Selling out will pay your grocery bills

It's always humbling when you find yourself agreeing with someone you dislike, but I recently found myself totally on the same page as Modest Mouse lead singer Isaac Brock. In an interview with The Onion AV Club, he was asked about his personal feelings on allowing his music to be used in commercials, and he said the following:\n"Around the time we did the beer commercial and the shoe commercial, I thought, 'Am I compromising my music by doing this?' And I think not. I like keeping the lights on in my house. People who don't have to make their living playing music can bitch about my principles while they spend their parents' money or wash dishes for some asshole. Principles are something that people are a lot better at checking in other people than keeping their own."\nI'd like Modest Mouse to be confined to an alternate-universe hell where black-and-white LiveJournal profile pictures are the only means of communication, but I don't think they've sold out. Selling out is when a musician tailors every aspect of his creative output to increase profitability, not when advertisers take advantage of a good song to hawk a product.\nIf a song is used in a commercial, it's most often beneficial to the artist. I mean, Iggy Pop managed to get a song he wrote about heroin-addicted male prostitutes to be used in a cruise ship commercial, which undoubtedly helped him to buy the drugs he desperately needs. Like Brock said, there's no compromise in wanting to benefit from your creativity (and get more exposure), especially if you need the cash. Miller used Blur's "There's No Other Way" in a commercial a few years back and probably got a lot of people wondering "Hey, who sings that song?"\nHell, the Clash had only No. 1 song, and it topped the charts 10 years after it was released. The reason? It was featured in a Levi's commercial.\nOf course, I'm not unique in the fact that whenever my favorite underground bands get new fans via something like a commercial, I inexplicably feel turned off. Still, it's not as if I stop listening to their music as long as it doesn't suck -- it's something that's going to happen, and just liking a band because of their status as unknowns is as obnoxiously trendy as swoopy, dyed-black haircuts and dance-punk.\nHowever, there are plenty of times when bands do in fact sell out in disgustingly-blatant ways. Ride's Carnival of Light is a great example -- they made as distinct an effort as they could to play to the mainstream and wound up losing all their devoted fans in the process; Queen released an ill-timed, stomach-churning disco album in 1981; the Goo Goo Dolls went from a metal band to writing songs to reassure 14-year-old girls in their time of need; Death Cab for Cutie effectively invalidated all of their previous musical accomplishments by writing their most overwrought, lackluster and successful album yet: Transatlanticism. \nIt's not like you can blame them, though -- just like Isaac Brock said, we as fans have no right to critique their integrity when we're not struggling to make rent every month and still have enough left over to avoid making starvation art. I don't have to write the street-cred-laden underground indie rock sensations -- I just tear them apart with printed words and get paid for it -- and like 99 percent of the population that can't write music beyond major chords, I won't ever have to.\nStill, I was a huge Death Cab fan. When I bought You Can Play These Songs with Chords during my senior year of high school, I played that CD incessantly and loved all but a few tracks on it, to the point that I was sending out copies of it to all my friends and designing my own Death Cab T-shirts. Hopefully this communicates the point that I was very, very disappointed.\nI would much rather my favorite band use a song in a Burger King spot than release an absolute turd of a record for the sake of mass appeal. Sure, the elitist in me would rather they do neither and starve as opposed to making me as turned off as I was by that Death Cab album. Then again, it's probably worth noting that I bought the CD with my parents' money.