Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-301) and index.

Part I : Early pop jingles and Pepsi's shift to youth marketing. Introduction : Hitting the spot and spotting the hits ; The Pepsi generation "now and then" : (re)composing the Cola Wars -- Part II : Pop songs, celebrity spectacle, and the MTV Generation. Big soda and celebrity pop : Pepsi meets Michael Jackson ; The choice of neoliberal generation : Pepsi models the perfect consumer ; Chasing "bad" : pop fantasies and teleological fiction ; A "wish" and a "prayer" : Pepsi faces the limits of redaction -- Part III : Millennial music marketing : redact, reuse, recycle. Humorous hits, nostalgic notes, and retro refrain in the 1990s ; Pepsi coda : Twenty-first-century "pop" and the branded future.

This book examines the mediating role that Pepsi's commercials have played in forging lasting relationships between the American music and advertising industries from its 1939 "Nickel, Nickel" jingle to its pair of 2011-2012 X Factor commercials. It historicizes and analyzes widely disseminated Pepsi commercials for its signature and diet colas, focusing largely on well-known television spots and charting their evolution from featuring stand-alone, broadcast jingles to celebrities singing the latest pop songs and styles in its campaigns. This book integrates close musical analysis with interdisciplinary scholarship on advertising and American popular culture to examine the process of redaction -- the practice marketers have used to select, censor, and restructure musical texts to fit commercial contexts in ways that revise their aesthetic meanings and serve corporate aims. It argues that it was advertising's ability to get inside musical texts that eventually allowed corporate brands to play key roles in popular music's dissemination and production. This book investigates how Pepsi-Cola marketing has historically appropriated meanings from hit songs and celebrity musical endorsers, what new meanings its well-known spots attempted to emit, and why these commercials shaped future relationships between the Americ