(And not because I'm secretly Satan and trying to buy all your souls, really, I promise.)

That said this is very hypothetical, since I've never been asked to change my stuff much. That would make a difference, I think -- and I'd have issues writing for the Times more than the Telegraph. But ultimately to pay the rent you have to sell out -- there's no way you could survice on what leftish publications pay.

It would all depend on the company/entity. For example, if it were Wal-Mart I could not do it because of their treatment of employees, use of sweatshops, union-busting, etc...

I'm biased but the Torygraph's film section is well on point. Fuck the rest of it obviously.

this sounds familiar.

Selling out aesthetically or selling out ethically?

From this thread, I'm guessing that the majority of the major issues would be with the latter.

Are you offering? I can get you my resume before the end of the day.

I.E. that HSA says he would never ever ever sell any work to Saatchi because Saatchi is tainted with Toryism and therefore evil. Yet, when I was asked to pitch to be a songwriter for a Chartpop Girlgroup (and I object to Major Labels coz they're evil and I object to Girlgroups coz they perpetuate sexist stereotypes, etc. etc. etc.) HSA's only comment was "WHEN DO I BOOK THE HOLIDAY IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE?!?!?" completely ignoring the fact that I might have an ethical *AND* aesthetical problem with doing so.

In the end, it came to nothing, so it doesn't matter anyway. But it did give me pause to stop and think about it. I decided that the benefits of the money (if it had happenned) and the contacts it would bring me would be worth selling out. (Even though I would refuse to do it under "my name" so no one would find out it was me.)

So was HSA being hypocritical?

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
HAHAHHAHAAHAHAHAHAAAAA
HEE HEE HEE

I am posting this from a computer owned by Lockheed Martin and I am wearing a shirt and tie

Could have just asked the band... or is that like assuming they must be thatcherite traitors for even thinking of mentioning golden grahams?

ow ow ow stop throwing stones in a john cleese voice.

Perhaps I work in the public sector to try to avoid such problems. I have a pretty loose code of ethics. But I think there is some truth you ethics being something you can only have if you can afford to have them. Sometimes these ethical choices are less about facts than our perception of a world order we have believed in for quite some time.

That said, I hope I'd never chide anyone for 'selling out', as people's morals are their own business, and being a freelancer who has to beg plead and threaten to get paid every day I understand the demands of rent and 'real life' can juxtapose idealism pretty fucking harshly sometimes.

Confidential to John Darnielle - got the new Mountain Goats CD today and it is brilliant, BRILLIANT!!

I think I sold out. I'm not sure, cuz I'm still broke, but, uh, I work for the man.

in the end the golden grahams thing was what tipped the balance for me: took the decision out of the aesthetic realm and into the ethical one. chris laughed at me (not in a nasty way, in a kind of wtf way) when i said it, and said she didnt think that would really help much to bring nestle down, so i said maybe not, but i dont have to join in with them, do i?

we probably could have asked them to change it (i think it was more a sort of one man/woman art project with guests than an actual band) but who am i to fuck with their creation?

oh, ive remembered the name. it was zap the world.

And I meant it. I was doing very little work, and felt guilty. That said, there was no clear sense of what I was supposed to be doing.

I'm pretty sure that is, like, everyone who says "I haven't sold out!"

From a dream I had not that long ago:

random passerby: "Conan, why are you in this hectare, instead of that hectare?"

Conan: "This hectare has more gold."

NB my dreams are awesome, except the one I had last night about getting in another drunken shouting match with my mom at a family gathering. But then it was cool because I was on the phone with my girlfriend for some reason and she handed the phone off to her dad without warning and he started quoting Indiana Jones movies to me (except I do not think that there is any point in the Indy movies where he sings the phrase "I wish that I had been at Bomb Run, instead of World War Two")

Did you tell them it was the GG's that did it?

It was a personal principle not an ethical principle, btw. Though I imagine my ex-employers may have had some slightly unethical background goings-on, I wouldn't care to speculate.

xxxxpost

Although he was willing to accept the rewards by proxy, hmm.

$$$$$$$$$$$

ouchy.

Stevie, we need you over on the Bored Freelancer thread.

Every April Fools' Day I fancy ringing ES Magazine and asking if they want a feature on how hard it is to find good help these days (by Naomi Campbell).

It's like you've known my dad for years, I swear.

I am wanting to take back all of my posts because my life has just been severely fucked up the ass all of a sudden because of my selling out four or five years ago. Holy shit. I'm at a crossroads now to deciding between selling out again or foolhardly refusing to be part of the Man's infrastructure or whatever we're talking about. I feel guilted into selling out and also $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ + near free apt.

mark g > just thought, and if wed loved the record and desperately wanted to work on it, wed (or id, anyway, chris could probably have coped) have gone to them and BEGGED them to remove the offending line...

Does the concept of 'selling out' even exist any more?
Growing up in the 90s it felt like my friendship group was obsessed with the idea of bands/artists selling out. To paraphrase a recent article I read the other day which I no longer have a link to: 'You didn't care about what such-and-such celebrity wore to the Grammys. You didn't WATCH the Grammys. Hell, you threw your TV away to get rid of that corporate claptrap'.
In certain versions of history, Kurt Cobain was literally prepared to die on the hill of not selling out.
It seems like a quaint concern now. perhaps a privileged conceit. something old, white, Generation X-ers got needlessly het up about - something closely tied to rockism no doubt.
But is it time to re-embrace the no-sell-out culture once more? Is it possible that the free-wheeling spirit of enterprise in pop culture in some way responsible for a wider acceptance of libertarian thinking, and in turn the political climate of the day - see Kanye's bizarre-but-maybe-not-so-bizarre love-in with Donald Trump from last year?

Selling out - yay or nay?

https://thehardtimes.net/blog/we-tried-to-list-the-pros-and-cons-of-selling-out-but-can-only-think-of-pros/

wonder if the stigma's gone away in part because we have a better idea of how little these musicians actually make

I remember there being a big backlash to a Modest Mouse song being used in a VW commercial to which Isaac Brock responded "I literally needed to do it to pay the rent" which shocked me at the time

i think the pomposity of whatever you were gatekeeping by not selling out is well punctured by now in most cases tbh

I'm wondering if 'selling out' was strictly a thing in rock music, or if it also applied to other music.
While rap in the 90s often got accused of being materialistic, there was still an elemental strain of street-level grit. Today, even if trap / mumble-rap seems inaccessible to some ears, and drill rappers present themselves as mean and thuggish as ever, an artist like Future won't shy-away from opening a track by announcing that he's 'here to make some hits'. Or am I drawing too much of a line?

Oops, I was in the middle of editing that post before posting. I meant to say:

I'm wondering if 'selling out' was strictly a thing in rock, or if it also applied to other music.

I'm thinking out loud slightly here, and there are probably a whole load of exceptions but.. I guess while rap in the 90s often got accused of being materialistic, there was still an elemental strain of street-level grit. Today, even if trap / mumble-rap seems inaccessible to some ears, and drill rappers present themselves as mean and thuggish as ever, an artist like Future won't shy-away from opening a track by announcing that he's 'here to make some hits'. There's no shame in wanting to achieve super-stardom and flaunting it.

There was a certain amount of pomposity and privilege around it, sure. But the idea of leveraging your fans for gain still doesn't sit well with being an artist, it makes you complicit in whatever the company does, and art can be spoiled by being overused in a shitty context. Like I loved La Ritournelle but when it became the L'oreal jingle it ruined it. Think there is a genuine socialist moment building now and this is not something which can be ignored forever.

Is quitting social media, or possibly even getting rid of your smartphone, the modern example of subversive not-selling-out? It feels less like a statement of cool, and more a genuine concern about one's privacy.

it's simply not fair, in the streaming era, to hold artists to the same standard. the contract was changed, i.e. the fans love the music and support it by buying it. you can't completely change the behavior on one side and still expect the other to still abide by the social contract.

but does the fact it's out there - like in the message of a lot of the music, the idea that the artist is PROUDLY selling out - change anything?

Is it possible that the free-wheeling spirit of enterprise in pop culture in some way responsible for a wider acceptance of libertarian thinking, and in turn the political climate of the day

I think this is definitely true. culture fully capitulated to capitalism.

I'm wondering if 'selling out' was strictly a thing in rock music, or if it also applied to other music.

do you need me to post late 80s/early 90s rap songs dissing sell outs cuz uh there are a lot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JO8BkvmNauw

Did Ice Cube sell out?/you say "hell no"

NARRATOR: Ice Cube sold out a couple of years later

of course within rap the racial politics were at the forefront - selling out meant crossing over to a white audience, ie compromising/changing your product to target a white audience rather than a black one. Still at the root it's the same dynamic, the crime is the betrayal of the community and the culture that the music originated from.

culture fully capitulated to capitalism

Not in full, but pockets of resistance are even less noticeable than they used to be. Any semblance of antagonism towards the prevailing model gets lost in the unending maelstrom.

Maybe the rulebook of selling-out/not selling-out is quite different now, and more wrapped-up in the individual rather than heavenly notions of the pop culture artist.
Social justice, civic-mindedness, veganism, environmentalism all seem high on (especially) youth agendas. As above, coming off social media seems like a pretty stoic act of rebellion. But that's only partly reflected in pop culture.
It's less about not being seen to be successful, rather achieving success while being seen to not be having a negative impact on the world

I was going to say that I think people might be asking less of musicians and more of politicians in this regard, or at least I would want to think so?

you'd like to think so, wouldn't you... :-(

and yet..

to me the problem with the idea of "selling out" is that it implicitly frames the issues with capitalism as being a matter of individual moral choice, sort of the equivalent to treating climate change as being first and foremost a matter of what sort of light bulbs you use. this focus on individual morality as opposed to collective morality hasn't, imo, aged well; also, the puritanism present in such a stance doesn't hold up next to the growth of luxury communism, which holds, like a lot of old hip-hop music, that being "real" isn't something that exists in opposition to living the good life.

Selling out:

1) Compromising your artistic production to incorporate a direction to which you are not naturally inclined towards

Or

2) Rendering your audience as a deliverable to which you market external product bases towards.

So, John Lydon didn't sell out by doing butter ads, he wasn't implying his audience to switch to Country Life.

Whereas those that sell headphones and/or expensive clothing/makeup/cars could be construed as such, but.

Thesedays, it's not "are they selling out" as much as "to what extent are they selling, and is it way beyond what seems to be appropriate.

Any other subjects I can talk gibberish about?

i've dumped social media, and i don't think dumping social media makes one "cool", because "coolness" itself is a social construct. mostly i just feel isolated and out of touch, which for me is healthy when i consider the things i'm isolated from and out of touch with. a band that doesn't do social media isn't going to play gigs at la cave or get written up in crawdaddy - there's no underground to oppose the toxic monoculture, just millions of cranky discontents waiting for something to happen.

Did Ice Cube sell out?/you say "hell no"

NARRATOR: Ice Cube sold out a couple of years later

― Οὖτις, Thursday, August 1, 2019 10:08 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

of course within rap the racial politics were at the forefront - selling out meant crossing over to a white audience, ie compromising/changing your product to target a white audience rather than a black one. Still at the root it's the same dynamic, the crime is the betrayal of the community and the culture that the music originated from.

― Οὖτις, Thursday, August 1, 2019 10:09 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is an extremely blinkered and slanted reading of this "betrayal" if that even exists....hip hop always celebrated wealth and money, for reasons that should be incredibly obvious.

Did it ALWAYS though? Run DMC, Public Enemy, Sugarhill, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, The Last Poets, Outkast, Nas - I mean, yes, money has been a subject that rappers have often rapped about, but often it was either about struggling to make money, or celebrating the fact you had money, but often now it's 'I'm making this music so that people buy it and I will make money'...? I'm clutching around here trying to express what I mean but I'm doing it badly.

you're right there's a lot there, but i think a lot of "selling out" talk is ppl projecting punk and indie rock values on to other forms of music and other cultures

I know I was being a bit flippant ums, initial post is essentially a text version of https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fimages5.fanpop.com%2Fimage%2Fuser_images%2F3064000%2F6mm-3064677_469_650.jpg&f=1

if we want to get into this seriously, my point was that there's nuances to what "selling out" meant in the context of the black hip hop community of the late 80s/early 90s. It wasn't so much the pursuit of money/success/fame that was suspect, but the pandering to a white audience to get there that was more suspect. In the indie rock world the different but kinda analogous situation was the "betrayal" of the indie community to cross over to major label rock. Both are essentially *aesthetic* betrayals, changing sound/presentation to appeal to an audience that is viewed as less legitimate. I don't think you really hear much of either argument either in rap or rock these days, just cuz everybody's accepted that musicians are struggling micro-capitalists.

to go back to the specific Ice Cube example, you could say he sold out because hip hop culture as a whole sold out. As soon as gangster rap really crossed over to white audiences (The Chronic/Doggystyle/Ready to Die etc.) and it was clear the rap audience as a whole were moving on from Cube's kind of confrontational steez to a much broader pop audience, he just tried to go with it. He also just became more interested in being a movie star, which I'm sure had something to do with his records getting more and more half-assed over time. But man that Westside Connection record was a real "ok Cube's just on some lame shit now" moment.

that Ice Cube meme LOOOOOL

I'm from the UK so maybe my perspective is different from what's actually happening, but I find it's interesting how swiftly formerly 'underground' rap acts with a few mixtapes can suddenly establish themselves as mainstream artists - Migos, Cardi B, Young Thug, all going from being cult acts to having number one hits or working with commercial pop artists like Katy Perry or Camila Cabello. And this transition seems effortless - one minute they're double-hard lean-drinking mother-effers, next they're on a youth TV charity appeal. No one ever questions it or moans about it either, even if quite clearly this transition has been organised by committee.