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For Rock Bands, Selling Out Isn't What It Used to Be
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And the thing was, Hilarie says, she and Robert used to be just
like that. They could understand. If she had ever turned on the television and seen a commercial using
a Pavement song, she says, "I would have had a violent reaction. I'd have been nauseous. My gut
reaction would be, that makes me sick." That's why the criticism from fans stung so much, she says.
"You feel guilty." But at the same time, Robert says, "you know the person who wrote that letter
is 18. And they're right, from that point of view. It's part of the sadness of bands getting bigger. You
understand it better as you get older. Our band might not be able to keep going if we couldn't do this."
As they moved through the ad world, the Apples in Stereo drew some limits. They recently turned
down an offer to do an ad for Corona beer, even though they liked the guy who called. "We made an
agreement we wouldn't do anything that promotes cigarettes or alcohol," Hilarie says. Robert ticked off
a couple other restrictions. Leather. Meat. The military. As he saw it, J. C. Penney and Sony were different.
"Hilarie bought all her maternity clothes at J. C. Penney," he says.
But beyond these easy no-nos, is there a line in the sand, a point at which a performer or a song
becomes cheapened by the commercial experience? It is a fan's romantic whimsy to think of musicians
as aloof from the business of selling. Those days are over, if they ever existed. "Now artists are very
focused on business issues -- how they're marketed, how they're visually being presented," says
Nancy Berry, vice chairman of Virgin Music Group Worldwide. "That's across the board. Every artist is
so hands on." With all this intermingling of art and commerce, when does a sellout become a sellout?
When they started as filmmakers, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris did not like the idea of music
videos; the specificity of the imagery, they felt, put limits on the song and listener. But they developed a
visual vocabulary that was suggestive rather than definitive. A good video, Dayton says, "is an invitation
to hear the song in a fresh way." The same standard might be applied to the use of songs in ads. In
the Nick Drake spot, Dayton saw the song more as something the people in the ad might be listening to,
reflecting on the characters, not on the car. "It's acknowledging the place music has in people's lives,"
he says. "It's not meant as an endorsement. As opposed to Nike's 'Revolution,' which is taking the idea of
revolution and applying it to a shoe."
But in a broader sense, both ads work the same sleight, transferring the good will created by or around
a piece of music to a brand. "What is a brand?" asked Lance Jensen, who recently left Arnold to start his
own agency, Modernista! "Is a brand products? I think it's a set of ideals, an aesthetic sensibility. Branding
advertising is not about, 'Come on down, on sale now.' " To establish a brand is to establish a tribe around
the brand, a tingle of shared pleasures.
This is true of indie rock, or electronic dance music, as well. The Apples in Stereo and Moby offer not
just songs but also membership in the tribe. As listeners, we invest songs with associations -- where we
were when we first heard them, what sort of people we share the songs with. Ads insinuate the brand
among these associations. For a small payoff, Sony becomes the third presence in the room with the
music and the listeners. It will be harder, marginally, for the Apples in Stereo to be alone with their listeners
again. Even the hippest ads compromise the listeners' intimate relationship with the music.
 obert and Hilarie bring a more pragmatic rationale to bear. The day after
they got the nasty letter from the fan, Robert's stepfather called to say how proud he was. "And that had
never happened before," Robert says. However compelling the principles, there had to be life beyond the
rigid censoriousness that sometimes settled over the indie-rock world. Recently, the couple were looking
at baby furniture in a Denver store but didn't have the money to pay for it. The baby was coming. The same
day they got a call from their record company: Sony wanted to license "Strawberryfire" for another season.
Again, the fee was small, but with their share, Robert and Hilarie were able to buy the baby furniture
after all and to shed a small slice of financial worry. Their son, Maxwell Alexander Schneider, born
Christmas Day, has a nice new crib and parents not too stressed, for the moment, by the call of their work.
Perhaps a few of their fans won't like it. But it was time to grow up and out of it. If this was selling out, they
were ready to buy in.
John Leland is a Style reporter for The Times.
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