Five Song Friday: Making Peace with Selling Out
This Week: Cat Fights, Russian Novelists and Topless Dads
Do you remember when hearing a cool song in a commercial felt like blasphemy?
“Selling out” used to be a big deal.
Music fans lost their minds when Led Zeppelin licensed “Rock and Roll” to Cadillac in 2001.
I remember watching the riots on TV. People trashed their Marriott hotel rooms, looted the Yankee Candle store and set fire to a Sunglass Hut. It was insane.
But Zeppelin lead singer Robert Plant didn’t see the problem.
“If you hear that music in as many possible places as you can outside of the normal home for it, then it can only be a good thing,” he said.
It was definitely a good thing for Cadillac. The company saw a 16% boost in sales from the commercial. And for a while, Caddies became the “bad boys” of luxury sedans.
Older Americans who already owned Cadillacs discovered “drifting” and face tattoos. They doubled parked and “flipped the bird” at strangers. The world took on a whole “Cocoon meets Mad Max” vibe for a while.
Such is the power of music.
But now, the other shoe has dropped onto the other foot.
Today, the big winners when catchy songs meet Madison Avenue are the people who MAKE the music. Times have changed and “sell out” is no longer used as an insult.
(Fun fact: “Selling out” is now seen as a good thing, since “selling out” means that you have exhausted all of your inventory and made as much money as possible!)
Commercials are just another channel of distribution like iTunes, TikTok or TODAY with Hoda & Jenna.
Maybe this trend started back in 1999 when Volkswagen used Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” in an ad for their Cabriolet convertible.
Before the spot, Drake’s 1972 album of the same name, had sold around 6,000 copies. According to Billboard, by 2004, that number rose to 329,000.
Great news for Nick Drake, right?
It would have been… if he wasn’t already dead. Drake died of an overdose in 1974 and never got to see his beautifully sad song about depression enjoy its second wind as “that song from the VW commercial.”
Artists in 2022 are okay with sharing their music with big name brands, but I was raised a Generation X cynic. My generation was born suspicious of “The Man” because we were stuck between stations.
On one side were the hippies who were still raging against capitalism and conformity. On the other side were the yuppies and entrepreneurs who embraced the idea that “greed was good” and life was all about “caviar dreams and champagne wishes.”
My generation liked it best when the stuff we liked stayed put in that sweet spot between the mainstream and the underground. As long as bands hung out below the radar, we were in. Once something broke through, we bailed.
And if a band sold their soul for a commercial? Sacrilege. An unforgivable sin in the eyes of all devout indie hipster types.
I was definitely a snob about it for years. But two incidents really changed my way of thinking.
I remember at a Breeders concert in 2000, this guy jumped on stage to protest the use of “Cannonball” in a Nissan Sentra commercial. He shouted “TRAITORS!” before dousing himself with beer and trying to light himself on fire. Thankfully, it was draft beer which isn’t very flammable. But I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if it was a pale ale.
Then there was the demonstration during REM’s final tour in 2008. About 30 people chained themselves to a tree outside of Madison Square Garden to protest Michael Stipe’s new job as a brand ambassador for Del Monte Creamed Corn.
That seemed a bit over the line since Stipe wasn’t using any of the band’s music and never let his promotional work interfere with recording or performing. I remember thinking, “Leave the man alone! His PR work for canned vegetables isn’t hurting anybody. Can’t we all just get along?”
That’s when I realized that I’d been lied to.
For years, I was warned that mixing art with commerce would create a disaster of epic proportions and nothing would ever be cool or great anymore.
But art and commerce hooked up lots of times. They’ve become inseparable over the last 20 years and you know what? Everything is fine and nothing is terrible.
Art and commerce have turned out to be a lovely couple.
So much so that today when we see an Apple commercial for earbuds that is basically one long Harry Styles commercial, we’re like, okay! That’s good. Everything is fine!
Or when Megan Thee Stallion comes on pitching “Hottie Sauce” for Popeye’s? No problem! All good! Everything is fine!
Or when Walker Hayes records a song called “Fancy Like” that not only mentions Applebee’s, Wendy’s, Maybelline, Tesla, Vespa and Victoria’s Secret but ACTUALLY NAME DROPS MENU ITEMS IN THE LYRICS?
Yeah, we fancy like Applebee's on a date night (that's right)
Got that Bourbon Street steak with the Oreo shake (ayy)
No problem! It’s okay! EVERYTHING IS FINE.
You want to completely obliterate the line between art and commerce? Great.
Is it a commercial or a song? Or BOTH? Whatever! All good!
EVERYTHING. IS. FINE.
(Fun Fact: This is actually not fine.)
Thank you for reading.
Let’s be careful out there.
DJ Crankypete
Five Song Friday 017
“Work With What You Got” - Socalled
Oh Canada, it looks like I just can’t quit you.
So here’s another goddamn musical genius from the Great White North.
This one is named Socalled (aka Joshua Dolgin), who likes to mix hip hop, klezmer, drum & bass and folk music… LIKE SOME KIND OF PSYCHO.
Does it work? Of course. Because goddamn Canada can’t do anything wrong, can they? With their free healthcare and Letterkenny and that goddamn gorgeous Justin Trudeau.
Somebody online called this an “eclectic bubblegum rap tune” and I was like, HELLO… you had me at “bubblegum.” I love bubblegum. And rap. And ALL things eclectic (which sounds redundant).
What else can I tell you about this fun little nugget of whimsical and motivational whoop-de-doo?
It features hip-hop legend Roxanne Shanté. The veteran of the “Roxanne Wars” who, at only 14 years old, invented the diss track with 1984’s “Roxanne’s Revenge”?
Yes, THAT Roxanne.
It also features calypso singer Mighty Sparrow.
If you have to ask who Mighty Sparrow is? Then talk to the hand, my friend.
And ask that hand to type his name into Google like I did.
What you’ll discover is that he is widely considered the Calypso King of the World.
Which is just about the best kind of Calypso King there is.
“I Walk Alone” - Mecca Normal
My first guess was that Mecca Normal were from Seattle.
But Jean Smith and David Lester hail from Vancouver (yes, as in Vancouver, CANADA).
(I was only a hundred and forty miles off. Big deal. It’s still the Pacific Northwest.)
Smith and Lester started the band in 1984 and their raw, arty and activist-tinged indie rock helped define the early DIY and riot grrrl movement along with bands like Beat Happening and Bikini Kill.
The grrrl connection makes a lot of sense and not just because Smith is a grrrl. On this song, it sounds like she’s growling out the lyrics. She’s not so much rolling her Rs as gargling them with warm whiskey and broken glass.
With her vocals doubled up and overlapping, it sounds a bit like two cats facing off in an alley trying to sound tough. But not actual cats. People dressed as cats like in the Broadway play Cats or the terrifying, live-action movie musical Cats.
On second thought, scratch that.
Don’t think about Cats. Ignore that weird pun in the segue.
Forget I even brought it up.
“The Carpenter” - Homeboy Sandman
If I had a cool name like Angel Del Villar II, I’m not sure I would even bother with a rap name.
But “Homeboy Sandman” is still pretty dope. It sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon I would have loved as a kid. I would have absolutely owned the action figure.
What’s so special about this song by the rapper from Queens? I don’t know.
Maybe it’s his distinctive voice, the rapid-fire delivery or the banging beats.
But I’m thinking it has more to do with his shout out to Russian authors.
Homeboy raps, “Reading Dostoevsky don’t mean I read Tolstoy.”
When I heard that, I was like “Hell yeah!”
Notes from Underground and The Village of Stepanchikovo were dope.
Brothers Karamazov? Straight fire.
How Leo going to answer that? With some lame-ass novella like The Forged Coupon?
The Death of Ivan Ilyich? That story is wack.
And don’t even try to come at me with that played-out War and Peace shit, bro.
“Ghost in the Record Store” - The Exbats
I was going to tell you about the time I actually saw a ghost in a record store, but that hasn’t happened yet. I promise you’ll be the first to hear when it does.
In the meantime, let me tell you that The Exbats is an Arizona trio that features a father named Kenny on guitar, his daughter Inez on drums and a non-relative named Bobby on bass.
Their music sounds like a bit of a throwback thanks to their 21st-century take on 60s psychedelic pop. They’ve been described as “a dystopian garage rock version of the Shangri-Las, or like a message to the future from the pre-Velvet Underground doo-wop wannabe Lou Reed.”
Their unique family dynamic got me thinking about what it would be like to be in a band with my teenage daughter. I think it would great. We’d collaborate well and share songwriting credits. Time in the studio and on tour would bring us closer together.
But then I’d go and ruin things because I would get caught up in the moment onstage.
My brain would be like “DO IT!” and I’d think “No, you’re too old to take off your shirt and dance like Iggy Pop” but my brain would still be like “DO IT!” and then I would think, “Well, I HAVE been cutting back on gluten” and then I would look at my daughter and she would know exactly what I was going to do and her eyes would say “DON’T YOU DARE” and then my brain would be like “ROCK AND ROLL!!!”
And she would be SO mad at me on the ride home.
“We’re Far Enough from Heaven Now We Can Freak Out (Dirty Virgin)” - Deep Cotton
Chuck Lightning and Nate “Rocket” Wonder are the funk duo from Atlanta known as Deep Cotton.
Also known as the “Punk Prophets,” they co-founded the Wondaland collective along with Janelle Monáe.
I feel weird mentioning this after my opening bit, but “We’re Far Enough from Heaven Now We Can Freak Out” was featured in a Sonos commercial back in 2012.
I don’t remember the commercial and only recently discovered this song.
So I’d like to make it clear that I am in no way including this song as part of a promotional deal with Sonos. They have not provided me with compensation or merchandise in exchange for sharing this tune with my dozens of readers.
But I would also like to make it clear that I love Sonos very much and own at least a dozen of their speakers. So if Sonos wanted to send me some speakers or subwoofers or even a pair of those outdoor, waterproof and wireless, portable speakers?
That would be fine.
Listen on Spotify
Listen on YouTube Music
That’s all for now.
Thanks for reading!
“Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.” - Kurt Vonnegut