Five years ago, U2 was promoting the iPod; now Bono is shilling for Apple’s most sophisticated iPhone competitor, the Blackberry, which is sponsoring the band’s latest tour.

The Moby Quotient on this will be low; no one cares about the song and the product isn’t that bad. But Bono has more money than god right now; note how the band went the extra mile for its tour sponsor by actually appearing in a TV ad for the product. And the worst thing is not only is the ad pretty derivative of that Coldplay iPod spot, as Maura Johnston points out—it’s not even as good.

Via Twentyfourbit.com and the Daily Swarm—a rant in the Guardian from Kim Gordon against Radiohead’s In Rainbows pay-what-you-want model:

“[Radiohead] did a marketing ploy by themselves and then got someone else to put it out,” Gordon told The Guardian’s David Peschek. “It seemed really community-oriented, but it wasn’t catered towards their musician brothers and sisters, who don’t sell as many records as them. It makes everyone else look bad for not offering their music for whatever. It was a good marketing ploy and I wish I’d thought of it! But we’re not in that position either. We might not have been able to put out a record for another couple of years if we’d done it ourselves: it’s a lot of work. And it takes away from the actual making music.”

Gordon, like other artists, obviously hasn’t really thought about what it was exactly that Radiohead did. Community had nothing to do with it.

The idea was that, since the music was going to be available online anyway, why not try to get in front of the issue and make it as easy to pay for as get for free?

Did it work for Radiohead? It looks like it. In the end, the band’s publisher claimed three million “sales” for the album, which I guess is reasonable when you take into account foreign tallies, its own offering, and iTunes, which the group finally broke down and joined.

Since Radiohead released the thing on its own, taking far more from each transaction than the $2 or $3 it might have gotten from EMI, the financial take should have been correspondingly breathtaking, notwithstanding the fact that some fans paid less than they would have otherwise. (The group is also said to have unloaded 100,000 $80 special editions of In Rainbow on fans, representing another chunk of change.)

What does that total? $25 million?

Anyway, back to SY. Leaving aide Gordon’s double-reverse ironic/not-ironic patois, which I bold-faced above, Radiohead wasn’t devaluing its music. It was just dealing with reality, which, unfortunately or unfortunately, has devalued music period.

The question is whether the same opportunities are available to Sonic Youth. The answer is, mutantis mutandis, yes and no. Sure they can do it, but no, they’re not going to make as much money out of it.

Why? Because they’re Sonic Youth.

The real irony here is that the group is one of those bands who probably did better than they should have with its major-label deal, in this case with Geffen; it’s hard to imagine they ever made money for the label. The band seems to have left it amicably—i.e., without any money owing, though its hard to see how it could have recouped its advances from the heady Nevermind era. On the other hand, there’s been this or that re-release of things like Goo, which would presumably bring the band a little bit of money.

Then as now, one of Sonic Youth’s selling points has paradoxically always been its uncommerciality.

Today, on Matador, they would probably benefit from higher royalties, but get much smaller advances and of course benefit from less marketing, the corresponding fewer sales and, inevitably, much less interest from fans. That why it’s gotten on the “We’re gonna play one of our old albums in its entirety” bandwagon—and why it made that ludicrous deal with Starbucks.

Here’s Lee Renaldo, incidentally, explaining that little deal to the Guardian, which deserves credit for bringing it up:

“It didn’t take a lot of blood and sweat from us. We thought we’d try it and see what happens. There’s a certain side to this group that likes perversity, and that’s a pretty perverse concept. At that time, Starbucks were selling records when no one else was. The majors were throwing up their hands. The irony is, for all the spewing it caused on the blogs, it is our most rare record. I have never seen a copy in a store, and I’ve never met anyone who’s seen a copy in a store.”

Funny how Renaldo pats himself on the back for the creepy association, trying to spin it as being radical. (”I threw a drink in this woman’s face. I wasn’t being an asshole; I was being perverse.”) He’s just rationalizing doing a promo deal with a coffee shop trying to look hip. The fact that it wasn’t successful after the band pocketed its fee underscores again the fact that Sonic Youth has done pretty well in its career from the kindness of strangers.

The idea of the old-fashioned major keeping major artistes on board even when they didn’t make any money was always overstated; in the end, its difficult to separate out them from those to whom the labels just paid too much for, given their sales records.

But in the world we live in today cozy homes for the likes of Sonic Youth will be very rare; all it really has, in the end, is that cool factor, which will decline with each Starbucks deal. Gordon’s snipe at Radiohead, which after all is just doing its best to make its own place in that new world, is perhaps a sign of the pressure getting to them.

Jimmie Fallon is comedically spineless, and has the moral ethos of a timid paramecium. So the news that he’ll be shilling on his new show for Bing, Microsoft’s umpteenth attempt to get into the search game, won’t besmirch his persona.

From the NYT:

[T]he segments on “Late Show” will present Mr. Fallon as a quiz master, asking contestants to use bing.com to search for answers to questions in categories like travel, health and shopping.

“ ‘Bing’ sounds like a Jimmy Fallon word,” Mr. Silverman said, laughing. “The alignment is great.”

In this way, Bing is the new Garden Weasel.

What will be interesting to watch from here on in is how NBC (and Fallon’s creator and puppetmaster, Lorne Michaels) will handle a name host whom they have essentially formed out of clay, and who will obviously do whatever he is told.

These days, 10 or 20 years in the life of a modern media franchise is unimaginable. But in theory, when Conan O’Brien* finishes his time on the Tonight Show there will be an even more pliable shell waiting in the wings—one who makes the pliable Jay Leno** seem difficult.

Since Bing is owned by Microsoft, Fallon probably won’t suffer the same fate as Whoopi Goldberg, a star with similarly high standards in her commercial affiliations, who jumped into bed a while back with another one of those newfangled internets companies and brought home a little problem. (If you’ll recall, she was suddenly the ubitquitous spokesperson for a misbegotten outfit called Flooz.com, which ended up screwing a lot of its customers out of their money when it shut down abruptly.)

As for Bing—Microsoft’s last search gambit, you will recall, involved paying people to use it. (This was the euphoniously named, oddly unsuccessful “Live Search Cashback.”)

The only problem with that was that M’soft couldn’t get advertisers on the thing. After chatting with Steve Ballmer on the subject, one reporter in all seriousness speculated that he was considering paying advertisers to support the idea as well.

At the time, Hitsville contended that the only way to improve on this innovative business model would be if Microsoft also just bought the companies’ products and gave them to consumers, thereby guaranteeing the ads’ success.

————

* Has O’Brien been funny yet in his new show? After presidential-transition-level coverge in the Times, it was hard not to be at least curious. But I’ve seen only tepid laughs, flop sweat, and O’Brien’s inability to stop hitting the desk top, the thumps from which echo uncomfortably into his mike.

Sample line: Joan Rivers is trying to sell her NYC apartment for $25 million. “It sounds high, but knowing Joan Rivers, it’s probably had a lot of work done.” The audience laughed tepidly, but O’Brien didn’t blink: He followed that up with a Larry King joke.

** Speaking of hacks, Neil Strauss does a blowjob interview with Jay Leno in the newest Rolling Stone. (There’s a short excerpt here; RS doesn’t generally put whole features online.) The departure of Leno from late night would be a nice moment to reflect on a guy who after 17 years on the job will leave no footprints—a colorless gladhander, a host simulacrum. Carson held him in contempt, as does, patently, David Letterman. But Strauss, no doubt looking for a new ghostwriting gig, doesn’t ask Leno anything remotely challenging.

Keith Richard’s done one, too:

The spot isn’t online right now, but Todd Rundgren has sold his classic hit “Hello It’s Me” to an antacid tablet commercial.

The song is one of the ineffable glories of its era, a mournful throwaway rag-picked from an early Nazz release and reimagined (for Something/Anything, Rundgren’s best album) as a jazz-pop classic, the glorious offspring of Carole King and Steely Dan.

It’s also about the little things, from the arresting bass triplet that starts the song to the insistent, keyboard-driven beat; from Rundgren’s gentle, unaffected vocals to a sax solo (which as I recall was done by one of the Brecker Bros.) as groovy as anything from the era.

Todd, you might say, is in the details.

Anyway, it’s now a commercial for Tums, and it’s going to be hard to hear it from now on without figuring it’s your acid reflux saying “Hello It’s Me.”

You gotta admit it makes a certain amount of sense, and I suppose Rundgren can make more money off the song by selling it to other treatments for digestive ailments (”When your diarrhea says ‘Hello it’s me,’ try Pepto Bismol!”).

Not to mention cold sores, acne or even herpes outbreaks.

I’ve been thinking about sellouts lately; a few weeks ago, a friend of mine, exasperated by my to-his-lights-doltish insistence on mocking such deals, wrote:

When a recording artist “sells out,” what has he sold? Can what he sold be resold? Is the sale permanent? Is it a bad metaphor? If the cliche didn’t exist, what would we call a recording artist who signed some sort of exclusive/promotional deal? Did Les Paul sell out to Gibson? etc. Is giving a label exclusive rights to sell your recordings “selling out”? Is endorsing a line of musical instruments or amps “selling out”?

To me, “selling out” is as good a metaphor as any, but it doesn’t have to be seen in that way. The issue comes up when artists embrace rock’s attitudinal posturings early in their career, and then turn around and sell the songs they made their reputation with to some TV ad.

Now, some stipulations: There’s a lot of crappy rock songs out there. And there’s rock that is as dishonest and cheesy as any commercial. But those posturings are real, and they put rock’s philosophical center of gravity some distance away from doing jingles to assist the branding objectives of a particular product of a large corporation.

(I don’t have a problem with a rock song about nausea, or diarrhea, or one that advises taking medication to take care of any problem; the issue is shilling for a product you don’t necessarily use—and that just as well might be bad for you or others.)

I’m not saying it’s fair: Rock and roll is a cruel mistress, and sometimes great artists end up financially out of luck. (The Moby Quotient, you will note, takes this into account.)

But: You don’t have to play the game if you don’t want to. So if you do, you deserve to get called on it when you sell your songs for an ad.

(There’s a tangential media issue, incidentally; there seems often to be a tacit agreement between journalists and sellouts not to ask about the commercials.)
So that’s the main point: If you buy into rock’s authenticity construct, you have to live by it.

What I don’t understand is what all of a suden we’re not allowed to even talk about this. Idolator, for example, mocked Hitsville when the Moby Quotient made its majestic first appearance in the pages of the Washington Post.

I attributed the phenomenon then, and still do, to the myrmidons of popism, who get fretful anytime you say anything that might make rock stars or their publicists unhappy.

But you could also put it this way: The extent you care about this in directly  related to whether, as a matter of first principles, you believe that rock and roll holds a special place in the pop-cultural firmament or that it doesn’t.

If you don’t, in a way you’ve excluded yourself in the discussion, because you don’t have anything at stake in it.

That said, you might consider whether there’s any line you will draw. Should Saul Bellow have done commercials? Should he have stuck in some paid product placement in his novels? (”Saul: Manischewitz wants in; can you have someone making matzoh?”)

Should David Foster Wallace have done Absolute ads, maybe, or done commercials for a hip new web site? (”When I’m looking up obscure information to pack into one of my signature orotund footnotes, I surf over to About.com!”)

Symphony orchestras are facing financial cutbacks; should Daniel Barenboim stop a Chicago Symphony concert (as I once saw Gary U.S. Bonds stop one of his shows) …  ask the audience what time it is … answer “Miller Time!,” pop open a bottle and take a swig … before continuing with the show?

In other words, you either believe in art as an activity separate from the crassly commercial or you don’t.

Again, there is no clear line: Rock isn’t a sound; it’s a state of mind, a big tent, a continuum. (”Rock is what you vote for,” Robert Christgau used to write on Pazz & Jop ballots.)

There was always pop music; rock came around about half-way through the last century and after a decade or so of experimentation coalesced around some core values.

One of those values was an understanding (I didn’t say rejection) of the idea of a line between art and commerce. Early on, in fact, the Rolling Stones did a Rice Krispies commercial; the Jefferson Airplane did a Levi’s ad. But there weren’t too many others.

There are many reasons most didn’t, but the main one was that rock traffics to some extent on authenticity; that the emotion and art conveyed through the music is genuine. Again, there’s a continuum: From Phil Ochs to David Bowie, from Patti Smith to Beck, artists have ranged between jut-jawed sincerity and disguised (even mocked) emotions.

Still, they haven’t shilled for crappy products. If the stigma to selling out didn’t exist, why has it been followed so closely by the vast majority of artists?

If people are talking about how a CD is being sold more than they are the actual music on the disc, let the buyer beware.

Latest candidate for Sellout Watch is Prince, who is selling his new release exclusively at Target:

The ad is for a three-CD set the retailer is offering for about twelve bucks. One of the records is by a protege; the other two are by him.

I’m happy to listen to any Prince album, but I’m pretty sure that these will be like the ones he’s been tossing out for the last ten years: interesting, but with few actual good songs you’d want to hear again.

In the Nineties, of course, Prince did the same thing—recorded too few good songs—but made it worse with a decade of petulant behavior. He tried to change his name to a symbol and fought idiotically with his record company*. Even his shows became self-indulgent and unfun**.

But faced with a potential Michael Jackson problem (expenditures of a star, but lacking star-level income), he started playing nice, doing interviews, reasserting his live chops and, not least, racheting up the marketing.

That’s why he played the Super Bowl. The Target deal is just the latest example we’ve seen of an artist figuring out ways to monetize something (generally their recordings) that really don’t have much worth any more, either aesthetically or commercially.

The sellers (the remorselessly focused Target***, in this instance, but they range from Starbucks to Wal-Mart) are using the artists as brand identifiers, so they don’t care about the quality of the product they are sluffing off on their customers. (Among other things, Prince no longer has to worry about a label person telling him his new record sucks.)

The artists get free TV promotion; I might have missed a more grievous example, but I’m pretty sure Prince dancing around in that Target-red landscape represents a new low for craven selling out by a once-serious artist. (When he was whining about Warner Bros., he wrote the word “slave” on his cheek; in this ad, he all but has a Target logo tattooed on his forehead.)

This is pure gold for the retailer, since the real point of the ads is to get folks into the stores to buy stuff other than the CD in question, which is being sold as a loss leader in any case. And, again, the retailers don’t have to worry about customer satisfaction.

In the event, the Prince set is expected to sell 150,000 to 200,000 units; that’s much less than what AC/DC or the Eagles sold, fewer even that what Axl Rose did with his execrable Best Buy deal for the quickly forgotten Chinese Democracy.

But he doesn’t care, but he’s already taken home a truckload of cash. I don’t know how the deal is structured. Under traditional label-retailer arrangements, a store might pay, in crude terms, $10 per CD wholesale and sometimes sell the discs below cost to get people into the store.

For all I know, the store could just be paying Prince a flat sum and would just take the new release off his hands. (From what I’ve read, part of the appeal to the artist is that there are no returns of unsold discs.)

So it’s hard to tell how much money the deal is ultimately worth; if the store is giving him the equivalent of $15 per unit (i.e., for each three-disc package), sales of 500,000 total, which is all that seems likely unless he pulls off a fluke hit, would mean the deal would be worth $7.5 million. That’s a heady premium, of course, over the $1 million, say, he might have gotten under typical industry royalty rates a decade ago.

Since Target is selling the things for $12, its net cost might only be $1.5 million for the deal, which just comes out of its marketing budget.

So it’s all good for Prince … until his next release, when a new search for a marketing novelty begins.

* Warner Bros., against which Prince carried out a range war in the late 1990s, signed him as a teen and gave him creative control of his recordings. He had decades of stardom to revise his contracts to his liking.

** Here’s a live blog from EW showing that Prince is still acting the diva live; doing a series of three shows, he started a half-hour to an hour late in each, and couldn’t be bothered to get the sound right. When artists have sound problems, as he did that night, they like to play the victim. But it’s their show! Who else is responsible? If there are sound problems, it means they probably didn’t bother to do a sound check.

*** I was once at a panel discussion at the Pulitzer Art Museum in St. Louis; for some reason, a Target exec had been included on the dais. When it came time for her to speak, she hijacked the event by playing a ten- or fifteen-minute long Target promotional video.

The use of the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Today” in that Visa commercial (YouTube link at the bottom of this post) was sadder than most; as I said, Corgan always seemed like a principled guy. And he just finished a presumably remunerative reunion tour. And now U2, once haranguing us about iPods, now has a tour sponsored by the Blackberry, creating all sorts of cognitive dissonance in the minds of celebrity-influenced potential smart phone buyers.

Comments:

Jeremiah:

Do music artists have an social obligation to remain poor, or at least, non-wealthy?

Can the work of a wealthy artist be taken seriously?

Can someone have a corporate affiliation *and* artistic vision, or are these mutually exclusive concepts?

HV: I didn’t say anything about wealth! There’s any number of ways a celebrity can make money, obviously. I’m juat drawing a line at a certain place, based on what I feel are issues inherent in the artistic medium they’re working in. And again, I’m not proposing a law. I’m just calling public attention and heaping ridicule. Entirely legitimate responses.

And yes, ultimately, they are mutally exclusive concepts. Rock ‘n’ roll is a cruel mistress.  

J.T. Ramsay:

Is “Sellout Watch” really appropriate for a band that has been doing cross-promotional stuff forever? They did a ‘Batman Forever’-themed video in 1996!

HV: Movies are a gray area. Whatever. I thought the original iPod arrangement was bogus. The issue isn’t how cool the product is. The issue is selling one’s celebrity to boost a corporate product. If Bono liked iPods so much he should have done it for free. It’s a slippery slope. One day it’s an iPod and the next it’s a Garden Weasel. The problem is that at some point the artist gets to thinking, Will this sound good on a Pattery Barn commercial?

Jeremiah:

Was Corgan lucky enough to have deals where he actually administers the rights to his work? Is it even his to begin with?

I ask (because I don’t know). If its a situation where his publisher just went over his head, then maybe the blame should be placed there….

HV: I don’t know the details of Corgan’s contracts, but I can’t imagine that, either in his first Caroline/Virgin deals (at the height of the image-conscious alternarock era) or anything that has transpired since, post-stardom, he would not retain veto power at the very least, and probably complete control through his publishing. See next comment.

JMG:

No Jeremiah, Corgan has control over the rights to their work by virtue of the fact that they re-negotiated their contract with Virgin records right after Mellon Collie became huge. He can license his songs as he pleases.

But on that note, Bill, I fail to see how this is selling out. This is the new business model. Sure it sucks, but if it gets some kid to ask “hey, what’s that?” and provokes him/her to buy “Siamese Dream”, then Nirvana, then Garbage, then Hole, then the Ramones, then Television, then Velvet Underground, then Leonard Cohen, et. al., then I think it was a job well done. Though I’m sure Steve Albini might have something to say about it given his well known spat about that record with a certain critic.

Sure, it means something because Corgan has previously been very protective of this song in particular…..but that being said, I don’t think it means that people will suddenly stop liking Siamese Dream or any of the other work just because :gasp: the opening notes for “Today” is in a Visa commercial. Why the young fan above (and those like him) take this stuff so seriously is far beyond me. The same people who bitch about this also buy their clothes at Urban Outfitters…..which plays licensed music by the same artists who supposedly are too principled to not license their songs. Moby’s “Play” was used EVERYWHERE because he licensed the hell out of that album, but it’s still an album I enjoy. I still love Zeppelin….I don’t care that “Rock and Roll” was used in a Cadillac commercial. If you’re going to be picky enough that you’ll turn your back on an artist simply because he or she licensed a song, you’re turning your back on a very large and storied group of music. Go listen to classical music…..oh wait, THAT has been used in every single classic cartoon by Warner Brothers known to man. How about we all just hum to ourselves?

I’m going to listen to Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” right now….you know, the same song that was used in a car commercial only a few short years ago.

HV: Just because it is a (not “the) new business model doesn’t mean it’s not selling out. Artists can of course do what they want with what they produce. The problem comes when one minute they’re up on stage acting all defiant and counter-cultural, and the next they’re backstage on a cell selling their songs to a SUV commercial.

Hitsville’s proposal: That artists with that in mind should take the time to stop at some point during their live performances to say, “Hey, these songs are available for purchase by any company looking to stir up a little brand excitiment with a contemporary youth culture soundtack. Call my agent or details; we can show you how your sales can positively jump with an exciting new sound to help make your image sing!”—and then go back to rockin’ the house. 

Joe:

I wish I owned a huge media company. I’d offer that young man in the second video a few hundred grand to star in a Rockstar Energy Drink commercial just to see what he’d say.

Then make a YouTube video blasting him.

Jody Macgregor:

“Not just any commercial, but a fucking terrible commercial.”

The kid’s got a point there.

HV: And … isn’t the song about suicidal feelings?

Of course, that’s how a lot of people feel when they see their Visa interest rates.

Jim Goldman at CNBC recalls the halcyon days of U2 and iPods, where Bono talked about how cool they were and Steve Jobs even deigned to hug Bono on stage.

Flash forward a couple of years and U2 … has a tour sponsored by Blackberry.

And Bono is the big-name face of a hedge firm, Elevation Partners that … owns 39 percent of Palm.

Hey Bono—which smart phone should I buy?

This arrangement doesn’t even seem very smart. Let’s just say that the iPod deal was sooo 2004. But neither Elevation nor Rim could be happy right now with Bono’s relationship with the other company.

More irritating is how, in the scads of press coverage the ban received in its typically masterful marketing campaign for an album and tour, no one bothered to put Bono on the spot about his myriad product associations in just one little corner of the technoverse.

There’s also signs that the companies are getting a little pushy about getting more for their millions of sponsorship money than just a couple of signs in the halls. In this case, Live Nation, which I assume masterminded the deal for the band under its 360 contract, got this statement from the band’s manager, hilariously cliché corporatespeak emphasis added:

Manager Paul McGuinness said in this morning’s release: “This tour announcement marks the first stage of a relationship and shared vision between RIM and U2 that we expect will lead to new and innovative ways to enhance the mobile music experience on the BlackBerry platform for U2 fans. We look forward to sharing more details as the relationship unfolds.”

Managers of a rock band as big as U2 like to think of themselves as (and, indeed, often act like) colossi bestriding the globe. Kind of fun to see him mouthing bullshit like that.

This is only the beginning, remember, of a brave new world of such—what’s the phrase?—oh yeah, “shared visions.”  It won’t be too long before we see the artists themselves uttering such stuff.

This is kind of sad; you’d think Corgan, a not unprincipled guy, made a lot of money during his fairly charmed career, and presumably made some retirement money last fall with the Pumpkins’ reunion tour.

He’s lost at least one idealistic fan, in the form of this industrious poster:

The Moby Quotient is μ32.01

Dylan is an iconoclast’s iconoclast; has sold one of his songs to some unexpectedly strange company every once in a while to (in his mind, I suppose) keep us on our toes; and is getting quite old (68 this year) and can be given some slack. Still, the commercial below is jarring. It’s for one of those silly sugar-water companμies, the most celebrity-heavy product he’s ever sold one of his songs to.

The theme of the commercial, if I am understanding the ad agency’s point correctly, is that there are patterns in our cultural life… “Beach Blanket Bingo” at one time, “Step Up 2 the Streets” these days, Belushi then, Jack Black now etc. etc.

(Logically, that would mean we should be looking for something instead of Pepsi today, but the company I think is making the argument that it has reinvented itself. After all, it has a new logo.)

Two interesting things. Race is implicit in the ad; Pepsi can’t explicitly show Obama, so it settles for some black and white crowd footage and then color that could pass for cell-phone footage of Obama’s Chicago homecoming appearance.

Is it me or does the ad go seriously awry here? There are two many overtones that don’t quite jell. John Belushi’s Blues Brothers persona isn’t exactly the best thing to show; it wasn’t exactly blackface, but it was a clumsy and soul-absent caricature.

And while Will.i.am has demonstrated some growth as an artist, producer and activist it can charitably be said that he is something less than a epochal cultural innovator.

All that said, the worst thing is that an aging rock star has agreed to sell one of his most cherished songs to help promote one of the silliest products out there—and to have the novelty of his involvement increase the effectiveness of the ad even more, as Pepsi gets secondary coverage of the ad itself.

This is a case for the mighty Moby Quotient, and produces a very high figure of μ110. By that objective determination this is one of the greatest sell-out moves of all time.

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

More on the Moby Quotient from Hitsville here.

“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.