Still Wondering What that Catchy Song in the AARP Commercial Is?

Have you seen that AARP commercial where they play a high energy song that seems incredibly out of place yet haunts you for the rest of the day? Wondering what that song that goes "Everybody's happy now-a-dayyyyyyyyys" is? Well, look no further because I have the answer. And let me say I'm less than pleased to have to tell you. It's a song called, well, "Everybody's Happy Nowadays" and it's by a band called The Buzzcocks.

Now, The Buzzcocks may mean nothing to you, but for millions of us the idea of a Buzzcocks song being used to promote an association for old people is right up there on the outrage meter with Nike using The Beatles' "Revolution" to sell their child-labor-producing overprices sneakers. Well, okay, maybe it's not quite that bad. But even so the very concept of using a punk rock song by one of the pioneering bands of the vaunted Manchester music scene verges into the arena of the surreal.

The Buzzcocks were one of the first bands to appear out of the industrial British town of Manchester in the wake of the Sex Pistols revolution. They were eventually eclipsed in terms of influence and importance by Joy Division, a band that later changed their name to New Order in the wake of lead singer Ian Curtis' suicide. That story, by the way, is the focus of the upcoming film Control. If you want to get a little taste of that story along with some background on The Buzzcocks, then you should Netflix 24 Hour Party People which not only contains a fundamentally necessary soundtrack, but a tremendous performance by Steve Coogan AND a cameo by Buzzcocks singer Howard DeVoto.