Beat Boutique

On February 5, 2012, the quasi-maybe-sorta-sometimes-revolutionary pop star M.I.A. performed alongside Madonna at the Super Bowl half-time show. Despite the fact that M.I.A.’s music interrogates ideas about revolt, nationalism, and the distribution of wealth (“Pull up the people. / Pull up the poor,” goes the chorus of the first song on her major-label debut, Arular), and that her early albums were embraced by indie audiences, there was a time when M.I.A.’s appearance alongside one of the most famous people in the world, at an event that roughly half of the American population was watching, would have been perceived as “the ultimate sell-out move.” But in an article on the website Grantland about M.I.A.’s performance, Hua Hsu begged to differ. “[Today], we’ve grown accustomed to how deeply entangled the interests of art and commerce have become,” he wrote (thinking, no doubt, of such cultural phenomena as 30 Rock and Lady Gaga), “the way a sitcom can be meta and experimental while convincing you that you desperately want a McFlurry.” To him, M.I.A.’s Super Bowl appearance (which ended, now infamously, with her flipping off the camera) was hopeful and exciting, as it signaled the end of the previous generation’s simplistic ideas about the relationship between art and commerce, and trumpeted a new cultural reality: “the impossibility of selling out.” (...)

A couple of years ago, I was working as a production assistant for a television newsmagazine show. If you have ever been on a film or TV set before, you know production assistant is industry jargon for “person who does whatever nobody else really wants to do,” so you will understand that a task I enjoyed infinitely more than steam-cleaning the host’s pants suit or picking up fancy lunches for the show’s guests or logging surprisingly vast amounts of archived B-roll following a former member of the Monkees around his stately New England home, was scouring the production library for background music.

Usually it would work like this: an editor would describe to me some images or sequences she needed music for (“man on a mountain peak at sunset”), and I’d plug certain mood-related keywords (motivational/inspirational) into the online archive for which our company had paid access, which in this case was an L.A.-based library called Killer Tracks. I’d put a few of my chosen tracks on a flash drive and walk it over to the editor, who’d usually send me back with more-specific guidelines (“I want something more dramatic than ‘Extraordinary Determination,’ but with slightly less gusto than ‘Overcoming Challenges’”), at which point I’d continue to scour and eventually hit upon a winner (“Follow Me Up,” perhaps, which the site describes as “inspirational, indie/alternative rock” and has for cover art a distressed photo of a colonial-era drum corps with the title “Motivational 8” scrawled in a graffiti-inspired typeface).

Library music (sometimes referred to as “production music” or “stock music”) generally refers to music that has been composed and recorded for commercial purposes and which is licensed not through the composer but the library for which it has been recorded. This means it is much easier and cheaper to use in a movie or TV show than a hit song, which requires copyright clearance from the songwriter and record label, and, in some cases, separate clearances depending on the countries in which the work will be screened. Library music cuts out the middleman, but it also means that most of it can be licensed to any number of projects, so occasionally while scanning through the Killer Tracks archives I’d get this uncanny “Where have I heard that before?” twinge, until I realized it was from, say, a local furniture commercial, or maybe the corporate-diversity video my colleagues and I sat through last week.

For anyone who keeps up with pop culture, browsing through certain corners of the Killer Tracks catalog is like traipsing through a bizarre shadow world full of easily identifiable doppelgängers. Songs for Shady Living features a Toby Keith look-alike on its cover and such instant classics as “I Pulled a Muscle (Loving You)”; Soul Pop includes Amy Winehouse–inspired jams and a beehive-coiffed cover model; and, with artwork that showcases a hand-drawn bird and a dead ringer for Ellen Page, Sweet & Quirky seems to be capitalizing on the popularity of the fey indie-pop on the Juno soundtrack. My time spent browsing the Killer Tracks catalog sometimes brought on flashbacks of Dr. Thunder, the cheap, off-brand soda that my family used to buy at Walmart when I was growing up—just unique enough to evade a lawsuit, but conveniently blatant enough that consumers knew exactly what was being ripped off.

Even more surreal to me were the moments when the pop world explicitly intersected with the library-music world. Killer Tracks features a special series called “REALITY by C. Franke,” which it describes as “a new reality music library from composer Christopher Franke (The Amazing Race, Supernanny, Big Brother, former member of Tangerine Dream).” What sort of world was this—in which a credit from Supernanny had more cache than being in a legendary kraut-rock band?

Library music fascinated me. At the time I was an aspiring music critic (aspiring here being industry jargon for “unpaid”), and we critics love to ponder the conflicts between things like art and commerce, or authenticity and artifice. Forget the glittery, Gaga-inspired pop music topping the charts; I could not imagine a kind of music more squarely on the latter side of both those divides—more blatantly commercial and in conflict with the rebellious, individualistic spirit of the punk and indie rock I’d grown up on—than library music.

It would be another year or so before I realized that I was completely wrong.

by Lindsay Zoladz, The Believer |  Read more:
Illustration by Tony Millionaire