This continues the discussions of whether bands should sell their songs for use in TV commercials. Hitsville’s original post drew some substantive comments, which I am highlighting in ongoing posts.

Next up—Leland Rucker:

Hey Bill, interesting posts on rock sellouts. It’s not hard to poke holes in Santi White’s rationale. But it makes me wonder how you look at other so-called “sellouts?” Nobody seems to knock Randy Newman for writing commercials. Pete Townshend has sold his music for commercials for decades, and people still think highly of “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” (Will more people remember the Who for the CSI series’ theme songs than as a powerful rock band of an earlier period?)

Personally, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass what musicians do with their songs. The argument that rock is something different made sense when I was 24, but it just seems specious now. I can remember getting upset once in the ‘70s about “Revolution” being used to sell tennis shoes after reading accounts by fans about how it ruined the song’s meaning for them. That was the last time; if a song changes meaning because of the context in which you hear it, it’s not much of a song, or a memory for that matter. And I never think of footwear when I hear “Revolution.”

There was a time when I believed that rock was “something slightly different,” too. But I didn’t know about Townshend selling songs back then, or that Cream made a Falstaff commercial, or that the mere act of signing to a major label might be considered a “sellout.” We didn’t realize that Newman wrote the upbeat “I’m a Pepper” at the same time he was coming up with the decidedly downbeat “Sail Away.”

I asked Newman about selling songs for commercials back in the ‘90s. There are many of his songs, “Sail Away” is one example, that he would never license. Others, he said, are fair game; when Colgate came to use “I Love to See You Smile” in a commercial, he sold it. Has that knowledge changed my feelings about Newman’s artistry? Are you kidding?

Hey, I admire Tom Waits, Neil Young and others for not selling their songs to commercials, too. But this seems like a non-issue. To knock everybody who has sold a song for an ad seems awfully simplistic to me. I’m curious what your feelings are about “selling out” in a more general sense.

Thanks for taking the time to write, Leland. (Leland and I used to hell around SXSW, back in the day.)

It’s true—a lot of heritage rockers danced with the devil once upon a time. I mentioned this on my blog before, but check it out…

…and of course the Jefferson Airplane did a Levi’s commercial. (If memory serves they even included it on one of the box sets.)

I have to admit. It is simplistic, and it is reductive. I’m not saying people can’t do this. Just that those who do deserve to have it out in the open, so those of us who want to can scorn them. My biggest beef is that the press too often plays along. If Randy Newman did write the “I’m a Pepper” jingle, there’s not too much about it on Google. (At least Barry Manilow would do a jingle medley in his shows way back when.)

Peter Townshend is more defiant. He says, “They are my songs, and I can do what I want with them.” He can, and I can think he’s a dick. With him, it’s not even a grey area. There are a lot of folks, intense and original artists, who got screwed over by the system and never became the important figures they deserved to be. Think of Alex Chilton; it might be hard to begrudge him the cash he might get for lending the plangent strains of “September Gurls” to a beauty commercial. For him, rock ‘n’ roll was a cruel mistress. But Townshend? He lived a life of enormous, unthinkable privilege from the time he was twenty years old. He was a great artist and is worth a gazillion dollars. And still he wants to make money by degrading “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in a car commercial?

The little secret here is that these artists are all part of the corporatization that has seeped into so many segments of our lives. Just because you can make money doing something, Wall Street holds that you have to. As I’ve written before, there are side issues that come along with it. CEOs are expected to lie whenever they want to… and when they get caught they say, “Well, I had to because it was in my shareholder interest.” That’s what Townshend is doing with all those crappy farewell tours; the cynicism involved is so crude you realize he’s wholly adopted a boardroom mindset, and like those denizens holds his audience cum customers in some form of contempt.

You’re right: “Revolution” withstood the sneaker commercial, but then, it was controversial at the time and probably didn’t run for that long. If Nike had just stuck with it they might have succeeded in forever denaturing it. As I said in a previous post, I think all of us, sooner or later, will cry “stop,” whether it’s “Redemption Song” being used by Northrop Grumman (”Won’t you help us sing these songs of freedom?”) or “Be My Baby” for Pampers. (Please don’t tell me that’s already happened.) I’m simply drawing a line in the sand much earlier in the process. (That’s what the Moby Quotient is good for. )

And that’s why, in the end, I don’t respect Waits and Young for not selling their songs for commercials. I expect them not to.

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Earlier in Hitsville:

The Sellout Debate: Maura Johnston
Sellout Watch: Idolator demurs
Sellout Watch: Santogold
New vistas in sellouts: Lennon’s “Real Love”

Also:

The Moby Quotient—The renowned Washingon Post article that created, for the first time, a mathematically sound way to ascertain how big of a sellout artists are when they sell their songs to TV commercials.