Advertising as Culture by Chris Wharton

Author:Chris Wharton [Wharton, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781841507873
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Intellect Books Ltd
Published: 2013-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

1. Post-production polishing

If ‘the day the music died’ was 3 February 1959 when Buddy Holly died in an aeroplane crash along with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, then the day it was resurrected was 20 July 1959. This was the date a demo of Holly’s ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’, which had been partially written as a follow on to ‘Peggy Sue’ (1957) was polished off with backing vocals and guitar and released. A productive decade of posthumous releases for the Holly estate followed and the creation of a new and lucrative revenue stream for dead musicians ensued.

Just as Heath Ledger’s performances went into post-production for his posthumous role starring in The Dark Knight (2008), we can see its replication in putting the final touches to musical unfinished symphonies. What is then created in the use of a death to market a commodity is a space in which Cluedo can be played out by using the (musical) clues in order to attempt to fathom how the death has occurred. For instance, Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York album (1994) was released seven months after Kurt Cobain’s death, leaving critics divided as to whether it gave an understanding into Cobain’s suicide or an ethical debate of the MTV Unplugged manipulative format. The five million sales that year and the following Grammy suggest that it was perfectly poised to make the most of the hungry market that wanted an aural, as well as a later visual insight (the DVD was released in 2007), into the mind of a tortured artist. As Coletti suggests: ‘Everyone knew this was special. Everyone knew we just saw another side of a very important band. But obviously [everything] gets magnified in the context of what happened later’ (2004).

When the deaths are from what are classed as ‘natural causes’, such as Joey Ramone’s death from lymphatic cancer, or Joe Strummer’s heart attack, any material they had been working on is often released within the year (Ramone’s Don’t Worry about Me or Strummer’s work with the Mescaleros, Streetcore). Joey Ramone’s second solo album, Don’t Worry About Me was recorded during the last months of his illness and has been described by critics as a ‘fitting epitaph’. What is interesting is that Ramone had already recorded the material knowing he was dying and was seemingly aware of its future release – even if the advertising for it would only begin in earnest after his death. But what of the moral issues of posthumous music when it is released against the wishes of the artists? The case of Jeff Buckley’s work is an interesting one as the NME.com music journalist Luke Lewis points out:

But even when the music is beautiful, the ethics are still dodgy. Shortly before completing ‘Grace’, Jeff Buckley explicitly stated that he never wanted the opulent-yet-spiteful ballad ‘Forget Her’ released – but there it is, on all copies of the album released since 2004. Future generations will have no concept of that record without it. Is that right?

(Lewis

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