There’s a new LG Telecom ad that’s been playing on Korean television recently. As happens all too frequently, I’m having a little trouble telling if it’s hilariously clever or dumb as dirt.

Here, you watch it, and decide what you think.

See, here’s the thing. Or the things. I’ve mostly gotten over the kind of pop-eyed apoplectic rage I used to feel when advertisers used rocknroll songs I loved as the soundtracks for their shills. It doesn’t bother me any more — I’ve made great strides in anger management over the years. So if LG wants to use The Clash’s Revolution Rock to sell mobile telephone services, well, I can live with that, even if I don’t like it much.

But I’m wondering if they had anyone who could speak English vet these lyrics:

Revolution rock, it is a brand new rock
A bad, bad rock, this here revolution rock
Careful how you move, Mac
you dig me in me back
And I’m so pilled up that I rattle
I have got the sharpest knife
so I get the biggest slice
I got no time to do battle

It seems a bit rogueish for an arm of one of the biggest chaebol in the country, one that owns so much of it, to be admitting “I have got the sharpest knife, so I get the biggest slice”. And being “so pilled up that I rattle” might be one heck of a fun way to spend a lost weekend, but it’s a bit much in Korea, where the last I heard one could still get the death penalty for it. But the imagery and lyrics, coupled with the tagline, are the bits that have me trying to figure out if this is clever or clueless.

Everybody knows about the Korean predilection for public demonstrations. Often violent ones. It’s probably one of the enduring images that the outside world has of Korea, much as the government would like for it to fade away — headbands, fists in the air, chanting hordes, riot cops younger than the demonstrators cowering behind plexiglass shields, blood, fire. So an ad showing people spontaneously joining some kind of mob, admittedly happy and brandishing cell phones rather than molotov cocktails, well, that’s just cheeky. And flashing the tagline “Join the Movement” at the end? Is it a clever reference to and inversion of that enduring image in the minds of foreigners?

I don’t know. I just don’t know. Crass, sure. But being semi-convinced that the Makers of Marketing Decisions at LG didn’t understand much of the lyrics of that song other than the word ‘revolution’ just doesn’t jibe with the bit that impressed me the most — the tagline “Join the Movement” pops up right after Joe Strummer sings “I got no time to do battle”.

It’s either brilliant or just plain lucky. I have no idea which.