You Have Said It All

Since it’s been “popular,” music’s always had to leech off of other entertainment industries and forms of media for power and dissemination.  Recorded works have been the central commodity objects since sheet music died off, but the “meaning” of music has always been parted out across all sorts of media: television, film, print, and all genres of communication, including advertising.  Working with Web 2.0 startups and major corporations shouldn’t be any different, in this light, but somehow it is.  That romantic ideology we like to filter art and artists through–the independent creative genius–is as strong as ever.  Will.i.am calling the Black Eyed Peas a “brand”? Of course–that’s all part of them being the worst example of musicians-as-bloodless corporate shills.

Or is it more complicated than we like to make it seem? Depends who you ask, according to a riffy Hua Hsu blog post over at the Atlantic, which starts with a “selling out” discussion from this year’s EMP, then moves through B.E.P./Target, KRS-One’s freestyle against the Hip-Hop Museum from last week, and finishes with the indignity of Guru’s death alone in a hospital.

Hua’s bit about KRS’s ad-hoc speech–which is definitely worth watching–sums up a rich contradiction within hip-hop culture:

KRS’ rant is situated at the collision of two sensibilities, one that moralized its inability to draw that just salary, the other that sees no aspect of itself that can’t be successfully monetized. Whether or not you buy the altruistic aims of KRS’ gate-crashing, he’s describing a very real contestation here, wherein a lot of old school artists, still waiting by the mailbox for those checks, are realizing that their stories can be sold, not just told.

In other words, is it “selling out,” or is it just “getting paid for your work”? If you’re an artist–particularly an African-American artist–dialoguing with a musical tradition that can feel as if it was founded on exploiting and repurposing your labor for the benefit of everyone but you, I would imagine it could seem like part of the life to find money somewhere other than the music industries, right?  Is singing for Budweiser beer inherently “worse” than singing for the 401k of a label executive?  Not for Lou Rawls, it wasn’t.  Dig the video at the top of the post, then consider this snip from his Wikipedia entry (bolding, of course, is all mine):

For many years, he was a spokesperson for the Colonial Penn Life Insurance Company. He was also a spokesman for Budweiser, helping promote the brand on radio and TV to African-American markets much as Ed McMahon did for the white audience. Budweiser was a key sponsor for the Rawls telethon and UNCF. There was no attempt to avoid the similarity between the title of the album When You’ve Heard Lou, You’ve Heard It All and his corporate sponsor’s slogan “When You Say Budweiser, You’ve Said It All”. A track on the album features Rawls singing the commercial slogan. Anheuser-Busch, the brewers of Budweiser, also suggested his telethon work to him.

Filed under: Black Eyed Peas  Budweiser  Guru  Hua Hsu  KRS-One  Lou Rawls  selling culture