To be clear: I would never begrudge a musician from getting a bite. 99.9% never see decent wages, so more power to the ones that make it work.
We can argue how far someone goes from their original music, and whether that is part of a natural progression or a healthy bit of selling out, but business is always central to the discussion.
Read Mansion on the Hill about the corporate-ification of music, focusing on Dylan, The Eagles and Springsteen and a few others. Bruce is the leather-jacketed Steinbeck of Rock n’ Roll but he made sure he got paid, and Born in the U.S.A. was a clear grab at the commercial brass ring. And it totally worked for him.
In 1981, Fee Waybill of the Tubes openly admitted that “The Completion Backwards Principle” was a sellout, saying that the band owed a huge amount of money ($600,000?) and they were never going to pay it off by catering to the 150,000 Tubes fans who bought their releases and went to their shows. He quoted Lily Tomlin “Remember, they call it show business, not show art”.
There were jazz fans who were upset that George Benson had so much commercial success with “Breezin” which went triple platinum.
Sammy Davis Jr “Candy man”. He was very disappointed his cover of “Shaft” failed and he had to record this awful white bread song.
Elvis Presley “Old McDonald had a farm”.
Beatles sold out for their first few albums, letting Brian Epstein make them over into non threatening idols for teenage girls
Frank Sinatra with “Something” and “bad Bad Leroy Brown”
This reminds me to purge the later Tubes albums I picked up cheaply and loaded onto my Ipod. There’s a lot of crappy pop/disco in there.
I liked early Genesis material but thought their later albums contained some of their best songs. “Sellout” wouldn’t have occurred to me until Phil Collins decided to make a career of being a pop balladeer.
I agree with this. If I were a musician in a band I would do whatever it took to keep playing and avoid a desk job.
I don’t really understand using the word “sellout” in this manner. Where are all the bands that kept their purity and integrity and did not evolve as the band members grew older (or grew-up)? Right - people stopped listening to them and they disappeared (because the fans also grew older, and up). I am not going to fault people for wanting to be successful (which includes being financially viable).
To me, “sellout” means allowing Target to use “Back in Black” for Black Friday advertising.
Well, one version of “selling out” would be failure to evolve: to keep playing the exact same kind of thing over and over because that’s what people expect and will buy.
Exactly… “And Justice For All” was the first album where they were getting kind of artsy-ish, with the long, “meaningful” songs, and they more or less extended that on "Metallica’ (black album) with a pair of ballads (Unforgiven and Nothing Else Matters) on an album that was more or less in keeping with their previous albums.
Nothing wrong with that… good bands do change their sound and evolve over time. But where they sell out (and where Metallica sold out) is when they start evolving more due to external sales pressure / greed, as opposed to internal artistic desire. THAT is selling out, and that’s why “Load” is the point when Metallica sold out- the atypical songs on the “Black Album” were successful, so they basically shifted to that kind of music primarily, because that’s what got them really famous and got them a lot of $$$.
Not that I have a Unified Theory of Music or anything, but I kind of suspect that’s why so many people have such intense hatred of pop bands- they came out of the gate as profit-generating operations, and as such aren’t even running according to any sort of artistic vision of their own. And it’s why a band like U2 is perennially respected AFAICT- they seem of march to the beat of their own drum, popular or not.
I think I already mentioned it before but I’ve never understood the hatred for Metallica’s Black Album.
I discovered them in the late 80s, at the time when And Justice for All… came out and bought their whole back catalogue in a matter of weeks then played it non-stop for years.
When the Black Album came out, I had moved on to other types of music but I was delighted to hear their music on the radio. Sure, they sounded a bit different from what I remembered but the songs were still pretty solid, even the “reviled” ballads. Along with Nirvana, they were at the forefront of a movement that brought loud guitars to the mainstream. Bear in mind that in the 80s, guitars were for has-beens. Ridiculed, in Europe at least. Then all of a sudden, around 1991, they were everywhere.
In fairness, the band with Trevor Rabin that made 91025/Big Generator/Talk was never intended to be called Yes. It was meant to be a different band called Cinema. I think the sellout moment came when they realised they could make a lot more money with Jon Anderson on lead vocals.
I don’t think those albums are at all awful if you stop comparing them to 70s classic Yes. Compared to the other stuff out there in the early 80s, those albums were pretty innovative.
I don’t know enough about music to comment on a specific band, but as a Metallica fan I always love seeing this discussion because Metallica is always mentioned.
In the ultimate “things no one but you thinks” and “say something no one will agree with you on” moments: I like Metallica’s newer stuff much better than their older stuff. I happen to like the Load and Reload albums as well. I can’t exactly pinpoint why, maybe it’s because I fall into the pop trap, maybe it’s because I like hearing the lyrics vs screaming…but they are always my more favorite tracks.
I’d say it’s selling out when the motivation becomes the money rather than the music. Whether that’s a bad thing or not depends on your principles. Also, only the artist truly knows their intentions, unless like Metallica they admit to wanting the massive success.
Someone earlier asked about people who’ve continued to be successful without selling out. Bob Dylan and Neil Young would be good examples, making the records they want to make regardless of what people (including many fans) think. Or Merle Haggard (RIP) buying himself out of his major label contract so he could release “Me And Crippled Soldiers Give A Damn”, and also giving the proceeds of the song to charity. Or Pink Floyd - they could have made roughly all of the money in the world by reuniting, but chose not to.
Another thing to consider is that fact that, in many, many instances, it was the fans, not the artist, who slapped a “definition” on them. The artist came out doing what they felt like doing at the time, and a certain segment of the music-buying public latched onto what they were doing, and proceeded to put the artist in a box. Then the artist took an interest in something different and … now they’ve “sold out”.
While I have my favorites, and have a long-standing love of heavy metal, I’ve always been into diverse genres of music. I grew up listening to my mom’s 1960s folk records (Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul & Mary, New Christy Minstrels, etc.). I took piano lessons, and learned to play the clarinet. When I took up the saxophone, I fell in love with jazz. I learned to play the bassoon and played in my school orchestra, and fell in love with symphonic music. Guitar-wise, I jammed on everything from The Beatles to Manowar. But I also loved to sing, and when I finally accepted that my voice was not suited (at the time) to metal, I took an interest in country music, which suited my voice perfectly.
Had I been both talented enough and driven enough, (and lucky enough), I could have happily made a career out of performing in any of those genres. And I would have been annoyed if somebody then told me I wasn’t allowed to branch off into one of the others. That diversity of interests is probably the reason that my favorite genre today is still metal … because metal has evolved into something that lovingly embraces all of those other influences. Symphonic metal, folk metal, etc. It’s been both gratifying and amusing to me to see the way metal has evolved from rebellious rejection of “traditional” music and instruments in the 1980s, to cheerfully embracing and incorporating those same things. Now I’m about to turn 50, still searching out new musical ideas, and feeling sad for people whose musical tastes are still defined by what they listened to in high school.
Genesis never sold out. After Gabriel left, A Trick of the Tale, The Wind and Wuthering, And then There Were Three, and especially Duke, were prog rocks albums. The last 3 had one radio-friendly ‘hit’ per album. But they were getting older and their tastes were changing.
If you keep doing the same stuff, even though your own passions have shifted…isn’t THAT selling out?
But who was playing much besides guitars, drums and bass in the late 60s and 70s? I get what you’re saying, but I don’t think metal was rebelling against folk music and such. There were some hard rock and metal bands in the 70s using flutes and fiddles and such.
Ha, I already own a version of that song! Though the version I have is not as heavy near the end. I like a lot of that type of music, with the flutes, fiddles and other non-typical instruments, what I don’t like is the damn cookie monster vocals. I’d be all over that kind of music if they had different vocals, and I’ve tried for years to get past it too.
I see the genrefication of metal as just dudes who realized that there was other music in the world, that everybody else knew about and has been doing for decades, but that they can’t because the’re so “metal.” So they make a genre up and everybody can be safe and stay in high school. They’re still trying to be “hard” in a way that’s ridiculous, especially when, halfway through the song, they turn on the amps and do something you knew was coming already. How is that inventive? In other words I think that the bands themselves make up these genres, and they are not imposed on them from outside.
Heavy metal is lovingly embracing? I thought the whole point was that is was not. If you take the “metal” off of any of those genres you have great music that has a history and has been played all along, but that metal heads never could accept until they were assured it was OK by making up one more genre with “metal” attached. To me that’s more sell out than not.
