beantownbubba wrote:As I understand it, the term "selling out" refers to a conscious attempt to make something popular w/out regard to one's own aesthetic/artistic integrity. IOW, whether one succeeds or not is not relevant to determining whether one has sold out.
I'm not sure that one has to sacrifice their "own aesthetic/artistic integrity" when making a conscious effort to be popular. First though, let's be clear, we are talking about two separate but sometimes interrelated things here. The first is trying to consciously make art that it is more commercial. I think there are more artists/bands that are accused of this than truthfully do this, sometimes by assholes like me or sometime actually me, but there is no question it happens. Bonnie Raitt did this with Nick of Time and succeeded. She had released a string of really good records that consistently topped out on the charts middle of the pack anywhere from 25-80 and then released an album in 1986 that came nowhere near those respectable, if unspectacular numbers. She talked with her many friends in the business and came up with a strategy to sell more records. In 1989 she succeeded with Nick of Time that topped off at #1 and went multi-platinum. Artistically the album is pretty damned good too, she used more outside songwriters, slicker production and less of her trademark slide guitar work but you can't say it was crap either. Was it a sellout? Yes, because she consciously set out to make a more salable product. Did she sacrifice her artistic integrity? I don't think so unless of course you believe that slide guitar defined who she was prior to that record. I'm sure some do, objectively it's probably not so.
The second kind of sellout being discussed is lending, or more accurately selling, your song(s) to a commercial venture larger than or even unrelated to your own efforts. This would be either writing specifically for movies, TV, advertising, etc. or selling previously written songs to those ventures. Again this can be done with the utmost integrity (Patterson Hood's Depression Era comes to mind) or it could be written with a distinct commercial appeal (think James Bond themes, not all of them bad but all of them sold for their commercial potential). I think it's much easier to tell whether an artist has crossed a line in this type of "sellout" than it is in the one discussed above. Again if your song about your beloved mother is changed to sell soap, well you probably messed up the integrity score but if, in contrast, your beautiful song is purchased and used intact to promote a quality product well maybe not so much. if you consistently sell to the latter and never to the former than I think you can probably sleep easy at night knowing that you have both satisfied your financial needs and desires without singing intimate thoughts about washing your clothes. Win-win.
We call him Scooby Do, but Scooby doesn’t do. Scooby, is not involved