I have to disagree about R.E.M. Their last 4 albums have been just going through the motions for the sake of the money (all though in interviews they claim it is maintaining employment for their staff! Same thing, of course). There is not an ounce of joy, passion committment, or emotion of any sort in the four of them. Elevator music. Very very sad.
Actually, there are only 3 of them, and their real decline (I consider their output since signing to Warner Bros. a series of small declines) - the period you’re referring to - didn’t begin until Bill Berry left the band. Who would’ve guessed he was the soul of the group?
A hearty amen for Bruce. As was mentioned in another thread, the music he does now is very different from in his megastar days, but it has nonetheless been a natural evolution. He could still pack arenas doing “Born to Run” to middle-aged crowds if he wanted to; but he’s chosen to do something different.
Another is/was Johnny Cash. I was a big fan even back before he became beloved of the hipsters, mostly for the way he was willing to buck sterotypes: as a country superstar in the 60s, he had good things to say about Hippies; but just when you’d think he was a rebel, he’d sing a patriotic tune. He’d do Gospel and was a very sincere Christian, but he also never stopped doing very dark material that made him unpalatable to many Christians.
Again, I think we’re talking about the difference between selling out and burning out.
Don’t know about pots of money, but Tom Waits is a ferocious no-sell-out and what about Neil Young? I mean, joining Crosby Stills and Nash may have been a bit seolloutish but then he sung “Ohio”, so that makes it ok, eh?
mm
I"ve gotta disagree with this one, and I’m a big Bowie fan: he sold out in the mid 80’s with crap albums like Never Let Me Down and the Glass Spider nonsense: he spent the next 15 years trying to buy himself back with various projects and albums of dubious listenability {Tin Machine, anyone?}, until he finally redeemed himself with the excellent Heathen and Reality albums. Let’s just say he mortgaged himself for a while.
I’m not sure if he has gobs of cash, but Iggy Pop probably doesn’t starve and he’s never sold out - or got fat, and he still has all his hair. Christ knows he’s made some awful albums over the years - as well as some excellent ones - but at least they were awful Iggy Pop albums.
I’m sorry, but Tori Amos’s career is one long sustained screech of selling out. She was born selling out; every breath she takes is a sellout; and she’ll die selling out.
She did Y Kant Blah Blah Blah because kitschy metal was big on MTV at the time. In other words, because she thought it would sell. It didn’t so she moved on; she even pretends it never happened. Then she discovered Kate Bush and tried on *her *skin for a while. That sold, so she stuck with that. (But she still pretends she invented herself in a vacuum; she denies KB as an influence.) If that hadn’t sold I have absolutely zero doubt that she’d have tried reggae or Tuvan throat singing next, until she found something that she could comfortably coast along in from the outset.
I liked TA when I first heard her. But the more familiar I became with her, the more the craven selloutness of her essential being became apparent.
So anyway, I vote against her for this thread. YMMV. 
I gotta disagree with your disagreeing.
When “Let’s Dance” came out and someone asked him about its commercial sound, he said he had to pay some rent for a while. The fact that he’s totally up front about it, that he pays some rent and then goes back to being Bowie, means, to me, that it’s not a sellout; it’s taking care of business so he can concentrate on things he really loves. Calling Bowie a sellout is like saying you can’t be an artist if you wait tables on the side. But why should Bowie wait tables?
Selling out is when waiting tables becomes your career, like Sting or Queen.
re Actors/actresses for this thread - I agree George Clooney was a good choice. How about Johnny Depp? Opinions wanted.
Also - George Lucas. Opinions? Stayed true to his own vision or created characters to make money?
Well, it’s certainly possible that the original vision was to create characters to make money. Certainly Lucas was all OVER the licensing stuff right from the get-go.
As for Bowie, isn’t he a literal sell out? Didn’t he sell shares of himself and his future revenues on the markets a while back? That should certainly count as selling out.
I think that Rod Serling falls on the borderline between selling out/not selling out. He wrote some of the most literate and intelligent stuff in the 1950s, not just for TV but for movies too. I was bothered when he agreed to doing the **Night Gallery ** series because he went into it without creative control. He supposedly had imput but really he was only allowed to be a host. The reason that he agreed to do the show were purely financial but he desperately needed the money for his medical bills. He was already fighting the cancer that killed him. If that was a sellout then it was a justified one.
Schulz didn’t coast; Peanuts actually continued to develop all through its final years. He experimented both with form (one- or two-panel strips instead of the customary three or four) and with tone and content (while the despair became more overt, Charlie Brown actually had a sort-of girlfriend). A lot of it didn’t work, and there’s no denying Schulz’s drawing became pretty lousy, but for a guy with 50 years under his belt, he made an admirable effort to stay moving. Giving up because he wasn’t as great as he had been in his 40s would probably have struck him as shameful and cowardly. Cartooning — not drawing, producing, screenwriting or merchandising, but the actual craft of writing and drawing a newspaper strip — was Schulz’ consuming passion, one he worked at as hard as he could for as long as he could. For him to abandon it would be the very opposite of integrity.
I’ve got to disagree about Prince. While he definitely kept an air of integrity, his early stuff was far more accessible to the dumb public than his really early stuff. I’m talking about the avant garde, atonal stuff. No doubt he found a key center because he wanted to find an audience.
I’d like to include Gentle Giant, except a) they never made money, and b) in the end they did sell out, alienating what little fan base they had.
I don’t know about Hitchcock. He certainly merchandized his famous name and profile. I remember a series of kids’ books – of the creepy tales genre – with his name on them, and wasn’t there a TV series in the '70s (animated?) that was sort of the same? To me selling out means licensing your name, characters, image, etc., to be used on something that you have no quality control over and which often sucks, but you don’t care about so long as you’re making money.
And I want to offer a defense of Charles Schulz here. The subject probably merits its own thread, but anyway, I was recently reading some of his late work (from around 2000) in book form, and was amazed at how strong much of it was. Particularly since cartoonists typically don’t last long before jumping the shark. That Schulz managed to be still quite funny after 50 years in the business means to me that he stands head and shoulders above everyone else.
I think that every single artist you’ve ever heard of has sold out; you wouldn’t have heard of them if they hadn’t. Every single one of them has sat in that room with the money people and signed something that basically says "I’ll give you x amount of art/music/whatever for y amount of money. Whether or not they altered their art for commercial success is virtually unknowable, since to even get your art into the public realm, you have to sign that deal with the money people.
Having said that, I think you could count Fugazi as one example of a band that attained success on its own terms, mostly. Then again, they made such a fuss over it that even that it was just hype, anyway.
About Hitchcock – by coincidence there’s this current thread that mentions that kind of schlock-Hitchcock stuff I’m talking about
Good point. Michael Stipe once said a band “sells out” when it plays its first paying gig.
And to mention Charles Schulz again: he originally wanted to call his comic strip “Li’l Folks,” but his syndicate didn’t like it and suggested “Peanuts” instead. Guess you could argue he “sold out” from day one! :dubious:
Pete Seeger. Still a rebel to this day.
Went from McCarthy’s blacklist to national treasure and is still fighting for environmental protection.
He was a Folk singer from the 40’s to today. He was friends with Woodie Guthrie and met him during a “Grapes of Wrath” migrant workers concert.
He inspired the Byrds, Dylan (who by many definitions did sell-out), Peter, Paul & Mary and others.
Seeger is involved in the environmental organization Clearwater, which he founded in 1966. This organization has worked since then to highlight pollution in the Hudson River and worked to clean it. As part of that effort, the sloop Clearwater was launched in 1969 and regularly sails the river as classroom, stage and laboratory with an all-volunteer crew. The Clearwater Festival is an annual two-day concert held on the banks of the Hudson in Croton Point, New York.
Jim
Oh, one more thing – I do think Bill Watterson deserves a special mention here, if only because he apparently faced a huge amount of pressure to license his insanely marketable characters. He turned down what would have been millions of dollars because of his concerns over artistic integrity. He stood fast, and when he got tired of making compromises, and when he felt the strip had run its course, he quit. No Jim Davis, he.
I think we need to define what selling out is. To me it’s losing the integrity of your art in order to pander to a wider audience. If you do the exact art that you want, and someone wants to give you money for it, that’s not selling out, that’s just selling.