Do you remember back in 1987, when Nike used the Beatles' song Revolution in a TV ad? There was an enormous uproar from baby boomers: how DARE a corporation turn a sacred piece of our glorious youth into a …JINGLE for selling sneakers!

Even as recently as 1995, when Mercedes-Benz used Janis Joplin's song "Mercedes-Benz" to sell cars, there was a righteous little boomer brouhaha.

But that was then. Today, the resistance and resentment that used to attach to pop songs repurposed for ads has pretty much evaporated.

This is the result, more than anything, I think, of 21 years of MTV. Music videos are commercials -- entertaining 4-minute-long commercials for records, produced by record companies and then aired as entertainment.

So, two generations, X and Y, have now grown up watching MTV -- and thus trained to disregard the distinctions between advertising and entertainment.

And so now, interspecies hybrids of advertising and entertainment have become the norm, remarkably unremarkable.

You don't even notice them anymore unless you make a point of it, as I did during the last couple of months. And I was amazed.

I heard Electric Light Orchestra's "Mr. Blue Sky" in a Volkswagen Beetle ad, the Yardbirds' "For Your Love" in a Saturn ad, The Clash's "London Calling" in a Jaguar ad, and Prince's "Little Red Corvette" for Chevrolet.

The restaurant chain Applebee's is using "Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire". Sony uses the Crosby, Stills and Nash song "Carry On" for a camcorder and Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" for a PlayStation game.

But it's not just familiar pop standards. NEW songs are selling random consumer products too -- AND selling themselves, becoming hits BECAUSE they're used in commercials. There's Moby's entire oeuvre, but also obscure songs like "Days Go By" by the cult band Dirty Vegas in one of those Mitsubishi ads where the people sing and groove in their cars…and "Get A Move On" by the cult band Mr. Scruff -- that's the ad where the chivalrous guy throws his jacket onto a puddle for the woman climbing into her Lincoln Navigator.

I realized what advertisers have done with all these ads is create a new, stealth, music-video channel -- it doesn't exist at ONE channel position -- it's an archipelago of 30-second spots broadcast on EVERY network, 24/7, to an audience 50 times bigger than those watching MTV and VH1. And lots of time the stealth channel is more entertaining than the television programs it ostensibly interrupts.

And it isn't just pop music and advertising that are suddenly interbreeding.

On Broadway, the director Baz Luhrmann's splendid live production of "La Boheme" is still running. The sets for the opera feature period billboards -- actual, paid, on-stage advertising -- for Montblanc pens and Piper-Heidsieck champagne.

But is anyone really upset about this? Uh uh. And this cool, exciting new Boheme is a hit, proving that the concept of strict cultural purity has mostly become, like bohemianism itself, an historical relic.

This is Kurt Andersen, in Studio 360.

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