This is the second entry in a new recurring feature in which Believer Commercials Correspondent Ian Dreiblatt travels back in time via YouTube.com to review and examine the cultural phenomenon that was Television Commercials. Commercials featured here will mostly be old, and have, in many cases, already left an indelible mark on America and its culture. Read the first entry.

Recently, Grace Slick usefully made visible a phenomenon I call the Pepsi Principle. We’ll get there, but first, let’s rewind a little bit.

In 1988, Grace Slick officially left Starship, the band that had begun two decades earlier as Jefferson Airplane, then become Jefferson Starship, only to be denuded of its “Jefferson” altogether by a lawsuit from founding guitarist Paul Kantner in 1984. Leaving the group was a dubious achievement. On the one hand, Starship is just awful, and escaping the outfit behind such roller-rink clunkers as “We Built This City (On Rock and Roll)” and “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” is an act of vision and laudable courage. On the other hand, to make such an escape, Slick first had to spend twenty years wading from the affable, doofy shallows of “Somebody to Love” to the deep, gatedly reverberant bog of crappola like “Babylon.”

Fast forward thirty more years and Slick, who will be eighty this October, has once again achieved ambiguity. After “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” appeared in a recent commercial for Chick-Fil-A (seemingly not viewable online), she published an op-ed in Forbes to say she’d let the fast-food chain use her song not despite, but because of, its widely-noted homophobia, which she deplores. “I am donating every dime that I make from that ad to Lambda Legal, the largest national legal organization working to advance the civil rights of LGBTQ people, and everyone living with HIV,” Slick writes. In a near-parody of morally compromised boomer self-satisfaction, she goes on to explain that this is because she’s “from a time when artists didn’t just sell their soul to the highest bidder, when musicians took a stand, when the message of songs was ‘feed your head,’ not ‘feed your wallet.’” After quoting herself, she quotes J-Lo quoting Toni Morrison, and then closes with a quote from “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” It is, how you say, far out.

Grace Slick’s impulse to support Lambda Legal is wonderful (you can donate to that worthy organization right here, without having to think about hate-chicken or listen to Starship). But this logic is a little melty. The whole nature of advertising is that Chick-Fil-A will have already determined that this commercial stands to spur more in sales revenue than it costs...