The borders between advertising and the rest of culture have been getting blurry for at least a century. Until recently, however, the hucksterism was still fairly unambiguous and brazen: you always knew you were looking at advertising. Nobody ever went to a NASCAR race in order to watch the Winston and Pennzoil logos whiz by at 180 miles an hour.

On the other hand, for two decades people have turned to MTV in order to watch advertisements - expensively produced, 4-minute-long advertisements for records. Thanks to MTV and the other epiphenomena of the 1980s' anything-goes free-market-mania, Generations X and Y have been trained to disregard the old distinctions between advertising and entertainment. Now that post-baby-boomers constitute a U.S. majority - today's median-age American was 14 in 1981, the year MTV launched -- a tipping point has occurred. Interspecies hybrids of advertising and entertainment have suddenly become the norm, remarkably unremarkable.

The punctilious, PC Gen-X hepcat Moby enabled the current avalanche by licensing every song on Play, his breakthrough 1999 album, for television advertisements. As a result, the odium that used to attach to commercial repurposing has virtually disappeared. TV ads featuring new and old rock songs are now so ubiquitous you hardly notice unless you make a point of looking. The result in 2002 is the emergence of a new stealth music video channel in archipelago form, broadcast 24/7 in 30-second bits on every network to a cumulative audience 100 times as big as those for MTV and VH1. Vinny Picardi is the Deutsch advertising genius in charge of those Mitsubishi commercials that lash obscure songs like Days Go By by the British electronic band Dirty Vegas (that's the one with the sexy/creepy woman busting moves in the passenger seat). "People hate commercials," Picardi says. "We wanted to make little pieces of entertainment…little pieces of pop culture." And so Days Go By became a hit single because it was on a TV ad.

Watching TV desultorily during the last couple of months, I made note of 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, the British trip-hop band Mr. Scruff's Get A Move On for Lincoln (in the ad where the chivalrous guy unnecessarily throws his jacket onto a puddle for a woman climbing into her Navigator), Led Zeppelin on behalf of Cadillac, Prince's Little Red Corvette for Chevrolet, and Bif Naked's I Love Myself Today for other GM cars. I noticed Carnival Cruise ads with soundtracks by the Beach Boys (Fun Fun Fun) and Cyndi Lauper (Girls Just Wanna Have Fun), and a Royal Caribbean ad with Iggy Pop's Lust for Life (which Mitsubishi has also used). The restaurant chain Applebee's is using Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire. Heineken is using the J. Geils Band's Give It to Me. And Sony uses the Crosby, Stills and Nash song Carry On (for a camcorder) and Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit (for a PlayStation game). Don't those seven minutes of television sound more intriguing and entertaining than seven minutes of, say, King of Queens or Presidio Med or JAG?

That's the point. The new pressure on commercials to be entertaining-- to be entertainment - is a function of new technology: hundreds of digital channels now provide an unprecedented temptation to viewers to graze the dial during ad breaks, and digital recorders like Tivo make it possible to skip ads altogether.

Producing music-video-esque ads is one way to keep people watching. Another is to embed ads more deeply into the warp and woof of the offiical entertainment. So Intel and McDonald's are this year paying to have characters in the The Sims videogame, in their new online incarnation, use the right microchips and eat the right hamburgers. Nokia (which last year paid to have the stars of the TV series Alias use its cell phones) is all over the hot new videogame Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer. Rap musicians have always tended to stud their lyrics with brand names, especially brand-name liquors (not unlike what Picasso did for a certain French aperitif 90 years ago in his collage Glass and Bottle of Suze). But this year came the stunning hard data: by all accounts, the Busta Rhymes-P. Diddy hit Pass the Courvoisier Part 2 ("We gon' tell that nigga [Pass the Courvoisier]/ We gon' tell that brotha [Pass the Courvoisier] increased Courvoisier sales significantly. So now recording artists are wondering, understandably, why they shouldn't monetize their lyrics, and charge the package goods merchandisers for plugs. If Picasso were alive, mightn't he consider making a deal with Suze?

We have become inured. The resistance and even the passive resentment are gone. Particularly now that we face urgent, unequivocal, external threats to our persons, nation and civilization, we are no longer so alarmed by the little outbreaks of cultural decadence. Some of us find the ingenuity of the new orgy of advertising-cum-entertainment-cum advertising…entertaining. This year, BMW continued finding serious name directors like John Woo happy to make expensive, 8 minute and 40 second online films featuring BMWs, and began hiring serious name actors to perform in them as well, among them F. Murray Abraham and Gary Oldman. And some of them are good.

Is anyone really upset that the new Scripps TV channel Fine Living is producing programs about travel and leisure with the advertising built right in? Or that the sets for Baz Luhrmann's Broadway production of La Boheme feature gorgeous period billboards -- actual, paid, on-stage advertising -- for Montblanc pens and Piper-Heidsieck champagne? In fact, this cool new La Boheme proves beyond any doubt that scruples about cultural purity have mostly become, like bohemianism, historical relics.

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