“Anyone Else But You,” the meditative Kimya Dawson love song that ended Juno on a bit of winsome emotion, is now the soundtrack for the Atlantis Resorts. Someone else is doing the singing, and the lyrics—quirky and poignant in the original—have been blanded out. Nothing at all about “You shook a little poop out of the bottom of your pants.”

Via Pitchfork, video of a new car ad featuring Cat Power singing “Space Oddity.” There are many things wrong with this, the first being greedy David Bowie.

The ad is hard to figure out, but it seems to be Lincoln making a play for aging and moneyed boomers, pricking up a teen memory or two with a Bowie tune. Marshall is there to add some postmodern edginess, the song’s futuristic sheen now anachronistic and the gender switch adding a bit of disruption as well, all in the service of promoting an overlarge car, Lincoln’s new topline luxury sedan, that gets 16 miles to the gallon.

The ad gets all revved up over the “Check ignition and may god’s love be with you” line, but doesn’t wait around to see the driver adrift in space after the technology fails.

From the WSJ:

Sharp-eared pop-music fans may have noticed a brief reference to an old chewing-gum jingle buried in “Forever,” Chris Brown’s top-10 hit. “Double your pleasure/double your fun,” the R&B singer croons in the chorus.

What listeners don’t know — and what Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. planned to reveal Tuesday — is that the song is a commercial.

“Forever” is an extended version of a new Doublemint jingle written by Mr. Brown and scheduled to begin airing next month in 30-second spots for Wrigley’s green-packaged chewing gum.

Two other acts—Ne-Yo and Julianne Hough—are doing commercials for the gum company as well.

But Brown is a special case. He was commissioned by the gum company to write a song that updated one of its silly jingles. Brown’s label, Jive, sent it to radio and then, once it became a hit, they added it to his last album and re-released it:

Tom Carrabba, executive vice president and general manager of the Zomba Label Group, which includes Jive, says label executives initially had qualms about releasing and promoting a song recorded at an advertiser’s behest. “But the song was so potent and strong. That overruled us being maybe a little hesitant,” he adds.

It’s kind of an interesting issue: In most cases, a company will buy a song after it’s a hit. Wrigley paid for the song’s production, so in a way it was taking a risk.

But the bigger issue is the deception. Shouldn’t Brown and his record company have revealed the source of the song to consumers? Shouldn’t there be a label on the CD? “Contains the hit song ‘Forever,’ which was paid for by a chewing gum company.”

The WSJ has a fairly shocking story about two books that just came out on Clear Channel. The first, by Alec Foege, you might remember from the extended interview Hitsville did with him on the book’s release a month or two back. Foege is a longtime reporter on the music industry and the author of several other books.

That exchange is here.

The other was written by Reed Bunzel, a onetime radio trade journalist. But there’s more to the story; let’s let the Journal’s Sarah McBride tell it:

In 2005, radio-giant Clear Channel Communications Inc. learned that a writer named Alec Foege was planning a book about it. The book’s working title, “The Monster That Ate Mass Media,” suggested something less than a puff piece was in the works.

Clear Channel mounted a counteroffensive, lining up its own writer to tell the Clear Channel story its way.

As a result, dueling books about Clear Channel have recently hit the shelves. Mr. Foege’s book—now titled “Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio”—chronicles the company’s role in the consolidation of the radio industry.

It competes with “Clear Vision: The Story of Clear Channel Communications,” by Reed Bunzel, former editor of the trade magazine Radio Ink. Mr. Bunzel says Clear Channel paid him to do the book but declines to say how much. Another journalist says he was offered more than $100,000 to take on the project. The book doesn’t disclose Mr. Bunzel’s financial relationship with Clear Channel, but careful readers may notice that the company holds the copyright to the book.

Allow me to make a few observations McBride is too polite to. One, this is strong evidence that Clear Channel remains a thuggish company that utilizes dirty tricks and subterfuge to get what it wants.

And two, Reed Bunzel is …. wait, what do you call someone who provides certain intimate service for money but who doesn’t reveal it to his readers? What’s the term I’m looking for?

a) A journalistic whore?

b) A sellout, lying, corporate toady?

c) A fake author, a cheat, and a sleazebag?

d) all of the above?

Pitchfork interviews Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman, the founders of Sub Pop, on the 20th anniversary of the opening of the label’s office in Seattle. (Pavitt is no longer with the label and the pair were interviewed separately, which is why there is a disconnect between their comments.)

Lots of interesting details about the scotch-tape-and-staples financial arrangements the label had to finagle to survive. But first, about Nirvana….

Bruce Pavitt: … By ‘88, selling 5-10,000 copies a record was considered doing very good business. The idea of selling millions of records was almost inconceivable… I remember Bleach in its first year selling 40,000 copies, which was amazing.
Pitchfork: It’s platinum now, right?
Bruce Pavitt: Bleach is almost double platinum, yeah. And it cost $600 to record, so…I would venture that, just from a business point of view, the return on investment from Bleach might make it the most profitable record in the history of the world. $600 for two million in sales, that’s pretty unusual.

Pavitt doesn’t mention that the band had to pay that $600 itself. Sup Pop did pretty well with Nirvana, considering the initial outlay of zero dollars. (My source is Heavier than Heaven, Charles Cross’s Cobain bio; he says the band borrowed the $600 from a friend … and never paid him back. In the indie world of the 1980s, every great fortune was based on a petty crime.)*

On the other hand, there’s this:

Jonathan Poneman: To give you an example of the sort of choices we had to make: A lot of the bands in Sub Pop’s early years went on to have early success and attract the interest of larger labels. In the early 90s, bands got scooped up by larger labels in this belief that “alternative music” was going to be the soundtrack to a generation, yadda yadda yadda. So a lot of bands we would work with for, you know, budgets of a thousand or two thousand for an album– and that’s the high end– would end up signing quarter-million, half-million dollar record deals with larger labels. One of the decisions that we had to make along the line was: We have two thousand dollars. Do we either pay that as a retainer to a business attorney who helps legitimize our business, or do we turn around and put out three or four singles? More often than not, we would make the latter choice, because that allowed for the momentum to continue. There was so much great music at the time—first and foremost, we wanted to document this music that was vital. Then somewhere along the line we also had to start taking care of the business of being a legitimate operation.

That’s a fair comment, excusing even the Sub Pop singles club, an entirely unnecessary scene accouterment. (The interview also has a lot of interesting background on the label’s selling 49 percent of itself to Warner.)

Pavitt goes out with a shot at the sellouts of today:

Pitchfork: The rise of indie culture and how it’s more visible now—is it comparable in any way to the grunge hysteria of the 90s?
Pavitt: [pause] It’s different. It’s matured into a really…it’s a cool scene, there’s a lot of a diversity. You look at the festival you’re putting together, there’s a lot of diversity there and a lot of people going to see it. I don’t think it has the insane buzz of what was going on in Seattle. At the same time, there’s so much material out there and it’s a really healthy industry, people have jobs selling records and making records and promoting them. Because there is so much material, I don’t think it’s having the same cultural impact as the late-70s punk rock scene. If you walked into [Chicago record store] Wax Trax in 1978, 79, the whole vibe was so against the grain that it was revolutionary. Indie rock is very healthy, there’s a lot of diversity and a lot of creativity, but it does not have the revolutionary spirit of the late-70s punk scene in regards to design and politics and fashion and stuff like that. I really miss that, and I’m looking forward to a youth musical cultural scene that’s a little more revolutionary, where indie bands aren’t vying for McDonald’s commercial spots.

Emphasis added—the Shins, one of Sub Pop’s biggest latter-day successes, of course, did a McDonald’s commercial. Poneman, who still runs the label, rationalizes things this way:

Pitchfork: What went into that decision of pushing artists toward licensing?
Poneman:  Well, we didn’t really push them that way. We said, the choice is yours. We understood that there was an ethical dilemma. If you’ve read Fast Food Nation, which I did at the time, you’re going, “Eww, McDonald’s.” But on the other hand, there’s a couple of other things to consider: First, the nature of radio play, which up to that point had always been the holy grail. Radio essentially is the same thing– you’re padding the advertising with music. The music brings people to listen to the radio, but the reason why advertising and radio stations themselves actually want people to listen to the radio is not so much for the music, but for the advertising because that is what pays the bills. This was put on its side to a certain degree, or seen a different way. This was kind of the same premise, but the artist gets cut in more directly on the revenue side.

The other thing is, as formats change—through CD burning, through music being made available through different means, and the channels of music distribution loosening up—a lot of the revenue that was coming from sales is actually…more bands are relying on the revenue derived from film and TV licensing than ever before. It also comes down to where the music is positioned in the culture, because there was a real feeling that the music was sacrosanct, back in the 1960s. “How dare you use this Jefferson Airplane song to market blue jeans or cosmetics or whatever.” But now, while I totally understand and respect those feelings, as a practical matter there’s so much cross-pollenization of media at this point anyway, that it just seems to me to be another facet of that. If that makes any sense.

It doesn’t, but whatever.

* Bleach has probably sold a lot more overseas, as well. The only other record I can think of in the same realm as Bleach’s profitability is the Offspring’s Smash, which has supposedly sold over ten million worldwide. It too was recorded at the height of the DIY days, but since it wasn’t the band’s first album wasn’t put together on quite so much of a shoestring.

Bill Kurtis is a serious guy, and by any account would be on the higher end of the (admittedly limited) spectrum of TV investigative reporting. In recent years he’s become more of a crime-show host than investigator, but it’s still a shock to see him shilling for a crummy cellphone company:

From the NYT profile of the band, which has reunited for some shows:

[Glenn] Mercer said he had earned more lately from Feelies royalties than he had when the band was active. One Feelies song, “Let’s Go,” turned up in a Volvo commercial.

Wow—”turned up in a Volvo commercial.” Like magic, just as the check Volvo paid the band for the use of the song in the commercial magically “turned up in” Mercer’s bank account.

It’s hard to begrudge the Feelies, the consummate uncommercial band, for making a few bucks, more than fifteen years after their (hardly remunerative) heyday. But if the band sold one of its songs to be used in a car commercial, the story should say so, preferably by using the words “the band sold one of its songs for use in a car commercial.”

Stories about bands reuning should also say something like this: “While the 1980s college-rock world that spawned the band provided it with some priceless cool, it didn’t make the Feelies any money. The band surely has been aware that many other acts from the same broad era have been getting back together and earning paydays on the road many times greater than anything they could have dreamed of at the time of their original work.”

From the big NYT profile of My Morning Jacket in Sunday’s paper:

[…W]hile many acts have turned to Madison Avenue for ancillary income, My Morning Jacket has remained ambivalent about using its music for advertising. Four years ago its song “Mahgeetah” was used in a beer commercial, but the group says that it gave away some of its earnings to charity and hasn’t done a commercial deal since. Its manager, Mike Martinovich, said the band has not ruled out these opportunities but that they conflict with a wish to hold onto a sense of mystery in its music.

“When you license a song to a commercial,” Mr. Martinovich said, “you run the risk of limiting the meanings the song can have to your audience. If an artist wants to preserve a listener’s ability to have a personal interpretation of a lyric, he may have to forgo the financial gain associated with a commercial license.”

A commenter named Scraps writes:

Where I’m coming from, the Popist thing started because of the perception of a lot of people — I am one — that the music we always loved was dismissed by rock-and-roll snobs — particularly in the criticism of the 1970s — as inherently not worth doing, mostly for no more reason than the way it sounded. Not the content, not the craft, not the passion (though critics often maintained it was about passion), but a simple, nasty, condescending rationalization for a personal preference. And it still looks that way. Contempt for (say) the Fifth Dimension had a lot more to do with Coolness than merit, while eminently criticizable musicians like the Jefferson Airplane were not called to account for their many inadequacies and stupidities; or rather, the Jefferson Airplane would be forgiven their flaws because they were doing the right sort of thing, while the Fifth Dimension’s flaws were proof of the inherent inadequacy of their entire approach, period.

Popism was about recognizing there were a lot of us who felt this way, and that we didn’t have to accept from the cool crowd that our taste was worse — in most cases not because we didn’t like rock, but because we could like pop as well — and talk seriously about the value of what we loved. And the response of a lot of the old-guard rockist crowd has been to impute our motives and reassert the same old standard line of what’s worth doing and what isn’t. I enjoy your analysis and your writing and your cultural observations very much. But it does annoy me that when you talk about the Popist revisionism and the Rockist reactions to it, you repeatedly frame it in terms that implicitly motive-bash. Popism questions the set of assumptions that the rockist critical consensus was built on. The Rockist reaction to this, by and large, is to say that Popism is about apologizing for crass commercialism and shit. It’d be nice, at this late date, to have the big discussions of taste and style without the (even at this articulate level) dismissals and reassertions of inherent authenticity and inherent garbage.

I think if you go way back—waaay back—you can find a few interesting examples of the phenomenon you’re talking about. It’s true, for example, that Rolling Stone writers twitted the first few Led Zeppelin albums. And it sounds, from your Fifth Dimension/Jefferson Airplane recollections, that there are probably some others. But in fairness, those were the early days of the form (of the form of rock criticism, I mean), and I don’t know how long it lasted.

By the 1980s, certainly, if you look at the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Poll, a pop artist like Michael Jackson would win handily, and evanescence by people like Lisa Lisa or Paul Young would dot the singles lists. And speaking as someone who was a critic close to full-time from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, doing the panels at SXSW blah blah blah, I don’t remember this being a part of the debate. Who didn’t think “Karma Chameleon” was a great single? (And who doesn’t think “Wedding Bell Blues” is one, too?)

And as time went on, it was implicit in the second wave of punk rock in the early 1990s that pop was cool, though I grant there was a species of reverse hipsterism at work as well. There were a few anti-pop fanzine writers, I guess, but even in the underground world there was an implicit approval of a great pop song. (Cf. Ciccone Youth, “Into the Groovey.”) So again, while your Airplane/Fifth Dimension juxstaposition sounds real, in my experience the idea that there was a “set of assumptions,” that there were rockist critics out there dissin’ pop, is a straw man.

And let’s not forget that the rockist term was coined by the popists, dismissively.

Take a step back and the idea that there is a cadre of big bad (probably boy) critics insisting on pondering high art and dissing pop culture is even more far-fetched. Serious criticism has been under attack across the board in much of the mainstream press for some time. I’m not talking about the existence of it—the internet has given many people a platform. But before the internet really started screwing things up for papers, space given to the fine arts was shrinking; resources instead were being focussed toward highly mainstream genres like TV and the most popular films; and critics who dared to say that popular artists sucked came under a lot of negative pressure.

So in daily newspapering and the general interest magazines the tension between the things that get good play (blockbuster movies, for example) and those that get good reviews (what the critics like) has been around for a long time. I’m sure that if you went back and talked to the folks who did the hype-laden Time and Newsweek cover stories on crappy big-budget action movies you wouldn’t get a lot of blather about popism. They knew what their job was.

Eric Harvey, of Marathonpacks, has a comment that’s worth reading.

His response to my original post is here. My response to that is here.

Up to speed? Here is the next round:

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have thrown the “rockist” thing out there. That’s been did, but it certainly allowed you a neat retort, which draws that unnecessary genre-definition between “rock” and “pop”. How long has rock been pop music now? How many debates have been squashed in which someone attempts to define “pop” as, gulp, a genre?

But! Are you seriously implying that those who write about pop are nothing but PR shills? If I read your response correctly, that’s what it seems you’re implying. I mean, you use “popists” as a bit of a crutch there, right?

It’s a neat way to basically re-affirm your critical position, but as a set of parameters for interpreting some of the best, most insightful and well-written criticism being published (ever read Simon Frith?), it just seems inadequate at best, and stubbornly ignorant at worst.

You seem like an informed person who can grasp that writing about pop music doesn’t mean you’re in bed with PR, just as much as you know that hacks exist at all levels of criticism. If you’d like, I could send you some examples!

Thanks for taking the time to write. I think the rockist-v-popist debate isn’t about writing about or liking or defining rock vs. pop per se. I have nothing invested in any of that. It’s just a critical philosophy issue that has been debated for some time. That’s what I thought you were referring to. But I guess it’s true that, to paraphrase Steve Albini, I was happily adopting the term as shorthand for the position you were arguing against.

Thanks for taking the time to write. I think the rockist-vs.-popist debate isn’t about writing about or liking or defining rock vs. pop per se. I have nothing invested in any of that. It’s just a critical philosophy issue that has been debated for some time. That’s what I thought you were referring to. But I guess it’s true that, to paraphrase Steve Albini, I was happily adopting the term as shorthand for the position you were arguing against.

That allusion makes me very happy, as did the opportunity to link to this essay on Kurt Cobain, because I’ve been interested in the pleasures of pop and the complications of any sort of purity in the rock world for a long time. (All of that was very much influenced by the work of not just Simon Frith but his sometime collaborator Andrew Goodwin, an old friend of mine, whose work can be accessed at the Professor of Pop blog.)

So it’s funny to be on the other side of the issue right now. But I still think it’s wrong to work as a shill for corporations, particularly car companies, purveyors of crappy, overpriced shoes and any number of other operations. I’ve laid the reasons out in previous posts.

Your argument is basically that times have changed and that I’m pining for the past. But this has always been a problem, and I’ve always ridiculed it whenever possible. What I think has changed—and this might be something you disagree with—is that those who speak out about such stuff are now way uncool. My evidence is I guess anecdotal: I can think of colleagues being uninterested in or hostile to the issue when it came to coming up with story ideas. I was just on a radio show the other day and the booker said it was really hard to come up with people like me to speak out against it. And like I said, the very idea of the Moby Quotient was attacked when it came out.

This is probably another one of those imaginary authenticity parameters, or just a downer, or whatever, but I think it’s all kinda decadent. The idea that Santi White isn’t, from the very beginnings of her career, going to be seeing things from Target’s point of view (or that now U2 will not see things from Clear Channel’s Live Nation’s) seems to me wishful thinking; and the idea that this is now or soon will be the norm is as barfy as an R. Kelly sex tape. So I think it’s true that we are long overdue for a corrective.

And speaking of which, when I was talking about PR shills, I was talking about the utilitarian origins, you might say, of the popist philosophy. But the R. Kelly scandal is an interesting case study in how this all plays out in the real world. Here’s a guy leaving a palpable path of human destruction in his wake for years and much of the establishment press took it all as a joke.

For more on the sellout debate, see Marathonpacks, a.k.a. Eric Harvey, who accurately pegs Hitsville as a rockist:

Wyman’s playing by rockist rules, which set the standards of music evaulation by an arbitrary, imaginary set of authenticity parameters, most succinctly summed up in his quote: “A rock artist is trafficking in the implicit independence of the form” (my emphasis). [ … H]ow can he have written about a subject for so long and still not be able to see past his own biases? Or, at least not call attention to them in his writing (or blogging)? How can he think that rock music, as a form of popular culture is “implicitly independent” of anything—commercial interests, cultural trends, industrial mergers, differently inflected ideas of artistic credibility?

The alternative to “rockism” is called “popism.” For most of its proponents, the latter is based on the straw man that “rockist” critics don’t appreciate pop music. Harvey is not saying that, which I respect. I accept his definition of “rockism”; those imaginary, arbitrary authenticity parameters are mine, and people can take them or leave them. That’s what criticism is all about.

The trouble is that most “popism,” once the big words are stripped away, is conveniently indistinguishable in practice from “entertainment journalism.” As I’ve said before, it gives the people who practice it a clubhouse and a neat handshake, but more importantly it offers a patina of intellectual cover for their appreciative profiles of shitty artists for the glossies. In this particular area, for example, a popist approach to the question of selling out dovetails smoothly with the feelings the artists in question have on the subject, not to mention their publicists and managers. It makes working in the pop journalism arena a more comradely endeavor than you’d expect.

For an apropos example, see my critique of Kelefa Sanneh’s too-enthusiastic-by-half writings on R. Kelly. Talk about your differently inflected idea of artistic credibility!

One more thing. Harvey writes:

What Wyman’s actually arguing for, though he doesn’t seem to realize it, is a return to the economic and popular culture climate of 1991 […]

I disagree with Harvey on that, but I guess that’s his point as well. It reminded me, however, that 1991 came up in Maura Johnston’s comments too. It was a complex year. My own modest contribution to the limning of its difficult admixtures of artistry, stardom, commercialism, and corporatism—all foreshadowing the broken wall, the burning tower, and Agamemnon dead—is here.

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.

———

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.

I am humbly in awe of the smart comments my contentious commentary on rock sellouts have gotten. You can read them all here. I’m going to discuss them in a series of posts.

Says Maura Johnston:

[Quoting Hitsville] “I’m willing to debate what exactly rock music is, but I’m pretty it doesn’t involve helping sell crap on TV.”

so does ‘lust for life’ not count as rock music anymore, then? or ‘won’t get fooled again’?

i’m not trying to lead a horde against dissenters or anything. there was something about the criticism of santogold’s statements, which i thought were pretty matter-of-fact, that seemed very knee-jerk and really rankled with me. it’s not 1991 anymore, but the concept of ’selling out’ is still the norm among a *lot* of rock writers and i think in an era where fewer and fewer people are willing to pay for music it needs to be rethought, if not thrown out entirely. assuming that music (not to mention music that will be aesthetically pleasing!) will just happen without financing assumes a lot of privilege and it’s something that is rarely talked about.

as far as the idea that an appalled kid is preparing some cobain-style world-changing “thunderclap”… i’m pessimistic about the possibility of that happening because of the sheer amount of noise out there, the subcultures, the fact that fewer and fewer people seem to *want* to look outside their little bubbles, even in the face of tragedy and upheaval. at the very least, i don’t think any tremors this new artist causes will resemble a thunderclap … it’ll probably be more like a slowly gathering snowball rolling down a steep mountain.

I think three things are true: “Lust for Life” is still a great rock song; Iggy Pop is a loser for selling the song to a cruise line (If he did; for all I know he doesn’t control the rights); and this once proud, tweaky, perverted demimonde anthem is ruined for at least one listener, me.

There aren’t clear lines here: art is a continuum; all sorts of things create it, or create the impression of it, and make it last or not last. “Selling out” is a continuum as well. Sure it’s fine if a cool song adorns a movie soundtrack or a TV show, but I think we would all be shocked if “With or Without You,” say, turned up in a Halliburton commercial.

If you disagree with that, then, well, we disagree. The question is why it’s wrong. Let’s go back to art. Who can define it? But if there are any things about it all that are special, it has to do with the artist starting from some place based in honesty and forthrightness and independence. (I have my own theory of rock, that at any given time the most potent strain of it is the sound of a new generation talking to itself, which would require those three characteristics.).

So in talking specifically about young or new or vibrant bands selling their songs, it’s bad because it compromises those origins. Sure, you can create a great song out of pure art … and then sell it. But the next time you write a song, you’re not an artist any more, you’re a potential jingle creator. I’m sorry, but McDonald’s mediates the Shins, and VW mediates Wilco. Maybe it’s corny or romanticized to think that Jeff Tweedy is singing just for me. (And of course the lines of communication were mediated in the past by the label.) But for some part of the band’s audience, in some way, it does, and the band will pay the price, in some fashion, down the road. Moby is a good example. I’m sure he’s living large, but no one’s buying his albums any more.

It comes down to this: At a certain point, you have to decide whether you’re creating music for yourself, or for a Big Mac.

There is a side issue here of honesty. The Shins don’t get up on stage and say, “Hey our songs are for sale for any fast-food operation that will have us. Pass it on!” And bands rarely get quizzed about these things in the press.

Now, as for the economic argument, that’s a side issue as well. Bands never made money from record sales. The idea that all of a sudden they have to get money from Campbell’s soup is crazy. In fact, there are a gazillion new income streams that don’t get talked about—ringtones, iTunes, Rhapsody-style services, and so on and so forth.

This is doubly true for big bands: If you’re a successful artist, you’re making more money than ever before from these new income streams. Adding TV ads into the mix is just being greedy. The Rolling Stones, back in the day, would always be quoted by credulous tour chroniclers “Oh, we need the sponsorship to make the tour profitable.” Bullshit. It made it more profitable. Sting doesn’t need money, and neither does Elvis Costello or Peter Townshend.

Idolator ridicules Hitsville’s position on rock sellouts. (I wrote about Santogold’s grotesque rationales for selling her songs for a Target commercial.) You can read Idolator’s extensive comments on the site, or ponder this contention here:

I like Tom Frank too, but I have to wonder if, in 2008, “rock” really has the same quotient of “perceived coolness” that it did at its genesis, or even on Sept. 24, 1991. If anything, I’d say that the form’s darker days—which, yes, include some “selling out” on the part of its biggest names, from the awful of-the-moment dreck that so many legacy artists put out in the ’80s to the “suggestions” that certain bands work with proven songwriters (Diane Warren, anyone?) to the selling off of certain once-iconic songs to any brand that’ll have them, as well as the recent fragmentation of music, where artists like Santogold create music for and disseminate to, well, an audience that would argue about these sorts of points—has resulted in its coolness quotient going down some. If there is “coolness” (itself a loaded word), it’s not necessarily because of the music; it’s often tied up in ideas of exclusivity or “trading up” to fame in other arenas, whether they’re related to pure celebrity or acting or what-have-you. Pop music has become such a dominant idiom that people almost take it for granted.

I’m pretty sure it all comes down to that last sentence. There has always been pop music, populated by grinning figureheads doing what they have to do to become popular and maintain their visibility in a crowded marketplace. That’s a fine and honorable profession, from Patti Page to Maroon 5. And once in a while they create art, accidentally.

Rock music is something slightly different. I’m willing to debate what exactly rock music is, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t involve helping sell crap on TV.

As I’ve mentioned before, rock may be dead and this is a moot issue. But we’re in a weird area when this sort of thing is not only accepted, but the few dissenting voices are routinely attacked. (I got dinged by Idolator when the mighty Moby Quotient first reared its noble head.) I suspect that what’s going to happen is that, as has happened before, an appalled kid out there even now is preparing a thunderclap or two to remind us that we have been collectively taking leave of our senses of late.

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.

During “Desperate Housewives” last night, John Lennon’s “Real Love” turned up in a J.C. Penny commercial. The plaintive song was first excavated by Yoko Ono as a device to publicize the “Imagine: John Lennon” movie. Then it got pulled out again and reworked by the other three Beatles as something to spice up the second of the “Anthology” sets, back in 1996, and has been turning up in various iterations on this or that Lennon compilation regularly in the years since.

And now here it is again being used to generate what I would assume would be well into the six figures for the Lennon estate. The Moby Quotient gives it a 57 and change, a robust number for a classically skanky move on Yoko Ono’s part.

The Moby Quotient? you ask? Details from the Washpost here, with a calculator here.

More on the Moby Quotient from Hitsville here.

Idolator attacks the Moby Quotient. Concerns about selling out are just a tired boomer trope, it says here:

…Wyman still takes the idea of pop sellouts very seriously. The text of the article leans on all the leaky assumptions that will comfort the Post’s crusty boomer readership–that “Imagine” is more important than “Get Ur Freak On” and therefore in more danger of being “corrupted,” that Kelly Clarkson or Fall Out Boy are somehow less tainted by doing the advertising dance than the Stones.

Why the Stones, artistically speaking, might matter more than Kelly Clarkson is part of the “rockist” vs. “popist” debate. “Popism” is based on the straw man that “rockist” critics don’t appreciate pop music. “Popism” is conveniently indistinguishable in practice from “entertainment journalism” but it lets the people who practice it have a clubhouse and a neat handshake.

Idolator continues:

[C]heck [out] this quote from “one time rock critic” Bill Brown:

“The problem with branding yourself and selling your songs to commercials is the music is no longer for the listener.”

Huh? The repetition of a popular ad has the power to turn a song you love into an annoying earworm, sure. But it’s an odd quirk of boomer critics that songs already designed to reach a mass audience somehow void their warranty when they come into contact with “commerce,” or that a band hawking its song to an advertiser automatically equates to “greed.” It’s become a sad, but viable, option for many during the industry’s never-ending commercial downturn.

1) No one said anything about earworms. 2) Brown’s point isn’t that the song is besmirched by contact with commerce (though that is one of my points); he is saying that the artist is now crafting songs for the audience of the commercial. This has obvious implications, among them the fact that the motivations of the performer will inevitably be at least affected, and most likely changed, by the potential of scoring more Volkswagen money. 3) The rock in commercials epidemic long predates the industry downturn. This is another excuse for greediness. But of course, “popists” aren’t known for their critical thinking.