Sunday, September 16, 2012

Jewel on sale at Walmart





Remember her? Jewel Kilcher was big stuff in the mid-90s, when her debut release became one of the best-selling debut albums of all time, going 15 times platinum.

And this year? Shilling for Walmart:



The retail behemoth explains,
Jewel visited recently and performed a song from her new album of children's songs titled "The Merry Goes Round". It's called the "Supermarket Song", but she sang a special version for us.
Best YouTube comment by far, "It's difficult to rhyme 'mechanically separated chicken'."

Jewel's new album of children's songs was released under the Fisher-Price label. Interestingly, it shares two traditional cover songs ("She'll Be Comin Round The Mountain" and "Oh Susannah") with fellow folkie Neil Young's latest Crazy Horse album. (Fun fact: She recorded her debut album in a studio on Neil Young's ranch, produced and backed by members of another of his classic bands, The Stray Gators.) But I'm guessing from the video above that her "Oh Susannah!" is a little less hardcore.

The video was posted back in March, but I just caught it on Jezebel last week.

It's not the fact that she has picked up a sponsor that's sad. It's not even that that sponsor is a symbol of the big boxification of America. It's that her sellout is so low budget that it went relatively unnoticed.

1 comment:

  1. her 'walmart song' could almost be interpreted as an anti-walmart song, a la 'little boxes' and mass conformity.

    I-)

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