I agree… and that’s why I was trying to distinguish between what you described and what I consider really selling out, which is when a band starts changing their styles solely to chase commercial success rather than according to any sort of internal artistic compass.
That’s why I think that Metallica’s black album wasn’t selling out- just them marching to their own drum, while “Load” was the sell-out album- they (to me, anyway), clearly started chasing the money right about then, and started getting cranky about piracy about the same time. (I suspect that Metallica ca. 1985 might not have cared nearly so much)
The Who only put out 2 albums before they decided to Sell Out. John and Keith in particular masterminded some of the jingles hoping to acquire free stuff from Rotosound guitar strings, Premier Drums and John Mason’s luxury car dealership.
By that definition, any artist that starts making “too” much money is selling out. What if an artist changes styles and it is a flop, commercially. Is that selling-out? Too many flops and the artist looses a record deal and fails.
It sounds like selling-out has to do with an artist’s perceived success among their fans. The fans want them to be successful enough to keep producing the music the fan wants, but not so successful that they are rolling in money. Once that happens, they’ve sold-out, right? If you like an artist, go ahead and buy the music. If not, don’t buy it. But don’t not buy an artist’s music because they are perceived as a sell-out.
I have to disagree with you about Duke being prog rock. There’s a couple of good songs written by Tony Banks, but I would say that Duke’s Travels/Duke’s End is the only prog on the album.
The first two albums without Gabriel, Trick of the Tail and Wind and Wuthering were definitely progressive. After Hackett left is when the real stylistic change happened.
They obviously sold a lot more albums later on, but the music never moved me the way their earlier stuff (1969-1977) did.
From “Fuck tha Police” and “No Vaseline” and “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted…”
…to “Are We Done Yet?”
Sellout central. And it’s not like he even needed the money. But you know what they say is better than money… more money.
I saw Metallica on their first tour. I also play guitar. I used to play pretty much all speedy, heavy stuff. These days I play some of that but also some classical, mellow pretty pieces and jazz.
Am I a sell out? If I am, why?
I still love a cranked amp and a fast angry song. However I am not 15 anymore and also appreciate a much wider range of music. Why should it be any different for Metallica? Why do you think they evolved due to (only) ‘eternal sales pressure/greed’?
They were heavily n debt before “Tommy” came out. There is a piece in the film “The Kids are Alright” where Townshend comments that he basically grabbed guitars out of stores and yelled “pay you next week” as he ran out.
Are you sure your not referring to “Load”? Most fans consider the Black Album to be their zenith, and the songs were hardly short. I can get “Nothing Else Matters” turning off a few fans, but lyrically it was a tribute to their fans.
That’s kinda where I was going with this thread. If a band was doing well why pop out to make a quick buck and embarrass yourself? That’s what Jefferson Airplane did.
KISS is an interesting case, though they did take off their makeup at a point when their careers were at a nadir, so in many ways, it was a smart move. THEN they convinced fans to see them WITH the makeup even though they knew what they looked like already! In many ways, Im sure Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley would be proud to call themselves “sellouts”.
It was the last song on Sacred Reich’s The American Way, a pretty good but rather run-of-the-mill 1990 metal album. My first reaction was utter puzzlement but it soon became my favourite song on the album (and the only one I remember nowadays).
Perhaps not coincidentally, I started broadening my musical horizons just a few months later.
I’m remembering Angus being asked his opinion of a critic’s statement that AC/DC had made 12 albums that all sound the same. Angus supposedly replied, “That bloody well pisses me off! We’ve made fourteen albums that all sound the same!”
I’m recalling my own teenage years (1980s) when, for a while, there was a bit of a cliché thing where a song would start off with a scratchy record playing some traditional, “your grandparents’” music, followed by an obnoxious record scratch and the guitars, drums, and metal screaming would start. I’m not talking about simply incorporating “non-rock” instruments into the band. I’m talking about rock musicians who compose their rock from a “classical” perspective. It’s basically orchestral music turned into metal by the addition of electric guitars and drums, rather than vice-versa. Or, in the case of certain other metal genres, taking something “traditional” and rocking it up. These metal genres have had the side effect of making me envious of the European higher-education system, having discovered that many of these “metal” musicians have Master’s degrees in music. I particularly like the Dutch band, Epica:
In that clip, they’re not performing one of their songs with an added orchestra and choir. They’re recreating the original recording with the original instrumentation. And the orchestra and choir parts were arranged by a member of the band, not some outside arranger. That’s how the song was composed in the first place. The whole album that song comes from is like that, and includes “orchestral” versions of every song (basically, the same tracks with the guitars and drums removed), and they still hold up.
David Lee Roth once said, in some issue of Hit Parader magazine, in the 1980s, “Heavy metal is just folk music played at high velocity.”
I guess in my mind, it comes down to the band/artist’s internal creative process. If they’re evolving and changing in the service of an artistic vision and trying to just create what they think are great albums, that’s great. Good bands DO change like that. And if that evolution happens to coincide with commercial success, so much the better.
But if at some point during that evolution, they realize that “hey… song X sold a lot of records. Let’s have our next album be more like song X because $$$”, then that’s selling out.
That was also why I was saying that some pop acts are so reviled; because they never had that artistic vision to begin with; they were pre sold-out before they even released a thing.
