Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, and Ronald Regan are all great examples of people who were considered sellouts at the time. It didn't hinder their mainstream commercial success, but there were a large number of people that definitely did not consider them cool.
Sellouts have always existed at some level, but now it's different, I don't even think a lot of kids know what "sellout" means.
I was alert to popular culture by the time Thriller happened and I don't recall anybody thinking Michael Jackson was a "sellout". Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson did not one but two duets together.
if you were into indie music scenes at the time, basically anyone in the pop genre was considered a sellout
Indie music isn’t a unified entity, there’s always been a lot of different cultures under that label.
Some define themselves in relation to mainstream, but others just don’t care about what is or isn’t popular.
To a degree that was a sentiment, for sure. But many of us just like good music no matter what shape and size it comes in. Some of us even like bad music. I listen to a lot of bad music. I make a lot of bad music, too. But I'm having fun and I like to see other people have fun and even make money doing it.
When I was 5 I had every Backstreet Boys CD. I had Backstreet Boys action figures from Burger King. I love the Spice Girls and stadium bands like Pink Floyd. They stay on rotation. And I also really love finding the most obscure music possible and frequently dive into old, obscure artists, particularly folk and early electronic music. I love hearing masterpieces that have gone unnoticed for decades. I love hearing some stranger's brand new shitty song with 20 views on YouTube. My algorithm knows this too and very frequently shows me videos that are 10 minutes old with 5 views from accounts with a dozen subscribers. All of these things bring me different joys.
The line is when a celebrity starts actively hawking harmful things to everyday people. Doing a Pepsi commercial is a sellout move. But I still listen to the Jackson 5 all the time. It's good music.
If you had every Backstreet Boys CD when you were 5, you are probably not a reliable narrator of the zeitgeist of Michael Jackson in the early 1980s. :)
Did I get something wrong?
I'm not talking about the existence of individual anecdotes, I'm talking broadly as a culture because this is a comment section for a blog post about culture. I was an adult working in the music industry in the 1990s.
By and large if you were part of the indie music scene it was incredibly common to consider anything in mainstream commercial music "not cool." Boy bands were reviled for it, and people felt strongly about it.
From a cultural standpoint much of this sentiment has been lost entirely. This is part of the change the author is talking about.
We're not talking about Steve Albini, Ian MacKaye, or even Bob Mould. We're comparing Pearl Jam to Nirvana --- artists on Epic and Geffen. If you knew who SST Records was, you believed everyone was a sellout, including everyone on Touch And Go and Dischord.
Yeah, and I completely believe in the punk rock DIY ethos and independent artistic control from start to finish. I don't like big labels and I don't like to support them because they aren't supporting artists. All of these are important conversations to have when discussing what "sell out" really means. But much of the music is still good, that's my point. I can articulate the issues with the music industry while still enjoying the fruits of human creativity.
> I don't even think a lot of kids know what "sellout" means.
I think they still do, but selling out to do a deal with a brand to put your name on some clothes or cookies is so far down the scale it doesn't really register to begin with. At worst, all the harm it does is a potential harm to their future art, but a man's gotta make money somehow. It is capitalism after all.
Selling out when there are moral or ethical problems in the mix, they're still able to get very mad about that, but most artists are smart enough to not sell out to Northrup Grumman, OpenAI, Nestlé, nor to your favourite local crypto coin or gambling website.