Until about age 20, I assumed I would become a lawyer. This pleased my mom. She left her beachside Jamaican existence in the 1980s for a minimum-wage municipal job in the frostbitten Northeast, partly in hopes that her eventual offspring would have prosperous, stable American careers. I was happily on my way to that future until, as a college sophomore, I fell into the seductive grip of "magazine journalism." I somehow became a writer, for literary magazines and music blogs and eventually working on screenplays. But as the years passed, I watched monetizable "real" work in my chosen discipline evaporate. For years, I accepted most "money jobs" for my skill set with much reluctance: copy-writing gigs, puffy interviews with P.R.-conscious celebrities, "brand strategy." This made me self-conscious. I worried that, in the eyes of my literary peers, I might appear to lack a certain degree of integrity.
Part of me also worried that this mercenary work was harming my precious artistic instrument. Perhaps in accepting the commission from that e-commerce site — for a 1,200-word article about "the growing psychedelia trend in streetwear" — I was dulling my tools. Maybe, in generating the Instagram caption for that Bluetooth-speaker company, I was siphoning off some creative essence. With each new invoice, I feared I was engaging in a betrayal of my deeper ambitions, and I assumed I would have to find a different way to pay my bills.
But then I saw a commercial. In a nostalgic-millennial-male turn that surprised absolutely no one, last summer I became obsessed with watching 1990s N.B.A. game broadcasts on YouTube. During an ad break of a '96 Bulls midseason game, I was treated to an ultrasleek, cinematic spot for the Air Jordan XII. So taken was I that, immediately after, I searched for "Cool Jordan 12 commercial" on Google. I learned that it was a somewhat famous ad, titled "Frozen Moments," and that it was directed by Jonathan Glazer. The same Jonathan Glazer who would go on to win an Oscar for "The Zone of Interest," his austere, scoreless film depicting the sinister banality of life within the household of the commandant at Auschwitz.
I stared at the screen, confused that this vanguard director had cut his teeth hawking trainers. Had I been duped? I had assumed that the true artists cultivated practices uncontaminated by the real world. I suspect this expectation developed in college. I was raised in a Black, working-class milieu where the very idea of a career in the arts was given little to no consideration. But at my Ivy League school, I was suddenly surrounded by poets, painters, filmmakers. They were self-avowed and single-minded. If you wanted to make money, the logic went, then you should become a management consultant.
Of course, most of those peers were wealthy and had a different relationship to the concept of "rent" than I did. I was trying to emulate their brush strokes without considering that they were working with different paint. Glazer's Jordan commercial reminded me that an artist's practice doesn't always emerge from a pure art-making void. It can be cultivated over time, through interaction with the world. And our world is one where you have to do things for money.
Then I started thinking of early 1970s Miles Davis. Approaching 50, the jazz legend felt pressure from his label to capitalize on a late-career resurgence in popularity and release more music that appealed to a broader, younger demographic. The resulting album, "On the Corner" (1972) — with its wah-wah-pedaled electric trumpet and dense rhythmic layering — is one of his most experimental. The album failed critically and commercially, but it has since become revered, with some fans asserting that it prefigured acid-funk, electronica, even hip-hop. Davis most likely wouldn't have arrived at something so unusual were he not, at least in part, attempting a cynical cash grab. And his lime green Lamborghini wasn't going to pay for itself.
Perhaps I had it backward. Maybe selling out was part of finding your way toward the art. I reflected on the times when I felt I had sold out. How had it actually changed me and my life? There was my stint at BuzzFeed writing caption copy for videos titled things like "Pizza Braid"; with the stability of the job, I pitched and published my first pieces in a prominent magazine. There was the commercial that I helped produce for an alternative-milk brand; I spent a memorable day with a set hand named Anthony, who was formerly incarcerated and had stories of raving in the backwoods of Maine in the late '90s. There was the fashion shoot I worked on at a private lake in the Catskills with such a preposterous collection of people that I turned the experience into a screenplay. Instead of derailing me, these jobs gave my life new dimension and supplied me with creative grist.
"Selling out," I've realized, isn't an artistic death. For most of us, it amounts to parceling out bits of our creative talents in order to live, in order to give ourselves time to make the art we want to make. The work can be joyless, iterative and enervating, but rarely is it pointless. I was foolish to presume that "real" art, insofar as it exists, was so fragile that it couldn't withstand gig work. If anything, my taste of selling out showed me what it might look like to work truly dispassionately, to create in the absence of emotional and intellectual implication. It's this glimpse that has shown me exactly what I'm working to protect.