I Want You".  We played it at my wedding.  In my lifetime, i've worked hard to raise a family, and now I've got a great job doing what I love... and what I love is making commercials.  I know that sounds crazy, but it's my job and I try to do the best job I can.  I have the biggest opportunity of my career, I'm shooting an ad for the superbowl, the most important ad of my career, and it would be an honor if you would let me use your song "I Want You" in the ad.  I know that money isn't the only thing that impresses you, so in addition to a nice royalty fee for your permission to use the song, I've also made sure that Dannon Yogurt is going to donate $50,000 to the charity of your choice, and I promise it'll be a light hearted ad that kids will enjoy.  Whaddya say?"

Bob loves to piss people off, go against expectations. That's the only reason he does commercials. After all these years, people still want to see him as "the spokesman for a generation", and all that counterculture bs. He sees himself as just a songwriter and performer. More power to him.

He's been that way since the early 60's, to hear him tell the stories. As much as the folk community took issues with him and was angry at him for going electric and selling out, he was just as angry at them for placing their expectations on him as a young singer with talent who could grab people's attention and "affect change" or whatever other charge they placed on his shoulders, when he wanted nothing at all like that attached to his music or to him as a performer in general. Unless that is if he wanted his music to be that way.

So he could basically look back with anger at the folk community for expecting things from him which he thought they had no right to either expect or demand, and therein lies one of the great flaws with many in the folk community. Dylan wanted to make the music he wanted to make at any given time, based on what he wanted to do - not what others either wanted him to do or expected him to be doing based on their own hopes.

So Dylan doing a TV commercial? Chalk it up to something he wanted to do at this time, simple as that. Just like he wanted to play electric music with his friends like Mike Bloomfield in 1965 instead of being crowned the young voice of social conscience and change through folk music and writing all his music to fit that hope and the demands of the purist folk audiences who didn't like rock and roll.

All that is perfectly understood, but it's just sad that it's for a stupid car commercial that sucks and is to sell shitty cars...... I don't think he did it to piss anyone off at all, but rather simply because they paid him and maybe he wanted the exposure. Either way, the commercial is lame and made him look like an idiot. I'm no purist but I happen to despise commercials in general. And I worked in TV for many a year, so I know how important they are to keeping the whole ball of wax spinning, however I also know the difference between quality and crap.

Clip at
 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bob-dylan-makes-first-tv-appearance-in-years-on-pawn-stars-20100921

- still one of the craziest things I ever saw on reality TV. The topper was that he signed Self Portrait (vinyl) on-camera; this was a little while before SP started getting "reconsidered" by what few rock critics are left.

(Quote is from Ron; got the cut-and-paste messed up a bit)

Everybody chillax.. Coco's on it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgN244khyxs

 :lol :lol :lol

:lol

I love how people started laughing at the "let Asia make your cellphones" even though it's apart of the original ad. Shows how absurd that line is.