Is it a mistake for a musician or band to make songs about mistakes or to title them with the word mistake? There is a philosophical saying, “To err is human,” but do people like their music to remind them of mistakes? In one of its more critical comments, a length book I once had about the Billboard charts once specifically commented on the song “Big Mistake” by Peter Cetera and explained that the late single from his Solitude/Solitaire era was a big mistake because of its lowly peak position in the bottom half of the Hot 100 chart. Similarly, the book claimed that it was a mistake for Australian act Men At work to release their top 5 hit “It’s A Mistake” because the band’s fortunes declined so precipitously afterwards. The same could be said, although it wasn’t said, about the band Culture Club’s maudlin “Mistake #3,” which showed Boy George in a mournful mood about the mistakes made in educating children and helping them to learn about the world around them. That song barely peaked in the top 40 and was one of their last hits before breaking up, so was it a mistake to make and release that song as well?

How do we know that something is a mistake? There are some things that are wrong in themselves, and so we can know that if people do these things they have made mistakes–we may call them sins or transgressions–because they cross the boundary between what is allowed and right to do and what is wrong. This sort of mistake can be known in advance, though it is certainly clear that people do not always do what is right. There are other actions, though, that are not wrong in themselves but are right or wrong insofar as we may determine their results. It may seem good for an artist to release a particular song because it reflects their concerns and their state of thinking or feeling at a particular time, but these songs do not always resonate with the general public. Is having a song that one has spent a lot of time working on and releases to the public flop necessarily a mistake? Is having a hit song that is one’s last hit and a sign of a general downturn necessarily a failure? Much depends on the nature of success that one cares about. The band Velvet Underground released an album that flopped in terms of sales, but just about everyone who bought the album was so inspired by it that they formed a band, and some of those bands became very successful as a result, giving the band an influence greatly outsized to its popular success. On the other hand, popular success can often be viewed as appealing to the least common denominator or hopping on trends to stay with what is current rather than expressing a genuine sentiment or structuring one’s thoughts in a way that leads to genuine personal growth and artistic achievement. People can succeed (or fail) in many ways. Sometimes we can fail now and succeed later, or succeed now and realize that our success was not lasting and set us up for longer-term failure.

All three of the mistake songs that we are discussing have been viewed by some people, at least, as a mistake in having been released as a single. Men At Work’s “It’s A Mistake” was the first of the three to be released, and it was a successful song that expresses the band’s desire for world peace and their fears about nuclear destruction in the rhetorical contest between the United States and Soviet Union that occurred in the Reagan presidency. Though it may be hard to understand now, a great many artists (and presumably many people) had a deep fear of nuclear destruction as a likely result of Reagan’s tough rhetorical stance against the Soviet Union, but history did not work out that way, with the Soviet Union collapsing because of its own internal contradictions and the failures inherent in socialism and communism and authoritarian government with regards to central planning and the coercion of large amounts of people, ending with a whimper rather than a bang. While it may not have been a mistake to give voice to fears that ended up not being justified, perhaps the confident assurance in being able to judge anti-Communists as making a mistake through tough rhetoric was a mistake, in that this confident assurance ended up being mistaken about many areas, and the band later broke apart in part because of rising conflict between members that could not have been helped by their developing an attitude of superiority in their own reasoning and a decrease in their willingness to give the benefit of the doubt to others.

The case is much the same as far as Culture Club’s “Mistake #3” is concerned. Here the group, which had gotten popular based on songs about their sexual availability and gay romantic melodrama, attempted to reflect seriously on the question of how kids learn to see the world and how mistaken the behavior of teachers and those responsible for education often are. It may not be a mistake in general to point out that the influence that people have over the thinking of others is often mistaken and can lead to great unhappiness for these children later on, but it is certainly ironic that Culture Club felt confident in labeling others as making mistakes without taking a good critical look at the negative externalities of their own ephemeral cultural influence. When you point a finger at someone else, you point three fingers at yourself, and Culture Club’s failures that would soon follow were do in large part again to the band’s internal pressures, especially with regards to drug use. People who are making big mistakes are not necessarily the best people to be taking a hard line in being critical about the mistakes of others. Perhaps an awareness of how we all stumble combined with a humble willingness to admit and overcome our own mistakes is a better attitude than hypocritical self-righteousness.

When we get to Peter Cetera’s “Big Mistake,” the conception of mistake is a much smaller one, not being viewed on the large scale of politics or education systems as was the case with the situations we have discussed before. Instead, Cetera’s song focuses on a mistake in the context of personal relationships, an area where it is all too easy to err. It is harder to judge this single as a mistake (despite the confidence of the author of the Billboard Book of Hot 100 hits) than the other two, because it was a late-album single released after Cetera had already hit #1 with two songs from the album. The other two songs were earlier released singles and thus were expected to do better. By the time someone has already had a couple of big hits, it can be harder to find songs among the deeper cuts of an album that can resonate as well with audiences while one is trying to extend an era. While the main standard people have for pop artists is to have hits that are popular on the charts, not all songs are as catchy or resonate as well with others, it must be admitted.

In a larger sense, though, is it a mistake to release songs that explicitly refer to mistake in the title? Is there a natural unwillingness on the part of people to think fondly of a piece of music–a form of entertainment–that reminds them of their own fallibility? We live in a day and age that is particularly unwilling to accept that we are wrong and is quick to project our failings onto others and to blame other people or things for whatever failings are impossible for us to ignore or deflect. To the extent that this tendency to want to avoid accepting blame and responsibility hinders us from appreciating or seeking out songs that wish to cast blame on us or on others, under the understandable logic that if we are quick to blame others, then others will be equally quick to blame us, such an act by a pop musician or band would indeed be a mistake. If the goal is to be popular, doing those things which are unpopular is, by definition, a mistake. It is only if there is something other than popularity that matters, a concern such as truth, then such an act can be defended and justified. Acting in accordance with higher motives than popular appeal, though, makes someone into something other than a pop musician, and with those higher ambitions comes higher responsibility and higher accountability. Can we who seek to deal in truth in art handle that?