For our third CD, “Product Displacement,” we asked musicians to select an advertising slogan or jingle and “embed” it in a song, transforming and camouflaging it in a way that made it difficult for listeners to identify it or the product it was pushing.

The 10 musicians rose to the challenge and treated their choices—from totemic slogans of the past to obscure TV jingles—as building blocks for tunes having nothing to do with shampoo, credit cards, hamburgers, or dish towels. Some contributors directly addressed the issue of commercialism in their lyrics, while others buried these public artifacts in deeply personal songs.

By forcing the profit motive to sacrifice itself to art, the participants have reversed the all-too-familar scenario in which an advertiser uses a popular song to help sell something. The quality of the music demonstrates the propriety of the reordering.