Selling Out is so Passé
Remember the concept of selling out?
I realized today I hadn't fully contemplated it in quite a while. I was reminded of this from listening to a short history of the concept via the very entertaining "Decoder Ring" podcast, which tends to focus on these types of historical nuggets. So what killed the concept of selling out?
Apparently, Oprah Winfrey is to blame.
"Selling out" as a concept was fairly well established as a pillar and hallmark of American counter-culture throughout the 80s and 90s. Foundational to the concept was an inherent and irreconcilable conflict between the pure artistic vision, and financial success. You could only have one to the detriment of the other, and the absence of the latter was used as a heuristic to establish the presence of the former. It's a self-serving fantasy in many obvious ways, because it reframes the literal starving artist as the underdog protagonist fighting off the corruption of money.
There was prestige and honor to be gained from heralding yourself as an individual driven by independent ambition, in contrast to a desire to fit into a cog in the machine. Punk rock music basically used this concept as its founding mythos. Punk wore its gutter and grungy aesthetic on its studded sleeves, as evidenced by one of the most prominent bands having a heroin junkie as its bass player who didn't even have his guitar hooked up most of the time. As early as 1978, the British anarchist punk band Crass resolutely declared that punk rock had sold out and was functionally dead:
Yes that's right, punk is dead
It's just another cheap product for the consumers' head
Bubblegum rock on plastic transistors
Schoolboy sedition backed by big-time promoters
CBS promote the Clash
Ain't for revolution, it's just for cash
It's fair to say it was a point of obsession for bands in that genre, and calling someone a sell-out was definitely one of the most acute insults you could level at someone in the scene. For many, signing on to a "major label" was anathema and the obvious death knell of your artistic integrity.
In fairness, there's some element of truth to this parable found in the trope of a previously obscure band cleaning up their sound to be more palatable to mass market ears. (There's too many examples to point to, but for one compare what AFI sounded like in 1996 when they styled themselves as 'Abuncha Fucking Idiots' vs 2003 where they were topping Billboard charts).
As a result, for many years the so-called 'serious' critics of music would be on the hunt to disavow any band suddenly deemed too popular. The mating ritual in the scene would involve locking horns with other males and name-dropping as many obscure bands as possible until one of you loses stamina. The loser would have to get the word 'poser' tattooed on their forehead and be prohibited from listening to anything except Good Charlotte's The Young and the Hopeless on repeat.
The term "indie rock" used to serve as a cohesive category because the independent record labels of the time had bands which distinguished themselves sonically from what was released by the major record labels. If you ask me what my favorite bands from the 80s through the early 00s were, most would be relatively obscure. But I noticed that in more recent years, the bands I found myself listening to were extremely popular. Yes, I can still rock out to new disco from Portugal you've definitely never heard of, but the Ting Tings, Miike Snow, and Passion Pit would pay lip service to street cred by superficially adopting the "indie" aesthetic, but in every other metric that mattered, they were "major" success stories.
I had to conclude that major labels figured out how to have their cake and eat it too, and I have to concede that music in generally is way better nowadays as a result. So good in fact, that there are way too many bands for me to keep paying attention to. Or maybe I'm just old now.
So anyway, back to Oprah Winfrey.
As early as the 1980s, Oprah Winfrey had an informal book club with her staff while she was hosting a morning show on AM Chicago. She went on to become a TV juggernaut with the Oprah Winfrey Show, but the early years were basically tabloid television up until 1994. Around this time she claimed she didn't want to do "trash TV" anymore (her exact words) and wanted to shift to something more "purposeful". This shift in how she presented her show definitely hurt her ratings, going from 12 million viewers, to 9 million. Years later, in 2007, she gave a graduation speech at Howard University where she extolled the virtues of not "selling out":
So do not be a slave to any form of selling out. Maintain your integrity in it. [...] If I could count the number of times I have been asked to compromise and sell out myself for one reason or another, I would be a billionaire ten times over. Many times when we were told that we would lose the advertisers, we would lose the ratings, I said, I’m going to take the high road. They said, you won’t be able to survive in this business taking the high road. You won’t be able to get the numbers. The advertisers will drop out. And I said, let them, let them. We will chart our own course.
It's not clear to me how seriously we should take this type of self-serving advice from someone already ludicrously successful many times over. There's an obvious incentive to recast someone's wild financial success as the result of dogged adherence to principled stands. But I digress.
One of the changes that Oprah made to her show included having a monthly book club. Having already a sizeable TV audience, every book she picked would inevitably turn into a runaway success. This went on for quite a while, up until she picked Jonathan Franzen's third book The Corrections in 2001. And then things took a turn.
Franzen was part of a self-styled high-minded tradition within literature, but he also admittedly was seeking more financial success. Being featured on Oprah's book club is a veritable godsend from that standpoint, but Franzen acted like a total dick about it all. Oprah's book club would typically feature the recommended book, and then a month later the author would be invited on the show. Franzen spent the entire month leading up to this scheduled show basically griping about being featured on Oprah. He just kept booking interview after interview, airing out how annoyed and anxious he now was for being publicly associated with Oprah and her female-dominated audience.
I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience and I've heard more than one reader in signing lines now at bookstores say "If I hadn't heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women. I would never touch it." Those are male readers speaking. I see this as my book, my creation.
He also complained about being in the company of previous Oprah book club picks, saying that she "picked some good books, but she's picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional ones that I cringe, myself, even though I think she's really smart and she's really fighting the good fight."
Oprah rescinded the invitation to be on her show and moved on. Despite his book turning into a runaway success, the reaction to Franzen was one of near-universal scorn. Franzen personified the apex of artistic snobbery and high-minded elitism. His disdain for Oprah's audience could be in part motivated by misogyny, but it was at least definitely motivated by a mistrust of the masses. He wanted the money, but he also couldn't help but express the deep-seated status anxiety of not being one of the cool authors the masses are too dumb to truly understand.
"Decoder Ring" argues that the Franzen/Oprah feud marked the beginning of the end of the concept of selling out. The incident demonstrated the logical conclusion of the idea, and it wasn't pretty. It's difficult to prove one way or another, but the hypothesis that people nowadays (especially younger people) just don't care about selling out is definitely compelling.
The kids nowadays don't appear to view financial success as a scarlet letter to hide. If anything, it seems to be the opposite with many content creators and internet celebrities transparently displaying their income on platforms like Patreon. Even self-styled leftist podcasters are unashamedly making several thousands of dollars a month without a hint of a black mark on their reputation.
The counterpoint is the term "grifter" gaining traction, but I've yet to come across a coherent definition of the term that doesn't just devolve into "this problematic person is earning an income doing something problematic".
But besides that, is selling out dead?