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Wednesday, Jan 30, 2002 8:30 PM UTC
General Motors gets tub-thumped
British pop rockers Chumbawamba take the car company's money and run straight to the anti-globalization movement.
Topics: Entertainment News
Pass it on. General Motors is providing $100,000 of backing for two fiercely anti-corporate activist groups, IndyMedia and CorpWatch, with a little help from the British pop band Chumbawamba. But before you call your local GM dealer to see if their latest models come with a “nuclear power, no thanks” bumper sticker fitted as standard, you should know that the world’s largest automaker’s status as benefactor to the anti-globalization movement actually came as a rather unpleasant surprise to the company.
GM’s embarrassing problem began when marketing executives at the company decided a catchy piece of music titled “Pass it Along” would be ideal as a hip soundtrack to their “Pass it on” ad campaign for Pontiac cars. Unfortunately for GM, the song in question happened to be the work of outspoken pop pranksters Chumbawamba, best remembered for their anthemic 1997 hit, “Tubthumping.”
Before the deal was even signed, Chumbawamba’s members were busily e-mailing activist groups to garner opinion about what to do with the “dirty” money. The band eventually decided to split their corporate windfall between the independent news collective IndyMedia and the business monitoring service CorpWatch. The groups were naturally initially wary about taking money from a corporation diametrically opposed to their aims, but eventually decided in favor of what such large sums could do to aid their campaigning work. The opportunity to drum up some publicity, quite literally at GM’s expense, must have been attractive too.
“There was some discussion about whether we should accept money that came indirectly from GM,” says Jay, an IndyMedia volunteer in Philadelphia who declined to give his last name. “Though ultimately we decided that the donation was coming not from GM but from Chumbawamba, and that despite some of our finance working group members’ disagreements with some decisions Chumbawamba has made in the past, we were happy to accept their contribution.”
Press reports indicated that IndyMedia planned to use the money for “corporate jamming actions.” As for CorpWatch: “We’ll use the donation to bolster CorpWatch’s Internet-based corporate accountability work. We plan on using some of the money to document GM’s social and environmental impacts.” says Joshua Karliner, Executive Director of CorpWatch.
Not what General Motors probably had in mind. GM representatives declined to comment. But its executives could probably have avoided the situation had someone at the motoring giant taken even the most cursory of glances at the history of Chumbawamba. Throughout their 20-year career the band has made no secret of their anarchist and environmentalist beliefs, and a swift click around the band’s Web site would have revealed that members of the band run about as radical as they come, and even attended last year’s anti-G8 Summit protests in Genoa, where a demonstrator was shot dead by Italian police.
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