Selling Out

Culture, Commerce and Popular Music

Bethany Klein

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501339325
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Music History & Criticism

The relationship between popular music and consumer brands has never been so cosy. Product placement abounds in music videos, popular music provides the soundtrack to countless commercials, social media platforms offer musicians tools for perpetual promotion, and corporate-sponsored competitions lure aspiring musicians to vie for exposure. Activities that once attracted charges of 'selling out' are now considered savvy, or even ordinary, strategies for artists to be heard and make a living. What forces have encouraged musicians to become willing partners of consumer brands? At what cost? And how do changes in popular music culture reflect broader trends of commercialization? Selling Out traces the evolution of 'selling out' debates in popular music culture and considers what might be lost when the boundary between culture and commerce is dismissed as a relic.

1

Popular music for art’s sake

Popular music culture inherited and adapted long-standing debates about art and capitalism, grappling with the slippery notions of authenticity and autonomy that had sought expression through Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. Music movements and scenes of the 1960s that imbued certain genres of popular music with the values and meanings of art also opened the door to the policing of commercial affiliation in ways that would have seemed inappropriate to apply to ‘mere entertainment’. Within this context, the concept of selling out gained purchase for some popular music cultures, as demonstrated by various events and activities, including the controversy around Dylan going electric in 1965 and the Who’s pop art reflection on commercialism, 1967’s The Who Sell Out. This chapter explores how popular music earned the right to selling out discourse by mapping popular music’s course towards art and by exploring some early disputes around and cogitations on commercialism.

The concept of selling out was not an obvious or natural fit for popular music produced as a commodity form and circulated within a commercial market. Popular music’s access to the selling out concept depends on the understanding and treatment of certain types of popular music as art, rather than mere entertainment, and on the increasing centrality of the notion of authenticity in assessments of performers and products. This chapter traces the legitimation of popular music as art through the relationship of early rock to art and its treatment as such. It considers claims to authenticity and classed, raced and gendered differences with respect to selling out. Famous cases of selling out in the 1960s – both charged and self-confessed – can be understood as setting a pattern about what it means to sell out and who can sell out under what circumstances that continues to resonate through subsequent decades. Finally, it seeks to shed light on the complex and at times contradictory relationship that popular music has to commercialism – one that echoes long-standing dimensions of traditional art worlds while presenting particular issues relating to scale and popularity.

Through key examples – the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Who – I explore how links to one form of art or another, and appeals to one notion of authenticity or another, reside at the foundation of and are necessary for entry to selling out debates. Popular music, like more traditional forms of art, has a relationship to commercialism that is not straightforward. Selling out debates distinguish acceptable commercialism (commodity form, financial success) from unacceptable commercialism (compromising values, deserting communities). On the one hand, selling out discourse pursues the valiant goal of protecting communities from the perceived influence of the mainstream market. On the other, it delineates insiders and outsiders in ways that reveal its construction: the badge of art, the version of authenticity promoted within rock culture and access to selling out debates are only available to some musicians and genres, some of the time. The potential value of selling out for policing important boundaries between culture and commerce must be weighed against its tendency to make distinctions that privilege existing power relations and hierarchies around class, race and gender.

Movement from entertainment to art

The movement of popular music from entertainment to art did not take place at one moment, across all genres, for all listeners. Nor indeed would we contend that popular music as a category is universally treated as art today. There are many historical instances that could be classified as evidence of people applying artistic criteria of one kind or another to forms of popular music. For example, in his analysis of jazz criticism, John Gennari (2006) traces the canonization of jazz as art. He explores the growth of anti-commercial critical discourse in jazz criticism through the 1930s and 1940s, noting that one of the most significant early jazz critics, John Hammond, ‘was among the first to popularize the word “commercial” as an epithet’ (Gennari 2006: 36). Yet it is around rock culture that such a treatment of popular music becomes entrenched. As Keir Keightley writes, ‘Taking popular music seriously, as something “more” than mere entertainment or distraction, has been a crucial feature of rock culture since its emergence’ (2001: 110) and while ‘some listeners did take mainstream popular music seriously prior to the advent of rock’, ‘it is within rock culture that this activity is at its most intense’ (2001: 111). For this reason, and because rock provides the model on which subsequent cases of artistic legitimation and denial are often based, I focus primarily on rock for this discussion. However, I begin with a consideration of folk music, in the context of the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, because of its link to folk art and because of the role played by Bob Dylan in crystallizing notions of authenticity within both folk and rock music, as explored more fully below.

The folk tradition in art and music

Thomas Crow (2014) locates the folk music and art revival of the 1930s and 1940s as laying the groundwork for what would become known as Pop Art, noting links in the development of popular music along the way. I pick up the links between Pop Art and popular music later in the chapter, but give a brief overview of the role folk revivals played in the legitimation of popular music as art here.

The path of folk or outsider traditions within the visual arts was an unsteady one. While a few influential individuals championed American folk traditions from the 1930s, their place in established art spaces was rare (Crow 2014). By the 1960s, folk art’s status was formalized by the founding of the Museum of American Folk Art in 1963, and the ‘increasing number of contemporary folk art exhibitions, especially throughout the 1970s, suggests the establishment of an identifiable artistic field’ (Ardery 1997). Over the same period, American folk music also experienced varying degrees of attention and popularity, including from art world inhabitants whose ‘impulse to link leftist politics with native voices from below … shifted away from the visual arts toward the more receptive sphere of music, where it engendered an enduring idea of American folksong’ (Crow 2014: 10–11). The American folk music revival gained in popularity in the 1940s, with Pete Seeger’s the Weavers at the forefront, and developing by the early 1960s into a movement set to go mainstream.

Crow’s (2014) skilled and fascinating exploration of the interlinking folk art and folk music traditions demonstrates the art world’s role in changing the way folk traditions, including folk music traditions, were viewed and appreciated. The parallels between the folk art and folk music worlds are not exact, of course, but there is a dimension that is particularly helpful in thinking about popular music’s journey from entertainment to art. The folk art tradition was and remains marked by two distinct categories of art and artist: elevation and placement of the work of outsiders within formal art institutions (e.g. Grandma Moses), on the one hand, and the adoption of similar styles by traditionally trained artists drawing on folk traditions (early Pop Artists like Jasper Johns), on the other. Similarly, the folk music revival included musicians performing in the traditional style of the communities from which they came and musicians from outside those communities – often equipped with privileges of race, class and education – drawing on the same traditions. For some revivalists, like Pete Seeger, the role of the latter was first and foremost to draw attention and audiences to the former. From this perspective, and as with self-taught artists (Fine 2003), authenticity for folk revivalists placed great importance on the performer’s identity, as much as on the material performed. For folk music, authenticity is defined by that which is ‘musically pure, genuine and organically connected to the community that produced them’ (Keightley 2001: 121). Musicians not from those communities, but supportive of the folk traditions, could not re-write their biographical histories (though some, like Dylan, tried), but could seek a version of folk authenticity by staying true to the material and community. If folk authenticity relies on staying true, however, then shifts away from traditional styles or traditional material must draw on a different sense of the term. The emergence of folk rock, marked by original material and non-traditional instrumentation, was thus crucial in producing rock ideology. While influenced by folk ideology, the ‘authentic’ in folk rock, and later rock, was instead rooted, alongside related notions of autonomy and authorship, in Romantic and Modernist concepts imported from the art world (Keightley 2001).

Both movements contribute to rock’s conception of authenticity but in different ways: ‘While Romanticism locates authenticity principally in the direct communication between artist and audience, Modernism manifests its concern with authenticity more indirectly, at the aesthetic level, so that the authentic artist is one who is true to the Modernist credos of experimentation, innovation, development, change’ (Keightley 2001: 136). There are shared ideals too, however: ‘Both Romantics and Modernists are anxious to avoid corruption through involvement with commerce and oppose the alienation they see as rooted in industrial capitalism’ (Keightley 2001: 136). The evolution of folk music to folk rock through to rock demonstrates how appeals to authenticity shifted from a definition applied to folk art to values associated with fine art, including notions of originality, autonomy and genius. At the same time, certain values from folk, particularly around community, were maintained: ‘When the folk-rockers individualized the folk concept of authenticity, they changed the political principles of their performances, but they continued to offer an experience of community’ (Frith 1981a: 164).

Authenticity and popular music as art

The above example itself suggests the slipperiness of authenticity, which takes different shapes for different genres and at different times: as David Shumway notes, ‘authenticity is an indispensable value but one that is historically and culturally relative’ (2007: 527). Authenticity is a messy business, but requires unpacking before I move on to examples of musicians being affirmed as artists or accused of selling out, because it is so intimately tied to such affirmations and accusations. Agreeing a definition that captures the meaning of authenticity with respect to popular music generally is near impossible. Keightley’s definition offers a persuasive combination of precision and generalizability:

‘Authentic’ designates those music, musicians, and musical experiences seen to be direct and honest, uncorrupted by commerce, trendiness, derivativeness, a lack of inspiration and so on. ‘Authentic’ is a term affixed to music which offers sincere expressions of genuine feeling, original creativity, or an organic sense of community. Authenticity is not something ‘in’ the music, though it is frequently experienced as such, believed to be actually audible, and taken to have a material form. Rather, authenticity is a value, a quality we ascribe to perceived relationships between music, socio-industrial practices, and listeners or audiences.

Keightley 2001: 131

Such a flexible definition captures the adaptability of the term in various contexts, depending on the version of authenticity appealed to by artists and often cohering around genres. And yet for all this variability, the understanding and application of authenticity within a genre tends to still follow either the trajectory of the folk art ideology linked to the blues and hillbilly traditions central to the folk music revival, or the trajectory of fine art, reflecting the Modernist and Romantic values associated with the rock tradition.

Connection to the community that produced them remains a central tenet for country musicians, whose roots lie in the hillbilly music promoted by folk revivalists. Elements that matter for country music include ‘signifiers of group membership’ in order to make claim to the country identity (Peterson 1997: 218), and ‘being able to show a family heritage in country music’ (Peterson 1997: 219). Similarly, today’s blues musicians continue to grapple with a perceived link of authenticity to race, with blues clubs pressured to conform to what tourists associate with authenticity, including blackness (Grazian 2003). That same emphasis on the performer’s identity and background has a legacy in hip-hop: thus, selling out in hip-hop is often not about commercial success per se, but turning your back on the community while presenting an inauthentic picture of that community (Quinn 2005). Conversely, rock and its sub-genres rely on a perception of autonomy and original expression, unencumbered by commercial influence: the centrality of commerce to the rock version of authenticity is one reason why this version dominates selling out debates.

In terms of being ‘uncorrupted by commerce’ (Keightley 2001: 131), popular music, particularly from the development of rock onwards, may seem to sit uneasily with authenticity. Unlike folk, ‘rock was born within the popular mainstream as an exclusively youth-oriented music. These differences crucially affected the way rock culture played out its folk-influenced world view, because they allowed rock to emerge in the simultaneous embrace of anti-mass ideology and mass commercial success’ (Keightley 2001: 122, emphasis in original). ‘Authenticity in rock & roll’, writes Shumway, ‘is more complicated because it, in contradistinction to folk music, is defined by the institution of stardom’ (2007: 530). In other words, commercialism is inherent to rock and its offshoots, while anti-commercialism is inherent to the notion of authenticity that informs its value system.

This is not to say that commercialism is irrelevant in genres that align more closely with a folk art sense of authenticity. The examples of country and hip-hop noted above both demonstrate complex relationships between commercialism and authenticity even if they do not necessarily exclude commercial success or relationships to consumer brands. (In this way, popular music departs from folk art, where the appearance of marketing savvy or commercial influence can challenge the construction of authenticity valued by curators and collectors (Fine 2003).)

As Sarah Banet-Weiser describes, ‘the authentic has never accurately d...