« * "words, words...between the lines of age" | Main | * "this goes up to eleven!" »

* "to hold all the promise of blue-velvet dark and stars..."

If you peruse our magazine's "Box Full of Letters" page regularly, you may have noticed that we have a few folks who drop us a line relatively often. We can't publish all the letters we receive, but we try to run as many as we can, and over the years we've probably printed a half-dozen or so from longtime subscriber Shawn Cote of Fort Fairfield, Maine. The most recent ones were concerned with artists who use their songs or identities for commercial purposes -- or, as he put it in a letter we published in our March-April issue, "the co-optation of subversive art forms by the corporate power structure." In that issue he was addressing comments made by our January-February cover subject Joe Henry; in our current July-August issue, a letter from Cote bemoans the recent appearance of Kelly Willis & Bruce Robison in a commercial for a pharmaceutical company.

I've appreciated Cote's correspondence over the years -- if for no other reason than it's nice to know we have a subscriber in the nether reaches of Aroostook County -- but I find that I've come to feel differently in recent years about artists and commercials than I used to. I'm sure there was a time when I would have viewed such situations as a matter of "talented people selling their souls," as Cote contends in his July-August letter. As I grow older, though, the whole concept just seems so much less black-and-white to me than it used to. There are a variety of reasons for this.

Probably first and foremost is that the landscape of commercial radio has changed so dramatically over the past couple decades that sometimes it is actually more possible to get creative music in front of a broad audience via TV ads rather than the FM airwaves. This speaks to both the dumbing-down of corporate radio, and the wising-up of Madison Avenue. Which is not to suggest that television advertising has transformed itself wholly into a form of artistic expression -- the vast majority of it remains as market-minded as it has always been -- but nowadays there are also flashes of creativity popping up amidst the flotsam, little epiphanies to the notion that art and commerce aren't inherently mutually exclusive.

I can pinpoint the exact moment when that little epiphany hit home with me: The late-1999 Volkswagen spot which featured Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" as its musical backdrop. It wasn't just the utter shock of hearing a Nick Drake song in a major TV commercial -- given that it was inconceivable for "Pink Moon" to turn up in the rotation on a mainstream radio station -- but also how artfully the ad was presented. Everything about the way it was shot -- the look, the feel, the tone, the style, the mood -- flowed from the essence of Drake's sonic imprint. It was perfect, a home run. I remember going to the online ND board after stumbling upon the ad for the first time while flipping channels and posting, "I just watched the best TV ad I have ever seen."

Whether it sold more cars for VW, I don't know -- but it sure as heck turned a lotta people on to Drake's music. A friend's check of Soundscan figures shortly after the commercial made its debut revealed that from 1995 to the fall of '99, Drake's *Pink Moon* album rarely scanned more than 100 copies per week (a typical snapshot: 52 copies in the last week of September '99). After the ad began airing, the disc started selling around 500 copies per week; by late March 2000, it was selling nearly 1,000 per week.

Obviously Drake (who died in 1974) had no say in the matter -- but did the licensing of his song to VW result in any loss of perceived integrity? To my mind, no. What it did was expose his music to millions of people who had never heard it before. In this particular case, television commercials provided an outlet that was far more amenable to Drake's music than mainstream radio had ever been.

As for the Robison/Willis drug-company ad, in my mind it's pretty much a non-issue, primarily because they're basically just actors in the spot. Music is involved in the background (I don't recall offhand which song), but mostly they're playing a role that neither enhances nor detracts from their musical identities. Perhaps it makes a few more people aware of them, perhaps most viewers wouldn't even make the connection or follow it to their music. Regardless, it seems a harmless little side-pursuit to me.

Let's move on, then, to another recent example, one that Cote didn't mention in either of his letters, but which speaks to the same subject he addresses. Recently I was watching AMC and was startled to hear a song I'd been listening to constantly on the office stereo and in the car lately: "Stars" by the Weepies, a rather misleadingly-named folk-pop duo from California. (Misleading because their music isn't really weepy at all; it's sometimes bright, sometimes introspective, maybe sometimes a little melancholic, but hardly the cry-in-your-beer image that their name implies.)

"Stars" is one of many memorable tracks on the band's terrific new Nettwerk Records release *Say I Am You*, an album loaded with potential Americana/AAA hits -- think, say, Shawn Colvin's stellar 1989 debut *Steady On*. Given (as previously noted) the difficulty of receiving commercial-radio airtime nowadays, it's perfectly understandable that the Weepies and Nettwerk might pursue other alternatives for getting heard. Recently their song "The World Spins Madly On" turned up in epsides of both "Grey's Anatomy" and "Scrubs", ample evidence that network-TV shows are yet another prime alternative outlet for exposure.

Hearing "Stars" in the AMC promo spot seemed at first another pleasant surprise -- until I noticed the context in which it was being played. The song is a very small and precious jewel, with singer Deb Talan's delicate vocals marveling at the serene deep-night beauty of "blue-velvet dark and stars." Married to that music onscreen is a series of box-office blockbuster heroes: Pacino in "Godfather III", Schwarzenegger in "Kindergarten Cop", Stallone in some gawdawful generic action flick. All of them big-time "stars," for sure. Just not the kind of "stars" that Talan is singing about in the beautiful little tune which accompanies the visual imagery of the ad.

Worth doing for the Weepies? Well, I guess it all depends on your perspective. In AMC's defense, they offer more than most advertisers do in terms of artist identification, as they actually credit the band name, song title, and label affiliation at the end of the spot. But I just can't help feeling a little heavy in my heart at having the subject of their song clearly misdirected by the basic thrust of the medium's message.

So, do I concur with Cote? Sometimes, I suppose. And sometimes not. Depends upon the circumstances of the situation.

Regardless, we're always glad to hear from him. And the rest of you, too. Keep those cards and letters and e-mails coming: letters @ nodepression . net, or the old-fashioned way at Box Full Of Letters, No Depression, 17000 Viking Way NW, Poulsbo, WA 98370.

adios,
peter

Posted by peter on June 30, 2006 7:54 PM | Permalink