Cred and Credibility
or
The Art of Selling Out

Artistic integrity.

Such a fine quality. A thing to nurture and cherish. A thing that separates the true artist from his commercially driven sell out peers.

A true artist stoically starves for his art.  He refuses to give up even an inch of his ideals and visions.

A true artist is also a fucking dumbass.

Artistic integrity comes with a price stapled to your balls. If you’re not willing to cash in on that price, to chop those artistic balls off and put them up on e-bay, you’re in for a long and lonely upward climb to absolutely nothing. Most of the time. Some artsy nut jobs do manage to keep their artistic integrity intact throughout their “careers” and eventually manage to shoot a star in the Hall of Fame. Unfortunately, most of these “quirky” artists are only really appreciated after their deaths, since we the consumers have a problem with artsy fuckheads getting away with being all sorts of unique while among the living. We like our “real” artists dead and buried so they can’t interfere with our interpretations of their art.

So, what’s a sell out?

What does it technically mean to “sell out” and who is doing it? Which distinguished “starving artists” are, in fact, “eating like motherfuckers”, selling out like it was going out of style, and what sell out bastards are, in fact, staying true to their musical visions? Who sells what and to whom? How credible are artists that want to make money on their art? Is that wrong or right?

We shall see.

In today’s pop industrial music market it’s so easy to point fingers at this and that band and scream “sell outs” at the top of our lungs. It seems that wherever we turn we see artists with questionable motives rising to fame like gas bubbles in a swamp.

“Questionable motives”? It’s fucking pop music! Please. If you’re in the pop genre, you have already signed up to release “popular” material. You come in either of two shapes:

•First, you once had a new sound and were signed for that very reason in order to become the new pop phenomenon. In this case you have one or two albums, tops, before you’re required to adapt to whatever new trends prowl the scene when it’s time for your next album. Otherwise you will be forgotten like so many flashes in the pans. You will have to start filing off some artistic edges and “sell out” to still be viable on that scene.

•Or second, you were signed because you already sounded like what was in style. In this case you are already a follower without any original musical vision, and can’t be accused of “selling out”. There was nothing to sell in the first place.

There are very rarely any genuine sell outs in pop music. There is virtually no integrity to start with in this genre so there’s nothing to sacrifice. The very concept of pop music is for the labels to milk these cash cows to their last drops while they’re still generating any milk at all. These cash cows didn’t set out to be the second coming of Mozart for a new generation. They were custom made by the labels for a particular market. It’s fast food music. Open up, swallow, shit out, forget about it. Ashlee Simpson may be a fake, but she never pretended to be Robert Johnson either. Britney Spears may be the poster child for a new generation of bubblegum pop stars, but she was always a product of the industry, ever since her Disney Club days. She didn’t sell out. She has stayed true to the easily dismissed pop form she has always promoted.

We do have the occasional sell out in pop though. Some stars “re-invent” themselves to refresh their fading status, and some do such a poor job at it that their new careers come off as fucking jokes. Even for pop. I am, of course, talking about Gwen Stefani. What the fuck? She personifies the stupidity of the record buying public. After having been the driving force in the somewhat original power pop band No Doubt, she is now riding in gold-rimmed Cadillacs with ghetto girls a third her age, “hollaing” about street fights and shit. Who the fuck is she kidding? She’s a fucking Wonder Bread white millionaire boy-voiced woman who wouldn’t want her white ass caught dead on Amsterdam Avenue with "some nigger". Giving a shout out to her mad (hired) crew when accepting the Grammy is to “sell out”. She would stock up on shoe polish if she had a shot at sneaking in under the radar at the Black Music Awards. Black kids laugh at her and white kids buy her albums. To shoot for fake street cred, at the expense of your musical  credibility is to SELL the fuck OUT.

However, Stefani is the exception to the rule of there being no real sell outs in pop music. Selling out both defies and defines the concept of this whole genre at the same time. It’s the Paradox of Pop.

It’s when we look in other genres, where artists and bands build long careers on their original styles and distinguished names that we find better examples of sell out vs. artistic integrity.

Often we look at Metallica and shake our heads. What happened to this great band? They were once the greatest thrash metal band in the world. Fucking pioneers even. What happened? Sell outs, right? Not necessarily… Other than the horribly uncalled for “Unforgiven II” on “Re-Load”, Metallica technically never sold out. Sure, they started sucking major ass after “The Black Album”, but they still tried to make something new. They tried to change their sound around because THEY wanted to. Nobody else sounded like “The Black Album” at the time of its release. That was all Metallica. All original. They were already selling millions of albums, so it’s not like they needed a push. Later on, with “Load” and “Re-Load”, they did, in fact, realize an original musical vision, crappy and worthless as it was, and stayed true to themselves and their own ideals. Never mind the rest of us. Their actual sell out manners are only prevalent in the way they market themselves these days, and hey… this is America, the fucking cradle of capitalism and our kids gotta eat, right? Let them make money on merchandise and singles and fucking documentaries, as long as they are not rapping or playing fucking emo. THAT would be to sell out. Who else sounds like Metallica? Even today with “St. Anger”? Right, nobody. (Nobody would WANT to, but that’s beside the point.) If Metallica had just released “Master of Puppets” over and over again, the fans may have been happier, but Metallica would then indeed have sold out, become stagnant, and lost in their past to sell more albums. That would have been them taking the easy way out. The fact that they started to fucking suck is a rather unfortunate testament to their artistic integrity, in this case. Like I said, we don’t like our idols too artsy fartsy.

AC/DC are more real sell out material than Metallica in the sense that they stick to a formula they know sells records. God forbid if they were to change anything and lose status. AC/DC would never release an album with string sections and bagpipes even if they WANTED to. They would lose every fan they have and be back on the first boat to Australia. On the other hand, you could say that they aren’t releasing jack shit these days anyway, and that they are probably musically incapable of releasing anything but what they do. So they are off the hook.

Did Guns’n’Roses sell out? What the hell was “November Rain” with the orchestra and shit all about? Not selling out, that’s for sure. It was Axl’s dream to release a huge symphonic piece like that. It was his true musical vision that he could only afford to do once they were huge. Good for him. After that they released the fucking “Spaghetti Incident”, with its Charles Manson covers, and as far from commercially hip as you could possibly get. Not sell outs. Fucking stupid, but not sell outs.

So who the fuck is selling out? And who never did? Beatles? Led Zeppelin? What about those guys? Give me a break. Once you’re in the position of being super stars you start to seriously think about what you’re putting on that album. You become a part of the industry. Being the “Rockstar” becomes just another job to make ends meet. Those ends might be light years away from what you and I think of as “ends”, but in the end it’s the same damn thing. We need money for oat meal, they need money for caviar. Notice how there were no more 23 minutes of “Dazed and Confused”-like stuff with bowed solos on latter Zep albums? It wouldn’t have worked. The psychedelic wave was surfed to its end, people were sober, and Zep had to change as well. On an opposite note, The Beatles were a study in selling out during the first half of their career, at least until the drugs started doing the musical talking for them instead and they went all Yellow Submarine on our asses. Their whole concept, prior to that time, was to write those exact tunes that people wanted to hear, not necessarily the ones they wanted to write.

Elvis? He was the real deal, right? Please. Just take a long hard look at him in his diamond studded Vegas outfit, doing “Love Me Tender” for the millionth time and then tell me with a straight face that he wasn’t the biggest sell out of them all. And it’s not like he needed the money either.

A “sell out” is an artist who sacrifices ideals and visions to sell more albums, concert tickets and merchandise.  They sell out to make money.

By this definition, who the hell doesn’t sell out?

Any of us?

In any line of work, in any genre, or in any art form?

How many asses have YOU kissed in your professional life? To get that job? To get a raise? To not be fired? Multiply that by one million and you’ll understand what musicians are going through on a daily basis in the corporate music industry.

In the end, it’s all about the money. Without the fucking money there is no art to pursue, since you have to start working at Mickey D’s to make those ends meet. Kids gotta eat, oatmeal or caviar, might as well make a living doing something you love, right?

Before you start crying “sell out” next time, look at WHY these artists even have to consider compromising their integrity.

Because, my dear reader, when was the last time YOU bought anything that you found yourself? Something that wasn’t served to you on a silver platter on MTV? When was the last time you bought a small independent label release? When was the last time YOU inconvenienced yourself to hunt down something new and relatively unheard of?

YOU are the one who cries a fucking river if your favorite artists ever evolve and don’t just release “Master of Puppets” all over again. YOU are the one keeping pop music in business.

YOU are the one buying that new Shadows Fall or Gwen Stefani disc for $9.99 at Best Buy, when there are literally HUNDREDS, THOUSANDS, of better bands and artists out there. There are, you know. You just have to find them yourself, since they are not on any major labels.

YOU are the one digging Jeff Buckley only after his stupid ass drowned in Wolf River, claiming you were “always a fan”.

YOU, my friend, are the ultimate SELL OUT. It’s all your fucking fault.


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