Part of the reason for being an artist, at least to me, is to be able to share your work with others. I think for a lot of the bands you’re talking about, the same holds true. They aren’t thinking “lets be corporate rock, YEAH!” but rather, “if we do this, millions of people will hear our creations.”
A related story - recently, Wizards of the Coast had a contest to make up a new fantasy setting for their D&D series. To start, all one had to do was fill out a single page about their setting and send it in. No rights were signed over, no ideas were going to be stolen, just a single page outline of your setting. Many people sent in the single page, but others said that it would be selling out to send in their outline. Exactly how is this selling out? Is it because the company might suggest a name change, or maybe small changes to the setting and it won’t fit your exact artistic vision? Possibly, though in something like this, everyone will see the setting slightly differently and no one will have the exact same image that you do in your mind.
How is getting more exposure for your art selling out? I think it’s great that Dirty Vegas got their song into the Mistubishi commercial, because now I know their name and know they make music I enjoy. Not only that, they made money from this so they can continue to make music I enjoy. If you truely look at it, Dirty Vegas was using Mitsubishi a lot more than Mitsubishi was using them. Is it selling out if you figure out a way to have millions of people listen to a song that you’d already written?
I just don’t get it. I can see that if you change your style to what’s ‘hip’ for the purpose of only making money (Metallica anyone?) then yes, that’s selling out. If you change your image because you want to make different music, it’s not selling out, it’s changing your style. Or maybe Picasso was just selling out during that whole ‘Blue Period’ thing cause he only did it for more money.
You risk mixing ideas in this post, K – “music should not be a job” sounds like boho idealism. If your skill is making music, you have a right to market your skill and the time you put into it, and it optimizes the entire society’s tangible and intangible benefit for people to be doing what they’re best at.
No sensible person should disagree with that. But then again, that applies to playing baseball, drawing cartoons or writing newspaper trivia Q-and-A columns. Thing is, you don’t have to become fabulously wealthy to do what you love AND make a living. And making a living at something directly related to what you love is a very good thing to happen. A majority of professional musicians live off music by working weddings and the neighborhood taverns, doing session work, and teaching. The greatest number of people who live off of athletic skill are PE teachers. In between, they do “art” or train for competition.
…is indeed a gross mistake. But the rub is there is such a thing as an entitlement and such a thing as a right. You have a right to get the best deal you can for your work, but to exercise it meaningfully requires that you yourself have it together enough to walk away from the table if you detect horns and a barbed tail on the salesman.
And of course, if you ARE making a conscious, free, informed decision, that which is YOURS – your time, your work, your creation, your skill, your knowledge – you have a right to do with what will make YOU happy and not hurt others.
Anyway, my two cents: accusations of selling out are hostile expressions of feelings of inadequacy when an entertainer whom one had previously thought of as one’s peer (i.e., unknown, underappreciated, and underpaid, just like the rest of us random chumps) suddenly jumps one’s tax bracket.
Every musician now is supposed to have artistic “values,” be “Serious” artists, and not “sell out.”
What happened to professional musicians making music to entertain people?
Count me here as someone who thinks something rather revolutionary: the type of music a professional musician makes has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with “integrity” or “principles.” A person’s integrity generally hangs on more important things than their particular assignment at work, which is really all we’re talking about. Fuck, people, it’s friggin’ pop music. The small variation between “edgy pop music” and “radio pop music” is not a degree of integrity.
RickJay, your common sense is pathological. But I have worked office jobs and concluded that co-workers lacked integrity and principles by observing them at work. Even by merely observing their output at work. You don’t need to wait until the building’s on fire before you can judge people’s characters.
Pop stars, as you so emphatically analogize, may be judged in the same manner. Doubly so, since they actually work in front of an audience for a living. If they didn’t want to be judged writ large, they could get an anonymous office job and only have to endure the scorn of a select circle of co-workers.
Aside from that, the fact that some artists are considered sellouts is proof that making music is in fact more than just a way to make money in our culture. You say there’s no integrity or principles in pop music, but if that’s true then on what basis do some pop artists receive praise and adulation? It’s not just applause for technical merit or units sold. It’s art, so style matters. And no matter how cynical you are about the industry, this product still means something to a lot of people. You can’t have the merit without the scorn, or the merit is meaningless. The upside certainly exists, so why expect there to be no downside? Or are you going to try and argue that people don’t really love music?
Certainly you would agree that an atheist becoming a priest because it was very profitable would be crossing a line? People who love music (even pop music), are allowed to have the expectation that artists, at the very minimum, are real and mean it. Musicians are quite aware of these expectations, and just saying “but I wanna get rich!” doesn’t excuse their behavior.
jackelope, the hostility can’t be predicated on the success of the sellouts, because selling out doesn’t always work. Nobody, for example, is jealous of Liz Phair because her new album is going to make her rich. Aside from the high probability that it won’t do that, she’s rich already.
This is something I’ve never quite understood (coming from a former frontman/lead singer/songwriter in a band): When someone writes a song, yes, they may be in a real emotional state that prompts them to write what they write, and that influences the lyrics/whatever, and that is discernible. But by the time a musician gets either onstage in front of a live audience, or into a studio to record the song, they’ve already sung that song a couple hundred times, and frankly, no one can recreate that same emotional moment on demand that many times.
What I’m getting at is that by the time we hear a song, whether live or recorded, that musician is acting. They are pretending to sincerely feel what they’re singing, and we judge their sincerity on how well they make us believe that, but they are almost certainly not experienceing the same emotion that prompted the song.
So where’s the line? How do we decide which ones have “artistic integrity” and which ones don’t? Granted, I can lay down some examples of my own (Frank Black: yes; Beyonce: no), but surely there are some who would put Beyonce on the other side of that line.
Or are we saying that no one who is a fan of Beyonce (I just picked her as an example out of the blue) cares about sincerity in music? To be honest, that would be my knee-jerk answer, but when I think about it rationally it seems totally ridiculous.
No, I think fans know that the emotional level isn’t going to be the same all the time. When you’re crossing the line is when the emotion wasn’t ever there to begin with, to put it into your words. Manufactured pop acts deserve the scorn of serious musicians, but they shouldn’t care because they’re in it for the money, not the critical praise. That doesn’t make the criticisms invalid either. And even they can cross lines on their own terms… the Backstreet Boys may not have a chance at critical success, but they can at least try and recognize their biggest fans are teenage girls and not be drunk and surly in public. Hey, it’s their lives, but being explicit about your desire for money doesn’t mean you’re exempt from people thinking you’re an asshole.
More “serious” artists can cross different lines. If they’ve built up an expectation that their work is something a person can benefit from investing their own emotion in, they can expect people to get pissed off when they make a crassly commercial bid for stardom. Being obviously insincere in the present is a valid reason for fans to suspect that maybe you weren’t being all that sincere in the past, and whatever they’ve invested in you up to that point… time, emotion, money, whatever… was in fact pointless.
Of course no single act adheres strictly to any of these archetypes, but fans can and do make the call about what kind of act you are and when you’ve crossed a line.
It’s a tough question, because nobody is going to agree on the criteria. But that’s quite different from saying the line doesn’t exist at all and Frank Black must be in it for the money so “selling out” isn’t possible.
First, let me start by saying that I think I have dug myself into quite a hole by using the term “sell-out” in this thread, despite the fact that I never use it in real life. I used these words since they are the topic of this thread, but upon reading responses to my last post I see that “sell-out” is too loaded of an expression to accurately describe what I mean.
I guess what I am really talking about is integrity. In this world it is next to impossible to make a living and completely maintain your integrity at the same time. You are always at some point going to be getting paid money to do what someone else tells you to do. Obviously this loss of “integrity” is hardly a worry for most rational people. Making a guy a sandwich while on my shift at the deli does not indicate any significant loss of my dignity as a human being.
However, I do think that the situation becomes a bit more sensetive when you are talking about art and other forms of personal expression. The moment you give anyone any kind of power over what was once your own personal form of expression, you have sold off a part of your integrity. As I have said elsewhere in this thread, I have no significant problem with this and I like plenty of artists who have done this: it is the way business works. Hell, I might do it myself someday. All I’m saying is that right or wrong, giving outsiders a say in how your art is produced must necessarily involve some loss of integrity. The question is to what extent you lose that integrity, and it’s all very personal. There is a difference between your record label asking you to play a show in a town you don’t like and asking you to dress differently so the teenage girls will dig you.
JRDelirious, thank you for your response.
It sounds like you’re talking about some sort of idiot sauvant (sp?) who can’t tie his shoes but can write an aria that will bring tears to your eyes. I don’t buy that there are people who can contribute absolutely nothing of monetary value to society outside of their artistic skill.
Fair enough, but if you have a wife and kids to support and being a professional musician is not paying your bills, you probably ought to rethink your career choice. Life is a choice of what you want to spend the most time on. Choosing to play in a band, have a child, or even go to the gym three times a week requires a lot of consideration of the things you might have to give up to do it. I still don’t see how playing in a band for very little money must necessarily preclude financial independence. If you don’t want to work for someone else, you can organize tours, go into distribution, or do any one of a number of things related to your field of expertise but more sure to make you a dollar than waiting for a big record contract to come along.
I agree, and I apologize for sullying the meaning of my posts with the phrase “sell-out.” I shouldn’t have used it.
Well said. I’ve been trying to get off the ground as a musician, but I’ve been discouraged by the fact that there is little to no chance that I’ll be able to make a living off of it. And if I can’t make a living off it, then I’ll be homeless because I’m sure as hell not going to waste a second doing anything else besides what I love. Thanks for helping me combat this idealization that has been keeping me in the clouds.
This idealization is a great attitude to have, but you also have to live your life in reality. In reality, if you’re starving, then you’re going to be a lot more likely to sell out as a musician. By sell out I mean manipulating your sound in an attempt to get people to like you (and, in turn, pay you). This is the devil’s (or evil’s or Satan’s or G.W. Bush’s, if you will) work.
We need to keep that idealization of music in mind, strive for it, but let patience be our guide. By this I mean that your ideals are NOT yet reality, so gradually and patiently tug and pull reality to meet your ideals. You cannot start in the clouds. You must start on the ground. That means get a job first. If the record label comes later, great. If not, then there’s a problem with the world, not with you (that is if you’re really, truly putting your entire heart and soul into the music).
If a crack whore lets her record label dress her up as a sweet young girl, is that selling out too? And what if she actually stops smoking crack? Is that selling out?