Music and Artistic Integrity

I was watching TV earlier this night when a commercial for Phoenix University came on. I normally tune out commercials, but this one had something that caught my attention: the song playing in the background. The song was the chorus for "The Bleeding Heart Show" by the New Pornographers, a song that I instantly recognized. This got me thinking about artistic integrity. What would constitute a musician "selling out" their artistic integrity? Can musicians ever sell out their artistic integrity?

There are a couple actions that people view as signs of a musician losing their artistic integrity. For starters, many people think that a band selling a song license for use in a commercial would mean that the song or band has lost their artistic integrity. Another commonly considered act of selling out would be when a musician starts writing music for a specific audience in the hopes that they'll earn more money on it. Having someone else write music for you is also considered a way to lose artistic integrity.

Imagine your favorite song, the one that you consider most special to you. Now imagine this song trying to sell you a car. Something that is emotionally powerful and special is being used to peddle merchandise. Surely this is a breach of artistic integrity? Well, maybe not. The music is going to be the same, whether or not it is selling you Pepsi. Besides, what if your favorite musician is a literal "starving artiste" and needs the money to survive? What if it is a choice between letting their music sell a product or the musicians having to take a retail job and therefore have less energy to focus on music making? Wouldn't that be selling out?

What if an artist starts writing catchy popular tunes with no emotional value just so that they can make more money? Is this selling out? To give a real world example, the band Modest Mouse has been writing pop tunes that really lack a lot of the emotional qualities of their earlier work and they're becoming more mainstream and doubtlessly making more money because of it. But if writing your music to a larger audience so that you can make more money takes your artistic integrity away, then Mozart, Bach and almost every other classical composer has no artistic integrity. Pretty much everything they wrote was paid for by rich men or churches who wanted a specific song for a specific mood. Mozart wrote some tunes for some rich guys kids, tunes that are considered to be "art" by a large number of people. The same example can also be applied to architecture: the architect is getting paid to design a building in a specific way, but it is still considered art. Just because the composer wants to make a living off of music does not mean that it is not art.

Thirdly, there is the claim that if you have something written for you by someone else, it has no artistic integrity. I don't think that there is much to this claim. Dividing up the work of writing a song does not make the song less artistic. I like writing songs and poems, but I'm a bad singer. Does that mean that nobody can sing the songs I write? Or that if they do, those songs have no artistic value? I hope not. I still put a lot of time and effort into the songs, even if I can't sing them.

I think that for the first two claims - licensing and changing what you play - there is some validity. I think I'd feel sick and cry if any Neutral Milk Hotel songs were playing on a commercial. Those songs have a lot of meaning to me and, yeah, they're special to me. Context changes the song to some extent; music videos, for example, add new meaning to songs. I think the same would happen if a song is in a commercial, the context would be changed and whenever you heard the song you'd think "Pepsi." This is only a problem for some songs. I don't think it matters much for the New Pornographers song that was advertising a college. It's a good power pop song, but it doesn't mean much to me. It is only when the song has a meaning to the listener when it becomes a problem.

The second claim, that a musician changing what they write for the sake of money, has more weight to it. This is a case where a musician is willingly deciding to stop making "art" and to start making a product. The difference between a contemporary musician selling out and, say, Bach selling out is that there wasn't a concept of selling out a few hundred years ago. Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse can sell out because there is a concept of selling out, Bach couldn't because the norm was to make your art on commissions from rich noblemen.

So, while there is some validity to the claims that some musicians are selling out, I think that a lot of the arguments are weaker than they appear. A lot of the cases they should not even apply. With Modest Mouse, their older songs are darker and a lot more depressed while the newer ones are happier and more upbeat. Maybe Isaac Brock isn't selling out, maybe he's just happier? Or maybe he did just want more money. Maybe the folks in the New Pornographers needed the money to pay the rent or maybe they wanted a jacuzzi. There's really no way to know when a musician loses their artistic integrity except when their songs and the emotions they are trying to express ring hollow to you.