Take the money and run...

February 27th – They all start out with the same intention, or so they say. “What does your music mean to you?” ask the interviewers and press corps when you become someone worth noticing, and the answers are trotted out as lines taken from the pages of ‘The Golden Book of Stardom’ and carved, just like pictures, into the stones on skid row by a UFO gun fired in madness from Jefferson’s Starship in a rage against the machine that is the soul asylum where Jane’s addiction was damned in shed seven despite being in dire straits…did you see what I did there? No? OK, skip on…

Yes...we hear them all the time repeating the mantra:

“It’s my life… It’s what I was born to do and what I do is my art… The music and lyrics I write, they are so precious to me… I want to alter the way people think... The work that I put out is part of my soul… The music isn't from me, it IS me… The money? I don’t do it for the money! I do it for its own sake… It breathes within me, this music, it creates the reason for my being… These songs are my children and, when I let them out into the world I weep at their loss and am frightened for their future…”

Yup, all good and laudable…until Pepsi come calling, that is…

It was on this day in 1984 that The Jacksons’ commercial for the above beverage was first aired on MTV and we shouldn't be surprised at their level of avarice, given what happened to ‘The Jacksons’ and what happened to ‘a Jackson’. However, there always is, for me, a level of naive surprise when the likes of The Who, Nina Simone, E.L.O., Buddy Holly, Cat Stevens or Thin Lizzy take the corporate dollar/pound. These are some of the bands I’ve actually cared a fig about and to find that all the ideologies I planted on them and watched grow to full flowering will now wither and die…? When I hear their songs – those anthems I sang written by those writers of lyrics and that I used as building blocks for a life-philosophy – now used to sell jeans (underpaid kids in sweatshops) or cars (oil-rich Texans polluting the atmosphere) or new-fangled yoghurt (laced with dubious taste exciters to keep us hooked) it’s not sadness but anger that fuels my emotions.

Some of those performers I don’t care a fig about – Herman’s Hermits, T-Rex, Donovan, Mungo Jerry, the Commodores and Nancy Sinatra…you expect it of them. You kind of expect them to be the first in the queue when the wedge of cash is held out by a manufacturer of some commodity or other. They somehow seemed to have no morals to start with, producing the sort of trite musical fluff they did, but the others? 
But then, is that a fair thing of me to do; to shoulder these musical heroes of mine with the responsibility for the success or failure of my own philosophical yearnings for a better society? Maybe they are ‘Just a Singer in a Rock and Roll Band’. Maybe the success or failure of my view of Utopia is up to me to make, create and set in motion. Thich Quang Duc, Wang Weilin Tiananmen Square tank-stopper, Emily Wilding Davison…? They've probably never heard of Neil Young or Rush (Ms. Davison for sure) and still they acted according to their conscience and the tenets that form the core of what it is to be human. So what does it matter if these singers of the songs of my life turn out to be paper tigers whose work is as ephemeral as a snowflake? Well actually quite a lot. You see, I don’t actually like Pepsi…or Coca-Cola, nor what they stand for so…