the friends i made in washington that first year out of college had a curious refrain anytime we talked about musicians. The running debate concerned who among their favored bands and artists was a "sellout."

Pride prevented me from asking outright what "sellout" meant. I gathered, after a while, that it referred to a musician who had changed his original style in order to become popular. In my friends' eyes, this was a mortal sin.

I had not been exposed to this before. My friends and I didn't take our music so seriously, the sole exception being a critic I edited at The Daily Texan, a High Fidelity-type with an encyclopedic knowledge of music and no actual friends. As for the rest of us, we liked the Pet Shop Boys or we didn't, and that was it. To him, the world was cloven between the few who understood music, and the riff-raff who had no taste.

Even as a fairly undiscriminating consumer, from an early age I was able to see the difference between what I thought of as "found" talent and the manufactured stuff. Even as a kid listening to the radio, I sensed there was something phony about acts like Bobby Sherman. Too much promotion, not enough "there" there. Much later, on a press junket for the college paper, I met a writer from Carnegie Mellon who couldn't wait to ask me—being from Austin and all—what I knew about the Fabulous Thunderbirds. Ah, I said, you mean that party-bar band that had just recently been inflated to seem like a regional sensation about to take the country by storm? Guess they found a producer and some money. He gave me a hurt look and the conversation ended.

i guess i wasn't quite as easily impressed as some music fans in general. Still, unlike the critics, I didn't care enough to sort the whole world of performers into sellouts and non-sellouts. If I liked what they produced, I bought a copy. If not, I ignored them.

But the D.C. guys never tired of the debate. Was Springsteen genuine? If not, then which album marked the sell-out point? (Once you'd taken the money, you were forever tainted, and everything you produced thereafter was junk.) Nothing made them gag like Eric Clapton after that Michelob commercial. Thank God I wasn't around them when R.E.M. released Out of Time.

Today, every last one of those guys works in corporate. Even the Texan music critic doesn't show up on Google, which suggests that he, too, took the easy money.

Now that I know what a sellout is, I am not surprised by the fate of those who constantly talked about selling out. We hate what we fear the most, and we eventually become what we loathe. Sellouts, all of us, with our mortgages and retirement plans and good schools for the kids.

The mystery is, why we think artists shouldn't want those things, too.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 05:35 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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