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Originally Posted by Coppertop
It is that when artists become spokespeople for corporations the line between them, their music and the company becomes blurred. Say a band sells their song to a large multinational corporation for use in a commercial. They make some dough, the commercial is jazzed up a little, no harm no foul, right? Said band then makes a new album, and some of the tracks on the new album have a certain political/philosophical slant to them. How can you know that the message is theirs and not something the company wants them to say? It becomes difficult if not impossible to tell when the one stops and the other begins. Hence the remark about their music being suspect.
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Yeah, that's pretty much what I gathered. Hicks likened it to prostitution, at least metaphorically, by using the term 'corporate whore'.
The problem is, the above reasoning is unfair speculation. And actually kinda farfetched, the way you worded it. Because they sold usage of a song to a company, the company now might have a stranglehold on where they're going with their sound/message? The Shins might start writing pro-burger songs or the Zutons will write an inordinate number of songs about jeans?
Certainly, there are many out there that have the sole creative direction of "whatever makes me money". But then, there are also many who are quite capable of retaining their original creative directions while making some money off it in less inspired ways (like commercial spots). There's absolutely NOTHING wrong with that, and it's more than possible, it's downright feasible. If being involved with commercials makes one's music suspect, it's only because of overly suspicious people who unjustifiably assume the worst.