Post by darkstar on Mar 3, 2006 15:45:42 GMT
Sydney Morning Herald
Music Section
March 4, 2006
Look What They've Done To My Song
They have been lambasted as immoral and vacuous, but many rock musicians refuse to be bought by the highest bidder. Gerard Wright reports.
TWO years ago, the last word in obnoxiousness had two letters. Its very presence led bystanders to yell insults at it, and the world to wonder at the lengths to which unbridled American materialism might go. The word was a vehicle, the H2, the second-generation version of the civilianised Humvee, the all-terrain military transport megalith; the offspring, it seemed, of the coupling of a jeep and a tank, with an average fuel consumption of 23.5 litres per 100 kilometres.
The task of persuading the public that it should spend $US53,000 ($71,000) for an H2 fell to Modernista, a fledgling advertising agency based in Boston. For a time, the agency was spectacularly successful. The Hummers moved briskly off car yards across the country, Modernista won international awards for one of its H2 ads, and petrol stayed relatively cheap.
But then it was time to update the ads, and something strange happened.
Lance Jensen, the president of Modernista and a former radio DJ, heard a song called June by Trans Am, a rock band from Washington, DC. Trans Am was an underground or cult band. "Underground" can mean invisible, or simply not well known, and certainly far from wealthy. Last year the three members of the band had a taxable income of $US13,000-$US16,000 each, according to the bass player, Nathan Means.
Modernista came calling on behalf of General Motors, the Hummer's manufacturer. Trans Am was offered $US90,000 for the use of June as the soundtrack for a new Hummer commercial. They said no. The offer was doubled to $US180,000.
"For us, the initial contradiction there was we'd just made an album that was not specifically anti-war, but probably our most obviously political, and against the fear and militarism that was gripping the United States at the time, and we were approached to advertise the civilian version of a military vehicle," Means says.
"Everyone would love to, for free, have an extra $30,000, but we were never going to take the money. For us, the thing was, the hypocrisy was too stark, of basically doing a military vehicle advertisement."
So they refused it. So did the Thermals, from Portland, Oregon. They play "loud pop, or whatever you want to call it", says the lead singer, Hutch Harris. "We're not rich. We don't sell hundreds of thousands of records." They were offered $US50,000 for the rights to It's Trivia, for a Hummer commercial.
"This was really the only commercial offer we've ever had," Harris says. "But it's always been important to me not to have my song used for advertising, and especially not for something like Hummer.
"I wouldn't want anyone to associate the song with the advertisement they saw - 'The band that you heard from the iPod commercial'. I wouldn't want to go to a town and see that on a poster. That would suck the life out of me."
Other performers also refused to provide an H2 soundtrack - Fourtet, an electronica duo, the Soledad Brothers, a psychedelic-blues revival band from Detroit, even Jonathan Richman, now into his 30th year of touring and recording.
It was partly the source of the money, partly the principle, explains Lyle Hysen of Bank Robber Music, a New York company that pairs songs with films, TV programs and advertisements.
"A lot of bands are into music to be not in the mainstream," Hysen says. "These are the kids who got beat up in high school because they look different. They don't want to be in the status quo. When an offer comes to them, the gut reaction is 'F--- you. I've made it this far without you'."
In that, they had something in common with a Who's Who of rock'n'roll in devising an answer to a conundrum almost as old as the music itself.
John Densmore, the drummer for the Doors, remembers the band being offered the then massive sum of $US50,000-$US75,000 by the Buick company for the rights to Light My Fire in an ad for its Opel model in the late '60s. The offer was refused, as were, Densmore says, more recent bids of $US4 million (Apple computers) and $US15 million (General Motors) to lease Break On Through (to the Other Side). In 1986, Bruce Springsteen turned his back on $US12 million from Chrysler for Born In the USA.
The choice was justified as a response to a calling that was higher than their bank balance.
"People lost their virginity to this music, got high for the first time to this music," Densmore told the Los Angeles Times last year. "I've had people say kids died in Vietnam listening to this music, other people say they know someone who didn't commit suicide because of this music … On stage, when we played these songs, they felt mysterious and magic. That's not for rent."
Tom Waits, the iconoclastic chronicler of the American underbelly, took up the argument in a letter to The Nation, a current affairs magazine: "Songs carry emotional information and some transport us back to a poignant time, place or event in our lives. It's no wonder a corporation would want to hitch a ride on the spell these songs cast and encourage you to buy soft drinks, underwear or automobiles while you're in the trance. Artists who take money for ads poison and pervert their songs. It reduces them to the level of a jingle, a word that describes the sound of change in your pocket, which is what your songs become."
A plainer response was offered by Nick Cave, the wandering and legendary son of the Melbourne punk scene, when asked by the Gap clothing company to appear in a television ad in the late '90s.
Cave wrote back. "Dear Gap. I might put on a pair of your jeans if you were to pay me $1 billion, but even then I would have serious reservations. Signed Nick Cave."
Again, it was the service of fans, memory and reputation that was cited. "I get letters from people telling me they got married to The Ship Song," Cave told an interviewer in London several years ago, "or that they buried their best friend to Into My Arms, and I don't want them to look at the TV and see that they buried their friend to a Cornetto ad or something.
"I feel some sense of responsibility about that, even though they wave enormous sums of money at you. That's where my muse puts her foot down."
The other side of the argument would be carried by Sting, whose waning career was rescued by an ad for the Jaguar line of luxury cars. The former Police man's single, Desert Rose, had sold only 1 million copies when the song and singer appeared in the commercial, taken from a video he had shot. The exposure transformed his fortunes, with Desert Rose going on to sell 3 million copies.
This happened in the same year as the release of Play, by Moby, the artist also known as Richard Melville Hall. Play received warm critical reviews but no airplay. The issue was profitably sidestepped with the licensing of every song on the album to any and every medium. Heard by a far wider audience, the album became a massive hit, while also paying Moby a reported $1 million in licensing fees.
Hutch Harris of the Thermals considers this argument. The band has just finished recording a new album, and he wouldn't be surprised if some of the songs had soundtrack potential. But those are not the terms by which he wants to be successful.
"I would love to break through commercially, but I would hate for that to break me through," he says. "We don't want it bad enough to have Hummer tell the world about us."
THE HOME FRONT
WHEN Football Federation Australia launched its new A-League competition last year, it did so with a compelling television commercial based around the catchy pop hit 'Not Many' by the New Zealand rapper Scribe.
Crowds for A-League matches easily surpassed targets and tomorrow's grand final is a sell-out. The choice of the edgy but accessible pop song was crucial to the campaign's success.
With the number of CDs sold in Australia dropping every year, licensing music to advertising agencies and television series has become almost routine for Australian artists. Television production companies and agencies employ music supervisors such as Alexandra Patsavas, who search for suitable music to spice up the soundtracks of series and commercials.
Patsavas and her staff at Chop Shop accept music from around the world to license for shows such as Channel Ten's teen drawcard The OC, Nine's Without A Trace, and Seven's Grey's Anatomy.
"Producers now have a really defined idea about the music in their shows, what it should sound like and what role it should play," Patsavas says.
Last week, the Australian quartet Youth Group felt the benefit of Patsavas's influence when their cover of Forever Young, recorded specifically for Patsavas, featured prominently in an episode of The OC.
The track is now a radio hit, used in Channel Ten promotions and expected to be a top-10 smash when it's released next week. "It was a great opportunity and seemed appropriate for us," singer Toby Martin says.
Music by the Australian trio Spiderbait has featured in Sex and the City and on the films Miss Congeniality, The Dukes of Hazzard, Without a Paddle and Ghost Rider - although the band has still been unable to break through in the US.
Similarly, the Church's Under the Milky Way was to be used in a Volkswagen ad in the late 1990s, but the producers decided at the last minute to use Pink Moon by Nick Drake. Drake, who died in 1974, still had a cult following. His album sales shot up tenfold. Under the Milky Way was eventually used in the 2001 film Donnie Darko.
Australia's two biggest rock bands, Jet and Powderfinger, have differing attitudes to licensing.
Powderfinger has trodden a conservative line. The single These Days featured in the Australian film Two Hands, but the only commercials for which the band has permitted the use of its music have been road safety ads. "We've been careful with what our music is used for," Powderfinger's frontman, Bernard Fanning, says.
In contrast, Jet's debut album, Get Born, has featured in The OC and in ads for mobile phones and iPods. Jet's US success has been attributed in part to the use of Are You Gonna Be My Girl? in Apple's iPod commercials.
Even Missy Higgins, who is discreet with licensing her music locally, appeared on the soundtrack of the US series Charmed to heighten her profile among her target American female audience.
Television commercials, once scorned by any rock act as "selling out", are being embraced more.
Thirsty Merc's In the Summertime is used to sell Foxtel, Spiderbait's cover of Black Betty sells Toyotas, Wolfmother's Woman sells jeans, and Channel Nine is using Shannon Noll's Shine to promote the Commonwealth Games.
Two of the most polarising examples of Australian acts licensing their work for television commercials are the now-defunct Melbourne rock quartet Motor Ace's Carry On, in campaigns for The Australian newspaper, and Sydney singer-songwriter Alex Lloyd's Amazing, first by the NRMA, and now by Ford.
Both acts were forced to defend their decision to agree to the ads by fans as well as derisive critics.
www.smh.com.au/news/music/look-what-theyve-done-to-my-song/2006/03/03/1141191845294.html
Music Section
March 4, 2006
Look What They've Done To My Song
They have been lambasted as immoral and vacuous, but many rock musicians refuse to be bought by the highest bidder. Gerard Wright reports.
TWO years ago, the last word in obnoxiousness had two letters. Its very presence led bystanders to yell insults at it, and the world to wonder at the lengths to which unbridled American materialism might go. The word was a vehicle, the H2, the second-generation version of the civilianised Humvee, the all-terrain military transport megalith; the offspring, it seemed, of the coupling of a jeep and a tank, with an average fuel consumption of 23.5 litres per 100 kilometres.
The task of persuading the public that it should spend $US53,000 ($71,000) for an H2 fell to Modernista, a fledgling advertising agency based in Boston. For a time, the agency was spectacularly successful. The Hummers moved briskly off car yards across the country, Modernista won international awards for one of its H2 ads, and petrol stayed relatively cheap.
But then it was time to update the ads, and something strange happened.
Lance Jensen, the president of Modernista and a former radio DJ, heard a song called June by Trans Am, a rock band from Washington, DC. Trans Am was an underground or cult band. "Underground" can mean invisible, or simply not well known, and certainly far from wealthy. Last year the three members of the band had a taxable income of $US13,000-$US16,000 each, according to the bass player, Nathan Means.
Modernista came calling on behalf of General Motors, the Hummer's manufacturer. Trans Am was offered $US90,000 for the use of June as the soundtrack for a new Hummer commercial. They said no. The offer was doubled to $US180,000.
"For us, the initial contradiction there was we'd just made an album that was not specifically anti-war, but probably our most obviously political, and against the fear and militarism that was gripping the United States at the time, and we were approached to advertise the civilian version of a military vehicle," Means says.
"Everyone would love to, for free, have an extra $30,000, but we were never going to take the money. For us, the thing was, the hypocrisy was too stark, of basically doing a military vehicle advertisement."
So they refused it. So did the Thermals, from Portland, Oregon. They play "loud pop, or whatever you want to call it", says the lead singer, Hutch Harris. "We're not rich. We don't sell hundreds of thousands of records." They were offered $US50,000 for the rights to It's Trivia, for a Hummer commercial.
"This was really the only commercial offer we've ever had," Harris says. "But it's always been important to me not to have my song used for advertising, and especially not for something like Hummer.
"I wouldn't want anyone to associate the song with the advertisement they saw - 'The band that you heard from the iPod commercial'. I wouldn't want to go to a town and see that on a poster. That would suck the life out of me."
Other performers also refused to provide an H2 soundtrack - Fourtet, an electronica duo, the Soledad Brothers, a psychedelic-blues revival band from Detroit, even Jonathan Richman, now into his 30th year of touring and recording.
It was partly the source of the money, partly the principle, explains Lyle Hysen of Bank Robber Music, a New York company that pairs songs with films, TV programs and advertisements.
"A lot of bands are into music to be not in the mainstream," Hysen says. "These are the kids who got beat up in high school because they look different. They don't want to be in the status quo. When an offer comes to them, the gut reaction is 'F--- you. I've made it this far without you'."
In that, they had something in common with a Who's Who of rock'n'roll in devising an answer to a conundrum almost as old as the music itself.
John Densmore, the drummer for the Doors, remembers the band being offered the then massive sum of $US50,000-$US75,000 by the Buick company for the rights to Light My Fire in an ad for its Opel model in the late '60s. The offer was refused, as were, Densmore says, more recent bids of $US4 million (Apple computers) and $US15 million (General Motors) to lease Break On Through (to the Other Side). In 1986, Bruce Springsteen turned his back on $US12 million from Chrysler for Born In the USA.
The choice was justified as a response to a calling that was higher than their bank balance.
"People lost their virginity to this music, got high for the first time to this music," Densmore told the Los Angeles Times last year. "I've had people say kids died in Vietnam listening to this music, other people say they know someone who didn't commit suicide because of this music … On stage, when we played these songs, they felt mysterious and magic. That's not for rent."
Tom Waits, the iconoclastic chronicler of the American underbelly, took up the argument in a letter to The Nation, a current affairs magazine: "Songs carry emotional information and some transport us back to a poignant time, place or event in our lives. It's no wonder a corporation would want to hitch a ride on the spell these songs cast and encourage you to buy soft drinks, underwear or automobiles while you're in the trance. Artists who take money for ads poison and pervert their songs. It reduces them to the level of a jingle, a word that describes the sound of change in your pocket, which is what your songs become."
A plainer response was offered by Nick Cave, the wandering and legendary son of the Melbourne punk scene, when asked by the Gap clothing company to appear in a television ad in the late '90s.
Cave wrote back. "Dear Gap. I might put on a pair of your jeans if you were to pay me $1 billion, but even then I would have serious reservations. Signed Nick Cave."
Again, it was the service of fans, memory and reputation that was cited. "I get letters from people telling me they got married to The Ship Song," Cave told an interviewer in London several years ago, "or that they buried their best friend to Into My Arms, and I don't want them to look at the TV and see that they buried their friend to a Cornetto ad or something.
"I feel some sense of responsibility about that, even though they wave enormous sums of money at you. That's where my muse puts her foot down."
The other side of the argument would be carried by Sting, whose waning career was rescued by an ad for the Jaguar line of luxury cars. The former Police man's single, Desert Rose, had sold only 1 million copies when the song and singer appeared in the commercial, taken from a video he had shot. The exposure transformed his fortunes, with Desert Rose going on to sell 3 million copies.
This happened in the same year as the release of Play, by Moby, the artist also known as Richard Melville Hall. Play received warm critical reviews but no airplay. The issue was profitably sidestepped with the licensing of every song on the album to any and every medium. Heard by a far wider audience, the album became a massive hit, while also paying Moby a reported $1 million in licensing fees.
Hutch Harris of the Thermals considers this argument. The band has just finished recording a new album, and he wouldn't be surprised if some of the songs had soundtrack potential. But those are not the terms by which he wants to be successful.
"I would love to break through commercially, but I would hate for that to break me through," he says. "We don't want it bad enough to have Hummer tell the world about us."
THE HOME FRONT
WHEN Football Federation Australia launched its new A-League competition last year, it did so with a compelling television commercial based around the catchy pop hit 'Not Many' by the New Zealand rapper Scribe.
Crowds for A-League matches easily surpassed targets and tomorrow's grand final is a sell-out. The choice of the edgy but accessible pop song was crucial to the campaign's success.
With the number of CDs sold in Australia dropping every year, licensing music to advertising agencies and television series has become almost routine for Australian artists. Television production companies and agencies employ music supervisors such as Alexandra Patsavas, who search for suitable music to spice up the soundtracks of series and commercials.
Patsavas and her staff at Chop Shop accept music from around the world to license for shows such as Channel Ten's teen drawcard The OC, Nine's Without A Trace, and Seven's Grey's Anatomy.
"Producers now have a really defined idea about the music in their shows, what it should sound like and what role it should play," Patsavas says.
Last week, the Australian quartet Youth Group felt the benefit of Patsavas's influence when their cover of Forever Young, recorded specifically for Patsavas, featured prominently in an episode of The OC.
The track is now a radio hit, used in Channel Ten promotions and expected to be a top-10 smash when it's released next week. "It was a great opportunity and seemed appropriate for us," singer Toby Martin says.
Music by the Australian trio Spiderbait has featured in Sex and the City and on the films Miss Congeniality, The Dukes of Hazzard, Without a Paddle and Ghost Rider - although the band has still been unable to break through in the US.
Similarly, the Church's Under the Milky Way was to be used in a Volkswagen ad in the late 1990s, but the producers decided at the last minute to use Pink Moon by Nick Drake. Drake, who died in 1974, still had a cult following. His album sales shot up tenfold. Under the Milky Way was eventually used in the 2001 film Donnie Darko.
Australia's two biggest rock bands, Jet and Powderfinger, have differing attitudes to licensing.
Powderfinger has trodden a conservative line. The single These Days featured in the Australian film Two Hands, but the only commercials for which the band has permitted the use of its music have been road safety ads. "We've been careful with what our music is used for," Powderfinger's frontman, Bernard Fanning, says.
In contrast, Jet's debut album, Get Born, has featured in The OC and in ads for mobile phones and iPods. Jet's US success has been attributed in part to the use of Are You Gonna Be My Girl? in Apple's iPod commercials.
Even Missy Higgins, who is discreet with licensing her music locally, appeared on the soundtrack of the US series Charmed to heighten her profile among her target American female audience.
Television commercials, once scorned by any rock act as "selling out", are being embraced more.
Thirsty Merc's In the Summertime is used to sell Foxtel, Spiderbait's cover of Black Betty sells Toyotas, Wolfmother's Woman sells jeans, and Channel Nine is using Shannon Noll's Shine to promote the Commonwealth Games.
Two of the most polarising examples of Australian acts licensing their work for television commercials are the now-defunct Melbourne rock quartet Motor Ace's Carry On, in campaigns for The Australian newspaper, and Sydney singer-songwriter Alex Lloyd's Amazing, first by the NRMA, and now by Ford.
Both acts were forced to defend their decision to agree to the ads by fans as well as derisive critics.
www.smh.com.au/news/music/look-what-theyve-done-to-my-song/2006/03/03/1141191845294.html
