Young people have, of course, always listened to music, but it's certainly true that never before have they had quite so much money to spend on it and on other trappings of a youth cult that graduated, during the recent boom, from bitchin' Camaros to boomin' SUVs. Industry is ecstatic about dipping into the burgeoning wallets of the dot-com demographic, and has no Klein-like confusions about how to do so. The youth, for their part, are more than happy to oblige: "Yet another wildly successful attempt by the Gap to attract our attention!" Iowa State student Corey Moss enthused in the school paper upon hearing the Material Girl's "Dress You Up" in a commercial. "In the past few years everyone from Run DMC to the Crystal Method have whored their music out to the clothing company's latest ad campaign. Why wouldn't you?" Why indeed? The bands get free publicity, and the Gap, Moss suggests, benefits too.

But if selling today's college kids on conspicuous consumption is easy, selling it to twenty and thirty-year-olds is a trickier proposition: how to define in marketing terms a demographic which, not so long ago, defined itself in opposition to the market? The answer is simple if you grant that ironies are like submarines; dangerous only when submerged. "It pays my way and it corrodes my soul," as the Smiths, a band you may have heard in a Nissan commercial, sing. "Oh, give us the money."

"I DON'T KNOW about [ex-bandmates] Damon and Naomi," Galaxie 500 frontman Dean Wareham writes in a recent e-mail exchange, "but the motivating factor for me was cash." So much for the media's effort to explain the sudden, recent transliteration of the punk, post-punk, and indie ethos into a marketing pitch -- college-radio icons like the Buzzcocks, the Minutemen, and Galaxie 500 have appeared in recent ads for luxury cars. "Thanks to the telecommunications act of 1996," the Des Moines Register reports, "we have a more homogenous radio landscape in America, with fewer corporations controlling more play lists." This trend, according to various papers, coupled with MTV's relegation of music videos to early morning hours and the increased corporatization of college-radio playlists, ensures that truly independent music's last, best chance for a fair hearing is a thirty-second slot in the background of a car ad.

A perverse argument, but not without its charms. Volkswagen's celebrated appropriation of Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" catapulted the soporific folk singer, who OD'd on sleeping pills a quarter century ago, back into the public eye. Drake's records now come with a sticker that reads "As heard in the new VW Cabrio commercial, " and Volkswagen, it seems, benefited too: They're now selling three hundred thousand cars a year, up from fifty thousand in the mid-nineties, and Newsweekreports that "among America's Gen-Xers, VW's cars have become the wheels of choice." But, according to Wareham, the benefits are negligible; asked if there was a spike in record sales after the Galaxie 500/Acura ad appeared, he replied, "I doubt it. There is no way to find out who the music is by."

Indeed, the Volvo S40 ad campaign's use of the Minutemen's "Love Dance" seems designed to impress only those who already have the record. Unlike other Minutemen songs, "Love Dance" -- an instrumental ­- is lovely enough to pass for a jingle. The shock comes exclusively from the seeing it embedded in such a strange context. Aggressively independent (they recorded exclusively for Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn's SST label), and unapologetically leftist (bassist Mike Watt does a wicked Castro impersonation), the band's oeuvre consists largely of pointed anti-capitalist anthems: "Let the products sell themselves/Fuck advertising and commercial psychology" they sing elsewhere on the record from which "Love Dance" was plucked. More jarring is to recall D. Boon's fate (the Minutemen singer's death, in a freakish car accident, ended the band's career) and find him shilling for the safest of car companies.

For the Minutemen, too, the deciding factor seems to have been money: D. Boon's father is suffering from emphysema, and all the band's proceeds from the commercial are going towards his medical bills. A final irony, however, is that there isn't much money to go around. A medium-profile independent band can expect to earn about seventy thousand dollars from a car ad, and once the monies are divided between band members, publishers, record labels, and agents, individual musicians won't see nearly enough to purchase one of the cars they've helped advertise. Still, given the number of records an indie band can expect to sell (ten thousand is a respectable figure), and the financial realities of life at the indie level, every cent counts. "I'm not so interested in the 'exposure' factor," Wareham writes, "and selling songs to TV commercials is not my favorite thing to do, but it is one of the few ways in which I can make a living from my music."

IF INDIE MUSICIANS aren't exactly scrambling to sell out, how do their songs end up in car commercials in the first place? Wareham guesses that "music supervisors of a certain age are getting into positions of power at ad agencies. Some of these people have better musical taste than the program directors at radio stations around the country, and consequently there is much better music on TV commercials than on commercial radio." But it turns the process is even more haphazard than Wareham imagines it to be.

James Overall, the MVBNS creative director who wrote the Volvo/Minutemen ad, explains that after filming a commercial, his team (the creative director, copy writer, and art director) and a freelance film editor "sit down and talk about the musical feel. Then the editor lays down a bunch of tracks that he thinks might work [the 'scratch track'] and we listen to them." In the case of the Minutemen ad, the editor picked "Love Dance" for the scratch track, the agency happened to like the fit, and the Minutemen happened to agree to sell the rights. Overall, who is forty-five, says that though "Volvos are aimed at people in their thirties and forties, who have a family and are firmly established, this particular Volvo is aimed at people who are starting off in life and want to have more fun," and that in this case, "the beats, or rhythms [were] more fun. I wish something deeper was involved!"

A similar thing happened in the case of Toyota's Camper ad, which features the Buzzcocks' "What Do I Get?" Jeff Beverly at Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles had worked on the kinetic Rav4 campaign, and knew that his ad for the Camper needed to make an equivalent splash for the thirty-something set. "It's an overused word," he says, "but we wanted it to be edgy." Originally, Beverly says, "we'd wanted to have no music at all in the spot ­- just sound effects. But when it was cut, it seemed dry." Then, during production, "the editor grabbed this track and put it on as a demo piece, to say, 'Is this a direction you guys like?'" Igor Kovalik, who works at Inside Out Editorial in Santa Barbara, picked the song: "I wish there was a more deliberate method behind the madness," he says. "We were cutting a commercial, and trying to make it a little more stylish, a little more fun. To appeal, even though it's an older song, to a younger market." According to Beverly, "What Do I Get" did just that. "Needless to say, we all fell in love with it," he recalls, "and went from 'Can we produce a track like this one?' to 'Can we buy this one?' And we did."

IN BOTH CASES, the agencies were surprised to find that the rights to their first picks were actually available. "What'll happen, a lot of the time," according to Kovalik, "is you'll pick a needle track you obviously won't be able to use. It gives you something to cut to, a certain energy level. What traditionally happens is, you would then take it and the agency would take it to a music production company which will either try to mimic it, or use something that has the same meter to it." But while Kovalik (who turns out to be the closest equivalent to the person whose existence Wareham guessed at) is happy to use songs he has an emotional connection to, he's hardly on a mission to push any one music into the mainstream. "Most commercials are so music driven, you almost have to have a broad taste in music, and a pretty good knowledge of what's out there," he says. "The commercial I did right after was for Jeep, and I ended up picking an Ella Fitzgerald track out of my head."

So why does the combination of this musical soup in Kovalik's head, and the fat wallet in the dot-commers' back pockets, result in a deluge of indie SUV ads? While Gen-X finds itself in the money, and in the market for luxury goods, yesterday's indie musicians (whose status in the subculture came largely from paying no attention to the mass market at all, except to mock and scorn it), grow older, but not wealthier. And the same indifference to market demands that propelled indie rock in the first place now gives it the edge, so rare in today's musical climate, which Jeff Beverly and his peers are looking for. Finally, the monetary ceiling built into yesterday's refusal to sell out is what makes those musicians (toiling in the business for well over a decade with very little financial payoff, and wanting nothing more than to keep playing) vulnerable now to compromises they may not have made then. In other words, the refusal to sell out today guarantees the necessity of doing so tomorrow, and no one -- neither the musicians, nor the advertisers, nor the editors assembling the scratch tracks -- is to blame.

Alex Abramovich  is FEED's culture editor. He's never been to Pedro, but punk rock changed his life.