Say it ain't so, John.

With all due respect to the victorious St. Louis Cardinals, there are two things I’ll always remember about the 2006 World Series, and neither has to do with the Redbirds.

First are the numerous and comical errors by the losing Detroit Tiger pitchers, and second is “Our Country,” the new John Mellencamp song that was used to tout Chevrolet during each and every break in the action.

The memory of the jarring Tiger meltdown is far less galling than the tune still jangling in my head, and the part that’s really grinding my teeth is that it’s precisely because Mellencamp and Chevrolet wanted it that way.

Grrrrrrrr.

During the period of time that passed between the conclusion of the NBA Finals in June and the commencement of the baseball playoffs in October, my eyes rested upon no more than eight hours of domestic television, and I continued to hold the view that if given the choice of voting for a Seymour native to serve in Congress, I would opt for Mellencamp over Baron Hill.

Now that Hill has shown healthy signs of an overdue pulse and Mellencamp has broken with his longstanding custom by licensing a song to an advertiser, I’ve changed my mind. Hill’s my man. Mellencamp? He’ll be judged by his forthcoming album.

Verily, there has ceased to be resistance to the notion of using popular music to promote products. Attitudes surely have changed since the 1980s, when baby boomers were quick to condemn the use of the Beatles’ “Revolution” to sell sneakers. Most of my favorite performers have done it (see: U2 and “Vertigo”), and there aren’t two-dozen people under the age of 40 in the entire country who care either way. Neil Young might be the last holdout, and maybe Pearl Jam.

(Speaking of the liberal icon Young, is there anything in the partnership of pop music and advertising quite as weird as KFC’s use of a loop snipped from Lynyrd Skynyrd's “Sweet Home Alabama” to sell fried chicken? Are those distorted sounds that accompany the music really whole fryers merrily clucking along the assembly line? Did anyone tell Yum!’s resident Wonder CEO Novak that Tyson is from Arkansas, not Alabama?)

But I digress.

It is true that Mellencamp has a reasonable excuse for accepting a check from Chevrolet. According to a United Press International report:

BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Oct. 20 (UPI) -- After years of saying no, Indiana rocker John Mellencamp is allowing his new single to be used in a television commercial for trucks.
Mellencamp licensed "Our Country," a song celebrating the durability of the American dream, to Chevrolet for a spot advertising its trucks. Mellencamp referred to the ad, which features images of disgraced U.S. President Richard Nixon and Hurricane Katrina, as "my new video" and says it's an effective way to promote the song.

"I want my records to be heard; that's why I write 'em," said Mellencamp, who has rebuffed numerous ad requests for other songs. "Radio's not gonna play 'em now. MTV doesn't even play videos anymore. How do you get it out there and ... stay relevant?

"This is what (artists) are going to have to do if they're not 21 years old and they want people to hear their music."

The fact that “Our Country” remains on inadvertent heavy rotation in my cranial jukebox might be said to grudgingly prove Mellencamp’s point, and furthermore, it’s worth noting that he has conceded (to Billboard) that the Chevy song’s conscious “Pink Houses” vibe isn’t at all representative of his forthcoming album:

John Mellencamp's new single, "Our Country," will be on his next album, but he tells Billboard.com it's hardly indicative of what the rest of the album will sound like. "It's pretty interesting," Mellencamp says of "Freedom Road," due in January via UME/Universal Republic. "It sounds very 1966, but it sounds now. 'Our Country' is the most John Mellencamp-sounding record on it.

And so, it all becomes clear: Mellencamp provides Chevrolet with a ready-made advertising anthem. He gets paid. People hear the song and are tricked into buying the album, exposing them to the artist’s new music. Case closed?

Well, not exactly.

For what seemed like a millennium, although it was probably far less than a decade, Chevrolet used Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock” as the musical tag for its television ads, transforming a pedestrian number by a respected rock ‘n’ roll veteran into perhaps the single most overplayed song of the current generation. As much as I like “Vertigo,” it’s probably a distant second.

If the use of pop music in Chevrolet’s advertising is about defining the company’s potential customer base, the car-maker’s mishandling of Seger's tune suggests a maddening tendency to simply murder an otherwise average song through serial overuse, which in turn implies that its target buyers are either undiscerning or tone deaf … or maybe both.

At least the news that “Our Country’s” licensing agreement runs only through 2007 is a source of hope and optimism.

Of course, it could be worse – and in fact it is, so don’t touch that dial, pop open an ice-cold longneck and stay tuned as “Toby Keith Plays With His Guitar And Spews Forth An Amerigasm Of Song About Ford Trucks.”*

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* You think I’d make that one up? As Grandpa Jones always said, truth is stranger than fact, so visit the singer’s web site to see why he’s “built Ford tough.”