You Don’t Have to Pay Fergie to Name-Drop Products

mbart | July 12, 2007 2:00 am
fergiecandies.gif

Last week, a story based on an article in the Sunday Times UK and claiming that as part of Fergie’s well-documented spokeslady deal with Candie’s jeans, she would “write and perform songs about Candie’s,” made the rounds. But it’s not true! Says Fergie: “I don’t know where they got it from. I sing about a lot of things in my songs–from cars to Taco Bell–but not because I’m paid to!” Then why did the story catch on so widely and so easily?

Part of it, obviously, was that the deal fit right in with Fergie’s image: she’s in a Candie’s ad that uses “Glamorous,” she’s part of the endorse-anything Black Eyed Peas, and she generally seems to have no shame or artistic credibility and thus no compunctions against whoring herself out quite so spectacularly. But at the same time, there’s a real misperception about what’s going on when singers or rappers drop the names of commercial products in their songs. Sometimes there is an endorsement thing going on, but that’s usually when the product is one the artist stands to make money from directly–i.e. a clothing line or vodka brand that they actually own. Everything else is just there because commercial products are part of our lives. The same thing happened with the movie Josie and the Pussycats: there were lots and lots of product placements, but they were there as a joke and/or a point about pop bands (and, presumably, because the Target logo is awesome); no one actually got paid. But because it didn’t seem serious, and because people saw logos, they assumed the placement was the result of a sell-out.

We like to think of pop artists as purely commercial creatures, cynically calculating the precise point where endorsements and credibility most profitably meet. But these people are musicians, too, and have most (if not all) of the hangups about the genuineness of their art that any other musician does. Maybe you don’t think that sampling Dick Dale and yelling “Pump it!” represents something true and meaningful about the human condition, but chances are that will.i.am, for better or for worse, does. No matter how much money you’re making to do it, writing and singing lyrics is done alone, and the act is inevitably a personal one. You eat at Taco Bell because it is delicious, and so you might want to also sing about it. And you do it because you think it’ll make for what you consider a good song, not because someone pays you to do so.

Alternately, it’s not like Fergie needs more money, right?

Memo Pad: Fergie’s Sour Candies… Week End… Hot Flash… [WWD, via Jezebel]