{"id":409,"date":"2008-04-11T08:55:26","date_gmt":"2008-04-11T12:55:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/?p=409"},"modified":"2008-04-11T09:07:02","modified_gmt":"2008-04-11T13:07:02","slug":"this-is-one-bugged-out-talk-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/?p=409","title":{"rendered":"This Is One Bugged-Out Talk Show."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Fanning<\/a>
\n“How can I bittorrent this sweet ride?”: Shawn Fanning ponders a VW<\/em><\/p>\n

I was watching TV yesterday when, out of nowhere, a commercial popped on, featuring, of all people, Shawn Fanning<\/a>, above, creator of the contraband late ’90s file-sharing service, Napster.<\/p>\n

Well, of course, not literally out of nowhere. It was part of Volkswagen’s recently launched “Das Auto” campaign, directed by ace image-maker Roman Coppola. According to VW’s April 2 release<\/a>, “Das Auto,”<\/p>\n

\n

which launches today, will introduce the world to Max, an iconic, quirky, talking 1964 black Beetle. … <\/span>In each spot, Max has candid conversations with notable figures from pop culture in a talk show setting. … Guests include supermodel Heidi Klum, pop and TV personality David Hasselhoff, Star Trek\u2019s Leonard Nimoy, NASA astronaut Richard Searfoss, music-sharing innovator Shawn Fanning and former basketball coach Bob Knight.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’ve had Napster on the brain lately, since, hard as this may be to believe, next year will mark the tenth anniversary<\/em> of the peer-to-peer music revolution Fanning started. I’ve probably never even said this before, but he remains one of my cultural heroes. That he isn’t exactly a household name makes it super-cool to see him in a national ad, looking grown-up, healthy, and happy, and not perturbed and beset, as he typically did during his outlaw years.<\/p>\n

\"VW<\/a>What really makes this spot, and all the rest, most frosty, though, is the appearance of my gurl<\/em>, \u00fcberdrummer Cindy Blackman, right, perhaps best known to them asses for her powerwork with Lenny Kravitz, particularly in his videos: 1999’s “American Woman”; 1998’s “Fly Away” by Paul Hunter; and the Mark Romanek masterpiece, 1993’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way.” So, let’s tally it up: Blackman, Fanning, and a 1964 Beetle on a swivvy white ultramod set. It gets no better than this, friends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“How can I bittorrent this sweet ride?”: Shawn Fanning ponders a VW I was watching TV yesterday when, out of nowhere, a commercial popped on, featuring, of all people, Shawn Fanning, above, creator of the contraband late ’90s file-sharing service, Napster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22,35,21,51,42,15,3,39,8,19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/harryallen.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}