It’s spring, and the thoughts of young hipster artistes run to … what commercial product they can sell their songs to. The latest of these is Santi White, who records under the name Santogold.

I’m indebted to The Daily Swarm for catching two separate articles—in New York and the Guardian—in which White makes the case for composing tunes for a department store chain:

“It’s a little weird, but at the same time, let’s say I make a deal with Target—knowing how many people shop at Target? It’s not like I’m writing a song about Target. It’s more like—Target’s onboard to help me sell records? That’s great.”

That’s great! There is one arguable reason in which that is great, but there are more and betters ones as to why it’s not:

1) While art can be created out of commercial or propagandistic purposes, from Michaelangelo to Irving Penn, let’s face it, most isn’t.

2) In any case, the dynamic is different. Someone like Penn, for example, created art out of his profession. A rock artist is trafficking in the implicit independence of the form; the companies buying an artist’s songs are really buying a little bit of that perceived coolness.

3) In most cases, that perception will correspondingly decline. The artists aren’t selling their songs; they are essentially selling off their coolness.

4) Soon they aren’t artists any more—they are just songwriters who write little attitudinal pieces of lifestyle soundtrack to help sell overpriced crap.

5) Their fans can no longer trust them. It’s fashionable to say selling out in this fashion doesn’t matter, and that no one cares anyway. But I don’t think its coincidence that greedy folks like Moby, an innovator in this area, have wholly marginalized themselves.

Now, from the music fan’s perspective, there is an upside:

It’s plain to see, from the vantage point of 2008, how cyclical rock is: Loud innovations, generally involving a wrenching temblor that puts the music on a course from which it was perceived to have strayed, come every ten or fifteen years. The last one was sparked by Nevermind, back in 1991, and we’re long overdue for a new one. My theory as to why that hasn’t happened yet is this: That the record industry learned something from Nirvana; that it needed to embrace innovation, rather than shut it out.

That’s created a decade and a half of eager and mutually beneficial co-optation. But you can feel the decadence coming back; indeed, the Guardian story that the Daily Swarm noticed is actually about how White, Pharrell (of the production due the Neptunes) and Julian Casablancas (of the Strokes) have all worked together on a song and video that advertises Converse sneakers. (That confirms everything I always suspected about the Strokes.) Here’s White, quoted in the Guardian, about that august collaboration:

“Everybody on it does their own separate thing and we didn’t do it together so it ends up being just this weird long song with sort of everybody with lots of their own personalities separate.”

That’s great! It gives one a delicious, portentous frisson, because there’s no one in the world who thinks that’s a good idea who isn’t a Converse marketer or one of the artists (or their agents and managers) pocketing the checks. Now, remember: There has always been pop music, but what came out of Memphis and Chicago in the early 1950s was something different. Now, it could well be that, at this point, rock is dead. But if it isn’t, a new generation of musicians will soon appear and look at the antics of your Santogolds and Julian Casablancases with some contempt—a new rough beast come ’round, you might say, to chew their asses up.