And last night as I was lying in bed, doped up on a nasty cocktail of 81mg aspirin, ibuprofen, and one Excedrin migraine, I recognized a song made popular to “our” generation in Quentin Tarantino’s film “Reservoir Dogs.” It facilitates a gruesome scene in which a man’s ear is removed with a knife while he is alive, unmedicated, and most definitely conscious. The song is “Stuck in the Middle With You,” written Joe Egan and Gerry Rafferty, and performed by Stealer’s Wheel. When released in 1973, that song reached number one on both the US and UK pop charts, and last night Olay Body Wash used it in a commercial for people with combination skin.
Cover art for the Rolling Stones' cd available only at Starbucks.
This is the latest example of the degeneration of character of our great artists. Geoff Boucher of the LA Times recently wrote an article about this same thing. He pointed out some of the latest “sellouts” in the modern era. I’m not talking about the Stealer’s Wheels of music, but about the big names, the ones that still have lots of money, lots of fame, and for some reason feel they need even more.
Boucher writes:
Bob Dylan is singing "The Times They Are A-Changin' " in a television ad for healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente these days, and who could argue? With Led Zeppelin pitching Cadillacs, the Rolling Stones strutting in an Ameriquest Mortgage ad and Paul McCartney warbling for Fidelity Investments, it's clear that the old counterculture heroes of classic rock are now firmly entrenched as the house band of corporate America.
But I must ask why. Dylan is Dylan – one of the most prolific, influential, and timeless singer-songwriters in music history. Zeppelin paved the road (poor word choice, considering…) for modern rock and roll. The Stones? Right up there with that other famous Brit band, the Beatles, and still touring, still charging $150 dollars a show, still playing only 10 songs a night, and still selling more schwag than anyone else (even at Starbucks). Paul McCartney? These last two artists are even associated with Aerosmith (the sucky version), Britney Spears, and the Super Bowl halftime show. WHY?
Paul McCartney wants more money too!
I guess money talks – thankfully, not everyone listens. John Densmore of the Doors, along with Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Carlos Santana, and the Eagles, have resisted the temptation to nibble at the financial carrots dangled in front of their faces. In the case of Densmore, he has instated a great disequilibrium with his former band mates, both of whom have wanted to cash in on add offers from Cadillac (reported $15 million), Apple ($4 mil.), and countless deodorant adds (wanting to use the song “Light My Fire”).
While Densmore’s reasoning sounds VERY cliché ("People lost their virginity to this music, got high for the first time to this music," Densmore said. "I've had people say kids died in Vietnam listening to this music, other people say they know someone who didn't commit suicide because of this music…. On stage, when we played these songs, they felt mysterious and magic. That's not for rent."), it’s that kind of steadfastness that protects the music’s integrity.
Robert Plant signing (his soul onto) the hood of a Cadillac.
I like some of the Rolling Stones old classics. They were written in a different era and meant something - that will never change. However, the perception of the band as a sellout will never change, either. They’ve sold their souls to corporate America, but at what cost, and at what gain?
3 comments:
It's still hard for me to think of Dylan as sell-out. The one constant throughout his career has been his dodging of labels and the stifling claims to ownership of his image and music certain groups. The folkies started claiming them as their own, so, after being introduced by Peter of Peter Paul and Mary (the sixties lefty hippie folky version of the Spice Girls) as someone who had brought to folk music the mindset 'of a poet,' he slammed into a rousing rockous version of 'Maggie's Farm,' loud and boisterous and getting booed. He exaggerated the injuries from a car accident to get some time off, made country albums, made bad albums, just to avoid being the 'archbishop of anarchy,' or 'the voice of a generation,' or whatever people wanted to call him. During a 1974 tour with the band, he realized that it was a facsimilistic rehashing of something great that had Actually happened 8 years earlier and, tired of hearing people say that the 'energy' of the show was awesome merely because it was loud, he started wearing a huge hat with flowers in it, painted his face white, showed up at venues unannounced, and picked up street musicians to join his band. He also would douse himself with alcohol and walk around pretending to be drunk so that people would think he was an alcoholic, and he wore a yamaka to the wailing wall so people would think he'd become hardcorely Jewish. Maybe being a sellout is the only thing he hasn't tried, or maybe he finds some amusement in the absurdity of it all, or maybe its an extension of his belief that the studio recordings don't really matter anyway, it's the song as it exists in the present moment of the live show that has any real life, maybe he just doesn't care anymore ('The Times They are a Changin' becomes 'I used to care but, things have changed), maybe I'm just a Dylan apologist.
My digestion has been improving recently. After an extended period of time in which I was excessively drowsy due to the repurcussions of a lifetime of antibiotics and a hardass bout of some crazy giardia-like European wonderbug, my hippie doctor has given me some hippie-pills, and I'm beginning to feel a bit more like my old self again. Which is some ways is good, in others means that I don't feel like sleeping even when I'm sleepy and that I tend to write too much about things on other peoples' blogs.
Why the big facination over the label "sellout". For me it conjures up images of cranky emo kids who are pissed off that Jimmy Eat World "went corporate". I can see a clear difference between doing it for the music and doing it for the money, but that doesn't mean that money itself, or the pursuit of it is bad. I agree that the whoring of their music by all time great musicians is sad, but at what point does someone become a sellout?
I have seen this many times. My favorite band, AFI, went through the same thing. They started getting really popular, left their indie label and went to Dreamworks. This pissed people off. After they had some videos on MTV and songs on the radio in other places than the East bay, admittedly, there were a lot more douche bags at their shows. Here's the question: can we blame them for their wanting and acheiving success? No. It sort of felt like a little secret was let out, but that was not our secret to keep. So celebrate musicians' success and damn the ones who let themselves down and become robots of the entertainment industry.
Post a Comment