Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Stephen Speaks

For my money, America's best interviewee just might be Stephen Malkmus. Always sharp and unpredictable, but not in a publicity-seeking sort of way. He pops up here on rotoworld.com. (Thanks, Culture 11.) My favorite part:
18. We've seen bands like Band of Horses and Of Montreal catch some heat for having their songs used in television commercials and now some Iron & Wine fans are groaning because one of Sam Beam's greatest tunes is getting a ton of exposure in the film Twilight. I'm happy these people are making cash and getting noticed for their work, but many people still resent this so-called "selling out," even when it's clearly the road many artists need to take to get paid in today's music industry. Your thoughts on selling songs for commercial use?

SM: No problems - to each his own. Gotta put bread on the table, within reason. It's like owning Kobe. Sometimes you gotta do it.
I was talking about the idea of selling out with my brother a few weeks ago, and we both basically agreed that it's kind of a silly complaint that you grow up making without thinking too much. The biggest problem is that, for a 19-year-old future lawyer (or insurance salesman or doctor or whatever), it's easy to call a singer a sell-out, but, as interviewer Steve Alexander points out, why should the artists have to be starving? Furthermore, artistic integrity isn't won through poverty and anonymity. London Calling is no less important for having appeared in a James Bond movie.

Modest Mouse helped clarify my thinking on this. They sold one of their cool songs from the Moon and Antarctica for a minivan ad in maybe 2004, but the song was no different afterward, and the album still had the really authentic and depressing mood that made the early Modest Mouse stuff so memorable, even post-minivan ad. When, shortly thereafter, the band stripped their music of that moodiness, that was much more off-putting to me than one of their songs appearing in a commercial. And even then, I wouldn't accuse the band of selling out; how do I know what was the inspiration that eventually resulted in more radio-friendly music?

No comments: