My old bandmate Kevin Murphy used to say, “I’d love to sell out, but nobody’s buying.” He was ready to make peace with the devil who’s always lurking on the fringes of the artistic mind, ready to ink a transaction, but that brimstoned personage had gone off for some smiting or something and wouldn’t come back.
The very phrase “selling out” is telling. Every artist has to make a living, and most of us want to make that living doing something in the neighborhood of actual art. And that’s where things get interesting, at least in a capital-driven wonderland like the United States. If your artistic vision is to be recognized for its particular imprimatur, its traces of you and only you, that vision has to remain uncluttered by mere venal concerns. Yet almost everyone outside the arts world thinks “success” equals being recognized by the greedy-eyed denizens of the box seats.
Just look at the poor sods on American Idol. They spend years honing their abilities and trying to find a voice all their own, go through a phalanx of prickly judges, and every week are forced to make a “Ford video shoot,” i.e., a dumb ad that has, horribly enough, managed to breach the wall between TV show and paid time. How would one of those contestants fare if, say, his mother had met an untimely end in a Ford Explorer and he felt a little funny about promoting the company? It is clearly assumed that paying that particular piper is an unavoidable part of the voyage.
Right here in the Valley, you’ll find musicians who’ve decided they are comfortable with selling their skills to advertisers. Longtime Valley resident and songwriter Cliff Eberhardt is a veteran of ad campaigns—he is, in fact “the heartbeat of America,” or at least the voice of that insistent Chevrolet jingle. Eberhardt went on to bigger recognition for his self-generated musical efforts, so it bears asking: did he “sell out,” or fund the dream most musicians are after? Where is the line, and is it bright-eyed naivete to think it matters?
At the other extreme of that debate lies Tom Waits, who has not only avoided being involved in advertising efforts, but aggressively pursued legal action against anyone who even imitated his voice for an ad. (Early on, though, even he did a voiceover for a Purina ad, a move he’s since said he deeply regrets.) According to the Tom Waits Library online, he told an interviewer, “I mean, you can glue decals all over your head that say ‘Coca-Cola’ and ‘Pepsi’ and advertise cigarettes and underwear. That’s one way to get across. You know, like race drivers that have every product known to man tattooed across the side of their car. And a lot of groups choose to align themselves with big companies to underwrite their tours. I hate that shit.”
I’ve never had any love to spare for television advertising, which seems to me, aside from the ham-fisted local variety, to be a refined and legitimized synonym for lying with pictures. My blood pressure spikes the instant some insipid voiceover oozes about “the leading brand of bottled Italian dressing” with a money-fueled helium whine. But that doesn’t mean I have a clear notion of what’s selling out and what isn’t. What if you genuinely like something, and don’t mind promoting it? What if, like Eberhardt, you have a tremendous well of talent and are using the ad companies just as much as they use you?
This seems like a modern conundrum until you remember that Michelangelo and all those other great masters did a majority of their work for either the church or rich patrons who wanted to be painted into all those holy scenes. It’s not a new question. Even so, the contemporary version of this age-old struggle is particularly insidious—how many creative types have run up against the assumption that their talents will be harnessed to something like making ads or doing public relations with nary a thought spared for the different nature and merit of the result? (And what exactly is “advertising art”? Does it belong on gallery walls?)
When I spoke to local songwriter Philip Price this week for Behind the Beat he told me that perhaps he should write jingles, because his melodic ideas are often short and he has to expand them into longer compositions.
Maybe it really is just that simple. Music is music and art is art, no matter what. And maybe I’m just a malcontent. But I’ll stick to my guns: fulfilling the incessant desire of that waiting devil to co-opt an artist’s work to turn a greasy buck demeans the artist. When Price sings, “Lose the lights on the palace rooftops, lose the lanterns in the foxholes, douse the fires in the fields of dry crops, or none of this might get told,” it’s a much more beautiful thing than if he sang, “none of this might get sold.”