Cold, Calculating British Pop Producer Is Aghast At Cold, Calculating Young Musicians

Pete Waterman–best known as part of the terrible trio of Stock, Aitken, and Waterman, which brought you a string of mechanicistic late ’80s pop trifles from Bananarama, Rick Astley, and others–is apparently taken aback at how common it is for young musicians to immediately hock their songs to advertisers. In a post on the Guardian’s music blog, Waterman complains that young musicians are too money-hungry and too business-minded (and perhaps not so in need of a producer-svengali):

One of my favourite songs of recent years was Bad Day by Daniel Powter. Brilliant song. And then I turn the telly on, it’s on a fucking deodorant ad! What are you doing?! And people go, “well, he got paid £200,000”. Hang on a minute – you write a song and all you care about is the money

This may surprise people, but I’m totally against that. You’ve never heard a Stock Aitken and Waterman song on an advert. I’ve been offered millions of pounds for our songs to be on adverts, but absolutely not.

We wrote Never Gonna Give You Up for Rick Astley for a purpose. It wasn’t for the Bank of Scotland. 15m people bought Never Gonna Give You Up because they believed Rick Astley singing it, and because they believed what we said, and because we were passionate about what we said – kids grew up with that song as an anthem. You sell it to the Bank Of Scotland for £1m – what’s the point?

I have no problem with saying that pop music is about making money – that’s what it does. But you have to entertain. To take the song one stage further and then have it all lined up so that it’s a movie, it’s a deodorant, it’s a car line ad – that’s shocking to me.

I actually agree with the teeny, tiny kernel of Waterman’s basic point about selling music to the ad men–even if it’s not cool to say so these days–that’s lurking somewhere under his 10,000 pounds of wack rhetoric about wanting to make a million dollars “the honest way.” But it still seems kind of ridiculous that he’s defending his position about the santicity of art (or even entertainment) (or even making a million dollars) with a Rick friggin’ Astley song.

Today’s Music Business Is Selfish And Greedy [The Guardian]