Another Super Bowl, another round of high-profile ads to dissect…this year the hipster community is up in arms over Audi’s use of an old Echo & the Bunnymen song, which reminded me of an earlier outcry concerning another car company’s use of perhaps the most counter-intuitive musical pitchman ever: Nick Drake.

Sixties singer-songwriter Nick Drake recorded a handful of meltingly beautiful and harrowingly sad folk albums before committing suicide in his early twenties, despondent about his total lack of commercial success. He has in the interim become a cultishly adored shadow legend of rock and roll, his work languishing in the genteel obscurity cherished by pale, sensitive music obsessives who substitute connoisseurship for a personality. These true believers yowled like kicked kittens when Volkswagen employed Drake’s beguiling “Pink Moon” for a car ad, lodging the predictable complaints about purity tarnished, the Artiste rolling in grave, etc. The thing is, though, the ad was a lovely piece of work, understated, evocative, and unaccountably moving. Millions were struck by the haunted, whispery voice and gently rolling acoustic guitar, and they sought out Drake’s music, prompting new compilations of his work. An audience was born, forty years or so too late. 

Maybe I’m being a little hard on those Drake cultists. After all, I’m one of them. I get it: Drake’s music, more than the music of anyone else I can think of, inspires an intensely personal and direct identification on the part of the listener. This effect was heightened by Drake’s obscurity; “no one else in the world is hearing this, feeling this, at this moment,” the Drake devotee might have thought to herself on a rainy afternoon, and she might well have been right. Now, Drake is played in Starbucks, fodder for caffeinated go-getters primed by those endless, tastefully compiled folk and jazz discs to find his sound congenial. It all just seems a little less special.

But this sentiment must be resisted. Drake’s music remains and continues to seduce and inspire. Solipsism is an unattractive quality in post-adolescents. It’s selfishness disguised as Romantic refinement—like the suicide of a young artist, too pure for a compromised world that buys beauty to sell cars.