This week: to be commercial is both an acknowledgment that something is designed to be sold and also a subtle dig at its perceived quality. Why? We get into it with all the footnotes you could want, below.
When I was 14, my greatest ambition was to form a really good rock band1 and play nothing but over-produced pop music. We'd dress up in suits and play slick, corporate rock shows but, because we were actually punk and not corporate stooges at all, we would call ourselves...the Sell-Outs.
Selling out was the big no-no of the day. Your favorite indie punk band had to struggle. They had to be known to only the select few in-crowd kids. The merest hint of major label interest or, God forbid, a hit record and that was it, they were sell-outs never to be listened to again2. In retrospect, it all seems more than a little ridiculous. After all, if the band wanted more people to hear their music, they needed to make a record. And, if a bigger label could get more records to more people, then so much the better, right?
The trouble came in finding the line between an artistic record, i.e., a record that expressed what the band really wanted to say without any oversight by a record label executive and a commercial record, i.e., a record designed to sell more records and thereby buy some nameless record executive a new BMW. The reality, of course, is that artists3 have always struggled between being true to their vision and paying the bills.
So, what does it mean for art to be commercial? Is there really a difference between art for art's sake and art for sales' sake? Maybe. Let's start by looking at what the word commercial really means. Merriam-Webster gives us four separate definitions of the word, primarily that it means something is "related to commerce," but they go all-in with the secondary meaning:
being of an average or inferior quality
producing artistic work of low standards for quick market success
Let's unpack that - the same word that means designed or created for profit can also suggest that something designed or created for profit has no artistic merit. It's worth remembering, here, that dictionaries are not prescriptive. They record the language as it is used4. So, the issue here is not that someone decided on that nuance, but more that someone found enough evidence of common usage that it warranted a sub-entry. It also raises something of a chicken and egg question for me - did this usage arise before the modern usage as a noun, as in television commercial?
Merriam-Webster does state that the noun usage was coined in 1935, but says nothing about when the "low standards" definition arose. My other standard books are no help either. One mentions only the same t.v. definition5, while the other refers me back to commerce6.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to run a full corpus analysis7 on this, so, instead, I'm going to speculate wildly. Radio was invented in the 1890s and by the 1920s had taken on a major role in daily life in countries around the world. Advertising had its first steps all the way back in the 15th century but did not really take off as a facet of daily life until the 1800s. Even then, it required a certain degree of literacy that limited its spread. Until radio. Suddenly, not only was the literacy requirement gone8 but you could reach different market sectors with a single message. Over the next thirty years, as commercials take a firm hold on how radio and t.v. shows are funded and presented, artists are experimenting with new recording and media. As these two forces meet, we see the rise of commercial's now-nuanced dismissal of art made purely for profit.
And, for me, this culminates in the era of the music video. Arguably an artistic expression to accompany a song, in practice, they were (and are) little more than a commercial to drive consumers towards purchasing said song. And yet, there are some that are undeniably art even as they fulfill their commercial purpose. I suppose the prime example would be Michael Jackson's "Thriller." It drove sales, certainly, but it was also hailed as a work of art in and of itself, almost divorced from the album where the song could be found.
While I doubt that this debate between commerce and art will ever actually be resolved, there does seem to have been a lessening of tensions as the concepts of personal branding and "everything is sales" have taken hold. There seems to have been a realization that it is in even the fans' interest for bands to be as commercially available as possible and that the starving artist trope should be burned in a fire.
That's where we'll leave it for the moment, I suppose. If you have better information on where and how the "low standards" definition came about, let me know in the comments. In the meantime, I think I'm off to form a band...
Stay curious,
J
Bonus Video:
Just for fun, one of my favorite bands, singing their very first hit song, “Sell Out.” I present, Reel Big Fish:
Unfortunately, none of us could play any instruments. Admittedly, not knowing how to play our instruments would have been par for the course if we were forming a punk band, but we wanted to be in a good band. But, uh, corporate rock still sucks?
Except when the major label record was really good, of course.
I'm using music because it's close to my heart; you could make the same point with authors, painters, mimes, and collage artists if you wanted to.
For those keeping track at home: Neither the Cambridge nor Dictionary dot com include the "low standards" definition but both the Macmillian and Collins dictionaries do.
The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins
Word Origins The Hidden Histories of English Words from A to Z. Although, it does contain this little tidbit on commerce's origins: "It comes, perhaps via French commerce, from Latin commercium ‘trade’, a compound noun formed from the collective prefix com- ‘together’ and merx ‘merchandise’."
Dissertation possibility alert! Seriously, if you're doing corpus linguistics, this is an interesting historical search you could do. Run a search through a historical corpus and code a random selection of your results (say, 200 or so) as to which meaning and nuance the usage matches and see how that graphs over time. Man, I wish I had more time.
Somewhat ironically, this happened even while education was being formalized and literacy rates were rising.