I was on the Fence Records Beefboard the other day and someone mentioned that he had heard The Aliens’ Happy Song on telly being used to advertise the Disney Channel, and said that “a little part of my soul died.” Now, to be clear, he wasn’t criticising The Aliens for the fact that their song had been attached to something so depressingly saccharine, crassly vapid and utterly banal as the Disney Channel. He was just lamenting this being the way of the world at the moment.
Now, this conjured a couple of thoughts in my mind. Firstly, people are slowly developing a marked immunity to a lot of advertising (article, article). And secondly, despite its importance, no-one has quite figured out how to advertise properly on the internet yet either, as evidenced by the slightly comical attempts of spammers, flashing banner merchants and employers of those idiotic pop-up windows. Basically, this sort of idiotic flailing about just alienates people, so what else can they do?
Well, one of the most popular methods at the moment is the removal of the barriers between content and advertising: basically turning all content into a kind of ungodly co-branding exercise whereby the more prominent the usage and the more key the moment, the better. For a band, this means placing a song in that climactic final five minutes where we all realise that if everyone is just ‘there for you’ (whatever the fuck that imbecilic phrase means) then life will be all beer & skittles.
So far so obvious. I think most of us knew that already. So what does this do for bands and the concept of selling out? Well TV and movies are already balls-deep in this particular fatted calf, as anyone who saw the downright embarrassing come-shots of that Audi in I, Robot can testify. Both these media are completely compromised now, and frequently one big advertorial, so in all honesty, fuck ‘em.
Music, on the other hand, will find it very difficult to shoehorn a line about, say, Sony laptops into a song, but plenty of people sing about their favourite shoes and spaff all over iPods and god knows what else which, whether or not they receive any actual cash for doing so, is essentially the same thing – co-branding, brand network curation, whatever punchable buzzword you happen to prefer. The hardest aspect of this kind of thing is the impossible blurring of the lines between someone who is simply being honest, and someone who is being a corporate shill.
Several bloggers, for example, advertise eMusic on their sites with various levels of evangelism. They get money for doing so, assuming people take them up on it, but they are almost all completely up-front about their reasons and almost all being completely sincere – eMusic really is the best music download service out there, and just about the only thing keeping me honest in this digital age.
As a band, money is always involved. If you want to make a living as a band you have to sell your music to people. So it’s all very well for legends like Tom Waits with a cast-iron back catalogue to refuse all commercial use of his music, because he can afford to. But I have seen too many of my friends play shitty gigs in grotty venues where the few people there spend the entire evening talking over the music to begrudge anyone saying ‘oh, sod it, alright’ if a company wants to use their song in a trailer, even for something as meretricious as the Disney Channel.
But as to marketing by association, it is almost certainly something we are going to have to get used to, and I don’t think it will be easy to do so. I detest, absolutely detest, the sort of American TV show that is becoming one of the best sources of exposure for emerging bands. Teeth-grindingly awful programs like The OC, Grey’s Anatomy, Lost and, going a little further back in time, Dawson’s fucking Creek. I don’t know what’s worse, their toe-curling desperation to be so cool they could sprain something at any minute or the need for society to have the empty, passive act of watching the same pointless television programs in common to act as some sort of social glue.
Consequently, if the scabrous marketing departments for these entities alight upon the same things as myself in the search for the new and the interesting then I genuinely feel tainted by association. You may think this is shallow, but I make no apology. It feels a bit less special if it has been fondled by the slippery fingers of the bleeding edge marketeers of this world, and I feel a bit less happy to like it.
That said, one of the best sources of exposure for our favourite bands is increasingly going to be this sort of circle-jerk festival of mutual ego massage which reeks of selling out – it just smells as fishy as hell to me – but I don’t think it really is. I may be aggravated if I were to hear, say, Honeytrap on The OC, because it is a program made about cunts, by cunts for cunts, but it would certainly not be Honeytrap’s fault. Those producers are basically fans, the same as we are. They’re only possibly compromising themselves in doing so, if they are claiming to like bands they don’t just because they thing The Kids will be impressed. But in this case, again, it is not the band, it is them.
So Madonna writing songs to peddle Gap clothes which she may like, but I would put money on her not loving, is selling out. This imbecilic stunt is certainly selling out. But music is still a commercial industry, and selling your music to people is an unavoidable part of the business. So fuck, if someone, even in The OC, mentioned reading Song, by Toad I’d fall off my chair in delighted surprise.
But as soon as money is involved, we need to be very suspicious. Bands may well be honest in their support of products, but it is sincerity that seems to me to be the core of the sell-out. Sincerity is notoriously hard to detect though, especially as we have a nasty habit of conflating a band’s opinions and motives with our own. But I do believe that in the end a consistent lack of sincerity is very hard to keep hidden, so don’t worry about what your band chooses to associate themselves with, worry about how much they seem to mean it. Even Chris Martin, for all his crimes against music, seems sincere.
Honeytrap – Death Before the Silver Screen My favourite song of the year? Quite possibly.
The Clash – Complete Control
Barry Adamson – You Sold Your Dreams
And, for the kings and queens of advertising, I actually really like these two songs. Yes, Moby. Ah fuck off, so crucify me. I like it, alright?
Moby – Run On
Goldfrapp – Paper Bag
