Every Great Band Should be Shot / Before They Make Their “Combat Rock”

Selling Out, Then and Now
by Jeff Somers

From The Inner Swine Volume 17, Summer 2011, out soon.

IN thinking about this issue, whose vague theme is “the past”, I tried to think of things that really are different today. I mean, I’ve been sentient for several decades. I’ve lived through some shit. I lived through Vanilla Ice and I’ve lived through Space Shuttle Disasters. I should have some wisdom.

Wisdom’s a bitch, though.

Cultural changes are always nebulous and subtle. It’s one thing to take post 1950’s America and compare it to, say, pre-1850’s America and see the stark, obvious differences. Ladies voting, generation gaps, race-relations—they’re all strikingly different. Much more difficult to examine 1950s America and 1960’s America—the differences are a lot more subtle. Change is constant, and accrues slowly, over the course of years, and in the process a lot of it is forgotten.

Take blue jeans: Back in the 1950s, when kids started wearing jeans it was in imitation of workers and undesirable elements in society—it was rebellion. It was a fashion statement. Today, of course, jeans are standard wear for almost any occasion. I’ve seen people go to funerals in jeans. This kind of evolution took years, and now the origins of jeans’ “cool factor” are forgotten by most folks, and people like me only know about it from reading about it.

So thinking back over the last few decades and trying to pick out something cultural that’s changed isn’t as easy as it sounds. I mean, I could bloviate about cell phones and gadgets, but I’m not sure if they’ve really changed the world so much as simply augmented existing behaviors. Things like cell phones or iPads or Kindles are easy to talk about because they’re concrete, and come with definite dates to point to. We here at The Inner Swine never take the easy way out. We work, baby.

And then I saw a commercial.

It was Fergie, unfortunately, shilling for Dr. Pepper. Well, I know it was Fergie (of the Black Eyed Peas, the worst band ever in the history of ever) because a title on the commercial told me so. It doesn’t look anything like any human being I’ve ever seen, frankly:

Shudder.

Anyways, what occurs to me suddenly is that not so long ago, as in clearly within my limited memory, rock stars or actors who wished to be taken seriously never did commercials. Sometimes they would do commercials in Japan, with the expectation that no one in the US would ever see them. I can clearly remember, in college, being outraged whenever some singer or actor I thought had some integrity would show up in a commercial—they were dead to me. My friends and I would be amazed, and sad. It was the sign that your career was in the shitter, frankly.

Now, everything’s different. Somehow, in the course of a few decades, product placement and shilling for corporations has become cool. It has, in fact, become a way to become cool.

I have no idea, exactly, when this happened. In an off-the-cuff, totally unresearched thought (our specialty), I might think of Rap Music, which has gloried in name-dropping brand names for years now. Since most Rappers are cool, it stands to reason that they have convinced everyone that casually mentioning fifteen luxury brands in thirty seconds is, indeed, cool. I have no idea if any Rappers are getting paid for product placement. My instinct is probably not directly, but if you mention how much you love Patron on a platinum record, I wouldn’t be surprised if a few cases of it magically appear in your mansion’s loading dock.

That’s just speculation. I have no idea exactly how we transitioned from the outrage I remember towards sell-outs to the term sell-out not even meaning anything, but it’s definitely happened. It’s not only acceptable, today, for a band to license its music for use in a commercial—it’s actually such a common marketing technique these days that I have little doubt that new bands are not only not avoiding commercial deals, they’re most probably aggressively seeking them out. One fucking iPod commercial is worth like five hundred plays on radio. Also too because no one listens to radio any more.

And that’s part of it—the whole world has changed since I was a kid. Well, not the whole world. There’s still Cheetohs and Yuengling Lager and baseball. The Mets still suck and the Yankees overpay for geezers. The Earth still spins around the sun and I still drink too much, get maudlin, and tell people things I should never tell anyone. But the Entertainment Industry has changed. When I was younger, you got your new music leads from three distinct places: The radio, which was huge and dominating; the MTV, which was new and interesting; and your friends, who were usually totally wrong. About everything. Especially which bands you should buy.

That world is gone now, ashes in history’s mouth. Today the number one way people hear new music is probably iTunes. Or simple file sharing. Or Pandora-like applications and Apps which just trot out new music for you with computerized precision. There’s no clear channel to follow. Want to put out your own album? No problemo. Get yourself some software, some equipment, produce your album at home, and sell it on iTunes. Except no one will ever know you were there. So you have to find ways to get attention. The old A&R model of big labels scouting for the next big thing is almost dead.

In that kind of thin atmosphere, I can understand music groups and other artists grabbing onto anything that’ll weigh them down in people’s minds. If a commercial gives you a chance to be heard by a million people, why the fuck not?

Brace yourself
while
Corporate America
tries to sell us
its
wretched things.

Another aspect of this is the lowered standard of what’s acceptable in popular culture. Back in The Day, there was a sense that any consorting with the Corporate Behemoth must by necessity result in self-censorship and artistic compromise. This because no one wants a degenerate artiste hawking their wares. The assumption that accepting a corporate paycheck means you must now run your lyrics or novels past the company law firm for pre-editing seemed obvious. Anyone who took a commercial had just traded their free expression for money, and that sucked.

Today? Different. I mean, we’re living in a world where you can write a song called Fuck You and no one particularly cares, even if you are required to put out a PG-version if you want wide airplay—which of course you do, because fuck it, everyone knows the joke anyway. Celebrities pretty much talk openly about doing drugs. A lot of the taboos have disappeared, and the establishment not only tolerates what was once considered controversial behavior, it encourages it, because it sells its merchandise. There’s no longer any conflict about taking the corporate money, because the corporate money wants its artists to be cool.

As a result, corporate sponsorship is no longer a bad thing. It’s a good thing. Up is down. Black is white.

***

I have no doubt that at some point in the near future no one under a certain age will even understand what I’m talking about here. It’ll just be standard procedure for bands and comedians and actors and writers to make commercials, endorse products, place products in their productions, and no one will care or comment on the fact. Except bitter old duffers like me, who will be ridiculed and abused. Although, come to think of it, I am ridiculed and abused right now. Although, come to think of it, I’m already an old duffer. Forget I said anything.

I don’t think this means FutureArt will be any worse than it is today, or was 20, 30, 50, 100 years ago. Good work will still be done, and time will grind the dross away as usual. And yes, you bastards, I fully expect my own work to be part of the dross. Maybe that means I should start selling product placement in my stories immediately. Who’s with me?