When I first got pretty serious about music, I remember the idea of “selling out” being a big deal. I said it a lot about bands that I didn’t like and bands that changed their sound or signed a major label deal. But I never really considered what I meant when I said it. It was just a nice catch-all for bands I was mad at.
I don’t want to use this post to point the finger at who I thought did and didn’t sell out, so I’ll try to leave the verdict as open-ended as I can. What I really want to do here is to establish (or at least start to establish) some kind of criteria for what it really means to sell out. Since I’m not 100% sure what it really means, I’m going to throw my thoughts out there a little at a time and try to revisit the topic every once in awhile, so that I can rethink things and take any comments into account. At some point down the road, maybe the whole idea will be fleshed out, but for now I’m just going to throw random thoughts out there.
The first point I want to make is that in order to sell out, the band or artist has to sell in. So we should first determine what a band really sold in to. For instance, the Clash sold in to rock as activism and Kiss sold in to rock as a good commercial product. We can’t hold the Clash responsible for the commercial inviability of Sandanista and we can’t hold Kiss responsible for their lack of substance. However, we can say former Clash members sold out when “London Calling” showed up in a Jaguar commercial (if they still owned the rights at that time) and we can say Kiss sold out based on the sad facsimile of their 70s heyday that they’ve become. Interestingly, a band like Limp Bizkit could only sell out if they actually did something of any substance, socially or musically, since they’ve only sold in to the cash cow of make-believe rock n roll rebellion and are obviously interested in neither music nor ideas.
Okay, so maybe the first thing to consider is, “What did the band sell in to in the first place?” I don’t think that even comes close to answering all the questions about what it means to sell out, but it’s a start. More on this later…