Quote:
Originally Posted by lucifer_sam
The entire proposition of "selling out" is a ridiculous assertion and is an excuse for people who enjoyed a band prior to their genre shift/crappy album release to say "they used to be good." If you are seriously naive enough to follow such dogmatic bullshit, you need to pull your head out of your ass and see the music industry isn't as innocent as you saw it before.
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Completely disagree. It's perfectly intuitive and reflects actual fact:
- a band, on a small label, is renowned in the music community for being audacious, adventurous, creative, daring and innovative
- they then sign a massive multi-million dollar record contract
- their output subsequent to signing the new deal is entirely commercially driven and conforms to pretty much every convention of pop/mainstream currently existing in the present market
- plainly, though this would be quite an extreme case scenario, it is certainly
"selling out".
Selling out, basically, should be understood to be
changing something in your product in order to capitalize on the market. Short of this, there is no selling out. You're simply not selling out unless you modify something in your creative output in order to make more money.
For this reason, statements made in songs like Tool's "Hooker With A P3nis" are odd. The satirical idea that by simply making a record you have sold yourself out falls plainly outside of the spirit of what 'selling out' is conventionally understood to mean. There is a wide gulf of difference between merely
selling your creative output, and changing your creative output to make it more
'sellable'. The LATTER is what anybody who talks of 'selling out' means by it. Thus, 'selling out', as with any other term, is to be judged on the basis of how it is conventionally defined.