Last night at trivia, we were discussing Peanuts and Charles Schulz, and how, even though Schulz became mind-bogglingly wealthy, you don’t often hear about him selling out.
You hear about Peanuts sucking in its later years, of course – the later years apparently starting any time after 1970. But Schulz didn’t change the content of the strip based on all the merchandising he was doing. People ignored the strip’s bitter undertones (and overtones) on their own, with no help from Schulz. Charlie Brown never kicked the football, kissed the little red-haired girl, or outwitted Lucy.
The strip’s sensibility evolved, but it didn’t bend under the weight of all the bags of money it was bringing in.
I’m sure some people think Schulz sold out, however they want to use the term. Maybe I can even be convinced – I’m not a Peanuts scholar.
But the discussion did prompt a big question: which artists – whatever the medium – became rich and famous without deliberately altering their sensitivity to attract the masses?
Another candidate that occurred to me this morning: Hitchcock. Before Spielberg, probably the most famous movie director in America, and yes his later works got sludgy, but his strong, cockeyed sensibility remained with him to the end.
Any other candidates for non-sellout artistic wealth machines?
At columist Erma Bombeck’s funeral, her agent Aaron Priest said she was “the one person you could not buy. If Erma did not want to do something, no amount of money could make her do it. I once told a person ‘You could fill a room with gold bars and it wouldn’t make a difference.’”
You can debate whether or not he altered his work, but Charles Schulz undeniably agreed to all kinds of merchandizing deals for his characters.
Bill Watterson, of Calvin and Hobbes fame, was on the opposite end of the spectrum - he basically refused virutally all merchandizing opportunities he was offered. The only things he ever authorized other than the comic strip itself and the books were two calendars.
Yes. But that’s not really the same thing as selling out – at least, not as I understand the term. Schulz is no Jim Davis, and Peanuts was never the deliberately crafted merchandising machine that Garfield quickly became. Snoopy’s spokesgig for MetLife didn’t change the direction of Schulz’s strip.
Watterson is a good counterexample, but I’m more interested in people who were able to sell stuff without selling out.
Perhaps the only musical group with integrity- ABBA. While it’s hard to understand how a group with no social or political context to begin with could “sell out”, they turned down $1 Billion to do a reunion tour, choosing to leave their musical legacy intact.
How about the Beatles? Honestly, didn’t they do what they wanted, when they wanted? If it worked, great. If not, oh well.
Hmm, one might say the Anthology “new” songs were a sell out. Still, the whole, “John left this song…see what you want to do with it…” was established during the latter part of their career.
Radiohead have made a career of doing exactly the opposite of what their corporate handlers recommend, which hasn’t stopped them from being one of the most popular acts on the planet.
I agree with Little Nemo about Watterson. And he sold stuff like crazy, only it was books and compilations of strips rather than tie-in products.
Gary Larson also retired at the peak of his popularity, and The Far Side was as brilliant in its last days as it ever was. No sellout there.
*Charlie Chaplin. ** He was the most famous and most merchandized person on the planet (and a very tough negotiator who always got the best terms for whatever he did), but he still made his movies the way he wanted to.
Alfred Hitchcock became a trademark and an ad for his films, but he made films his way (especially once he became established as a brand name director).
*Chaplin knew the key to negotiating: be ready to walk. He’d ask what he wanted and if he didn’t get it, he’d walk away.
Submitted for your approval, a young man from Hibbing, MN. Bob Dylan has certainly gone through a lot of changes during his career but I don’t think he ever sold out. His MTV unplugged is a wretched album but I don’t consider it a sellout.
I don’t see Bruce Springsteen as a sellout either. In fact, when the Republicans offered him a whole lotta money so that they could use Born In The USA in the campaign to re-elect Reagen, he publicly turned them down. His reunion with the E Street band doesn’t come across as a “we need money, so lets tour” operation.
Also discussed during trivia night was the question of whether or not the undoubtedly large checks Schulz received for the TV cartoons (culminating in “Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown”) qualifies as “selling out.”
Ditto on Prince. Always ready to experiment, always ready to fail. Some of his stuff sucks, but he’s never coasted, which is what I equate with selling out.
Kate Bush. She mellowed, but that’s exactly because she DOESN’T coast: her stuff stays emotionally true, as she has matured and mellowed.
David Bowie. Like Prince, Bowie is uneven but always ready to try something new. No coasting there.
Bjork.
Greta Garbo.
George Clooney.
And hearty agreements from me on Hitchcock, Radiohead, Chaplin, and Watterson.
As far ash Schulz, if you equate selling out with coasting, as I do for the purposes of this thread, Schulz was a major sellout. He shoulda retired 20, 30 years before he died, instead of continuing to crank out shallower and lamer dreck. Early Peanuts was revolutionary and brilliant; later Peanuts was lamer than Marmaduke.
So far as I’m concerned, selling out isn’t the same thing as sucking in one’s own unique and uncorrupted way.
I also don’t think earning a lot of money is the same thing as selling out, so the suggestions of Prince, Bowie, Clooney (good one!), etc. are all good.
Selling out, to my mind, is taking the money and altering your work so as to attract more money. Schulz’s TV specials don’t make him a sell out, in my mind, because what he was really interested in was the comic strip. Yeah, he ran out of gas long before he stopped driving, but no one paid him to go to Vegas instead of Kalamazoo.
What I’m really interested in – so people like Watterson are borderline, and Bill Hicks doesn’t qualify at all – are people who took the money but didn’t let it corrupt them. (Change them, maybe. Corrupt them, no.)
That was just one song, I believe. Suppsoedly, though, Dylan once joked (in the 60s) that if he were to use his music to sell anything, it’d be ladies underwear.
Anyways, I’ll add Tori Amos to the list. She’s always done things her way (except for that wretched Y Kant Tori Read debacle of the late 80s - which wasn’t her fault). She does a lot of work for women’s issues (like RAINN).
The closest thing she’s done to selling out might be the current “official” bootleg series of concert CDs she (and Sony) are releasing online. IIRC, she’s one of the most bootlegged artists and the idea behind this project is to give her fans quality recordings at a decent price (if you buy two or more, the 2-CD sets are $12.50 each and if you buy the first 5, you get the 6th free w/a custom storage box and stickers)
Everyone seems to agree that U2 has always tried to make an album they could be proud of. It hasn’t entirely worked, but they meant it at the time, and I don’t think they were phoning it in at any point. I wonder if the Rolling Stones can say the same.
U2’s Zoo TV tour was not a sellout. Anyone who repeats that little glib opinion doesn’t know much about the band. Spectacle does not mean coasting or shallowness.
They also recently turned down a VERY lucrative licensing deal for “Where the Streets Have No Name”:
They also made no money from the iPod tv ads. They donated the their time and attention-getting because of the massive ad buys that Apple was able to provide, and it was a product they genuinely liked.
With Schulz, I wouldn’t call it selling out so much as burning out. I don’t think even the most talented among us could do something everyday for 50 years without your quality lagging a bit. Still, at least he seemed to like what he was doing which is probably why he kept at it and since the strip remained immensely popular there was no reason for his superiors at United Feature Syndicate to tell him to quit.
As for those who didn’t sell out, I’ll add R.E.M. and mention Springsteen again.
