What a rip off

Watching the Super Bowl truly caters to all types of audiences. For the first time, your girlfriend is actually willing to go somewhere with you to watch a football game. Unfortunately, when she asks how the guys in blue just got three points, you have to start explaining the concept of a field goal and the appropriate time a team chooses to kick one. This explanation begins to take your focus off the new commercials, half the reason for the majority of female viewers.
One particular commercial has received a massive amount of attention. A recruitment advertisement for the U.S. Air Force Reserve takes multiple extreme sports like surfing and snowboarding and glorifies “catching air” and getting radical.  By the end of this commercial the two comments that were made in the room I was sitting in were, “that is a White Stripes song” and “I’m sure that’s what the Air Force is all about; surfing and snowboarding all the time.”
I didn’t think much of this commercial. Well, other than the fact it was nothing like dropping bombs on the enemies of the United States government. Then The White Stripes released the statement on their official website that, “The White Stripes take strong insult and objection to the Air Force Reserves presenting the advertisement with the implication that we licensed one of our songs to encourage recruitment during a war that we do not support. The White Stripes support this nation’s military, at home and during times when our country needs and depends on them. We simply don’t want to be a cog in the wheel of the current conflict, and hope for a safe and speedy return home for our troops.”
The song that is used in the advertisement is clearly a rip-off of “Fell in Love with a Girl.” I’m not sure that the main problem here is the fact the song is being used for military recruitment purposes. The bigger conflict lies in the fact that a song was reproduced without the consent of the artist. It’s a touchy subject for a band to hear a song they worked so hard on sound like crap on national television. It was even embarrassing for me to hear a song that I have rocked out to numerous times sound like such trash, especially in a commercial that makes no sense in the first place.
From what I know, the U.S. Air Force is not about getting gnarly on waves and catching massive air off a snowy cliff. I’m pretty sure they are devoted to flying planes and dropping bombs. The White Stripes have every right to be upset with the misuse of their music and the wrongful glorification of action sports in correlation with warfare.