September 10th, 2004
Driving home from work last night, I was listening to the radio. The station was one of those "classic rock" stations that plays about 50 regular songs in steady, regular, and monotonous rotation (it's like finding a couple of restaurants you like, and then eating at them for the rest of your life). Every once in a while they stray off their playlist and pick some other "classic" songs from the 60s or 70s, which is what they did last night by playing the song, Somebody to Love by The Jefferson Airplane. (Actually, Grace Slick wrote and performed that song long before she ever joined The Airplane, but when she joined the band that song and the other famous one, White Rabbit, came with her.)
So, as I drove, I sang along to Somebody to Love (I like to add harmonies to songs when I sing along, not just sing the melody line).
What follows is a pretty close transcript of my thoughts triggered by that song:
Yeah ... great old song from a decent band ... back in the days when artists weren't instant sellouts ... back when Marketynge took a back seat to creativity ... what was the name of that album, anyhow? ... Oh yes, Surrealistic Pillow.
!!! Hang on a minute, they called their album "surrealistic"? They used the actual adjective "surreal" in their title? Are they trying to tell people that their album is surreal? Are they trying to tell people about their album's nature using its title, or are they trying to sell more albums by making it very obvious about who they think would want to buy it? Couldn't they have just made it sound surreal and let people decide for themselves? Good grief! That's marketing!
[It really is. To exemplify: Ford Motor Company tells us in their commercials that they've made a great car, or a safer truck. They target these commercials to people who would buy such vehicles, i.e.: advertise trucks during sporting events, compact cars during romantic comedies, luxury cars during Masterpiece Theatre. Or whatever; I'm just trying to point out that Ford wants the people who might buy a certain product line to be aware of that product line--and in the same way that The Jefferson Airplane wanted to tap into the drugs-and-daisies crowd, and get them to buy their records (and hopefully not just steal them under the self-delusion that in Hippieland "what's yours is mine, wanna toke, man?")]
Yeah, yeah, okay ... The Airplane marketed themselves ... and I guess that any band who ended up as Starship writing such nausea-inducing crud as We Built this City could be expected to have its roots firmly planted in the Marketynge Mindset.
Hmm ... so when was a time that artistry and creativity did not get up on its soapbox and market itself to the masses? William Blake? Samuel Taylor Coleridge? William Wordsworth? [My favourite poets] Naw ... they all held a certain amount of conceit to let people know about their poetry too. Except maybe for Emily Dickinson (and she was crazy), nobody seems to have tossed their collected works into the desk drawer and moved on. Or maybe some did, but we'll never hear about them now, will we?
Great Gridirons! Even J.S. Bach, the composer who has God-like status in my mind, packed up the six so-called "Brandenburg" Concertos and sent them off to Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg because he was ... gulp ... he was marketing himself, looking for a better job.
Blake did it,
Bach did it,
Even overeducated technical writers should do it ...Some conceit is necessary, eh? ... I can't say I like it any more than the fact that innocent cows who never hurt anyone have to get killed and chopped up so that I can eat my favourite steak ... but I do love to eat steak, and if I want people to read my short stories and if I want people to listen to my bands' songs, then I guess I have to do some marketing ... no, I don't like it for sure ... but maybe I'm more afraid of what it will make me look like than I should be ...
At this point I got home, and so it was a little while before I could get back to this train of thought. It happened as I drifted off to sleep:
I will never become a Marketeer ... but not because I will avoid all kinds of Maretynge ... it is because I will only seek out the folks who want to hear my songs and read my stories ... I will not try to create markets of the unwilling ... good grief ... that's the key!
The difference between Marketynge and marketing is that Marketynge makes its own life--and everyone else's-- miserable by trying to create new markets ... marketers only identify and cater to markets; Marketeers irresponsibly push past boundaries ... but it's not the end of the world to become a marketer, after all ...
It's not like I'm pushing cigarettes on children, after all ...
* * *
So, to that end: You are cordially invited to take my totally-100%-anonymous-you-lose-nothing-but-4-minutes-of-your-time survey?
It's here if you are interested.