Selling Cars and Feeling Good

Pianist, singer, and activist Nina Simone’s 1965 recording of the song “Feeling Good” was used in a fascinating 2018 ad for a Buick model made in Shanghai.

The song begins with Simone’s unaccompanied voice, and gradually adds instrumental parts verse by verse, becoming a big-band anthem with a full horn section. The Buick ad uses an instrumental clip from the song around the 1:00 mark.

The ad uses documentary footage of China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, including images of Mao Zedong, student Communist rallies, and so-called “struggle sessions,” during which “enemies of the Revolution” were forced to publicly admit to various crimes against the state while crowds beat and humiliated them. Ominous music plays in the background as a raspy-voiced narrator refers in vague language to those dark times, saying that “after those trials, we all rallied around what was right . . . all that matters now is what lies ahead,” as video of vibrant street life and various homegrown small entrepreneurs — an old woman carrying a bundle, various outdoor vendors — is shown. Then, to the text “Wealth is back,” a Buick GL8 goes speeding out of a garage as the Nina Simone song plays.

Why do you think Buick’s advertising executives juxtaposed a song by a controversial African-American artist with disturbing images of China’s troubled past, to sell a luxury car to the emerging Chinese upper classes? Is this a good choice? What does black music mean in this context?

And, going from the particular to the universal: do you think that appropriating sources and remixing them fundamentally changes their meaning? Or does the meaning of the original sources stay the same? Is the song “Feeling Good” fair game for remixing for the purpose of injecting capitalism into a Communist country?