Lots of underground bands improve when they sell out, but that's usually just because they were so awful in the first place that they've got nowhere to go but up.
Originally published in
millennium pop,
Volume I, Issue 1, Summer 1994
As a charting of the progress and/or regress of Def Leppard's music, this was just silly-the band had been flinging their heaviness airbound with soft harmonies ever since the beginning. Three songs on their 1980 debut album had glam-rock-style shouting, and "Hello America" contained a Beach Boys chant. 1981's High 'N' Dry upped the macho quotient by slowing tempos so the sludge seemed heavier, but it still boasted some tunes you could dance to, not to mention Lep's first power ballad. Pyromania may have had more pretty music-for-girls than before, but the prettiness provided hooks and contrasting colors that helped the loud-and-fast songs rock harder. And if Anthrax are the hip-hop and AC/DC devotees they claim to be, they certainly should've picked up on the way "Rock of Ages" and "Rock! Rock! (Till You Drop)" on Pyromania used voices as rap-slapping-type rhythm. But for some reason they didn't. Why do you think that might be? It couldn't be that Pyromania was the first Def Leppard collection to sell to a non-metal audience, to people who also bought Michael Jackson's Thriller and the Flashdance soundtrack, could it? Pyromania had three Top 40 singles, three more than any previous Leppard album-"Photograph" hit number 12, "Rock of Ages" went to 16, "Foolin'" to 28. Pyromania was so popular that it helped spur a record industry sagging from Japanese home taping conspiracies or boring radio or videogame competition or trend-hopping executive incompetence or shitty music (take your pick) toward a recovery that lasted until the next big slump at decade's end. To enforcers of metal verities, this was a sellout for sure-Def Leppard was no longer their band. Heavy metal is supposed to fight the system, not buy into it, right?
By "selling out," Def Leppard committed Ozzy Osbourne's "ultimate sin"--they fell from headbanger grace. But they also joined a hallowed pop music tradition. In fact, rock'n'roll's first big sellout was rock'n'roll. "In the fifties, the critics of mass culture regarded rock and roll as one of its horrors," Ellen Willis wrote in "Can a Man Who Hates the Jukebox Love the Beatles?" her early '70s essay answer to sociologist Charles Reich's The Greening of America. "In contrast to 'real people's music' like blues, rock was ersatz, mechanical, relying for effect on electric guitars and echo chambers rather than the talent or skill of the performer; it was black music watered down to sell to the white middle class; its lyrics substituted teen-age fantasy for real emotion; it was cynically foisted on youth by profit-hungry businessmen who bribed disc jockeys to push it; its popularity showed that we were passive consumers whose taste had been corrupted; and so on." So Milli Vanilli and Vanilla Ice have something in common with Elvis Presley after all, see?
Willis goes on to admit that said critics' observations were mainly right-early rock hits were written by songwriters no less professional (Lieber and Stoller) and no less teenage (Chuck Berry) than Irving Berlin. Producers screwed around with voices and instruments in the studio until they got a salable sound, and if that meant their audience was "brainwashed," so be it. As Willis points out, the profit motive made rock better. Short songs, tight arrangements, and gimmicky hooks helped sell records, but also made the music more immediate, and constituted a more vigorous revolt against outmoded urbane standards. I submit that very little has changed since the beginning, or at least less than most people admit-Vanilla Ice probably had more to do with "Ice Ice Baby" than Frankie Ford, a squeaky white teen hunk from Mississippi with similar appeal, had to do with his comparably furious 1959 hit, "Sea Cruise." Ace Records owner Johnny Vincent took the basic "Sea Cruise" track from his charges Huey Smith and the Clowns; Frankie just sang over it. At least Ice stole his music (from Queen and David Bowie) and words (allegedly from a black college fraternity) himself!
Lots of underground bands improve when they sell out, but that's usually just because they were so awful in the first place that they've got nowhere to go but up.
Altering your sound isn't the only way to piss off fans and influence people, of course. You can suddenly become irresponsible like aging Partridge Family pseudo-bassist Danny Bonaduce beating up transvestites or New Kids on the Block urinating in airplane aisles, or you can suddenly become respectable by doing benefit concerts or going through rehab so you can make bad Aerosmith albums. Mainly, pop music has a long, proud tradition of selling out to the advertising world. The Memphis Jug Band used to play on the backs of trucks advertising Colonial Bread and Schlitz Beer in the '30s, and in 1970 the leftist ranters MC5 sang that "rock'n'roll music is the best advertisin'." So when people like John Mellencamp whine about the evils of corporate sponsorship, claiming "there's no battle zone anymore: it's not us against them," somebody really ought to give them a quick history lesson. (Mellencamp used to give free plugs to Tastee-Freez chili dogs and Bobby Brooks jeans in his songs back when he was called John Cougar.)
Directly and indirectly, one of rock'n'roll's main reasons for existence has always been to sell Clearasil and new cars. In his 1958 song "Green Christmas," anti-rock satirist Stan Freberg sang cynically about decking the halls with advertising; he went on in the early '60s to work in advertising, spinning jingles for Chun King Chinese food, Sunsweet Prunes, Jeno's Pizza Rolls, and so on. His commercials won 21 Clio Awards. Anyway, I think it's about time somebody documented a History of Rock'n'Roll Sellouts. I elect myself.
Louis Armstrong--Starts out by helping invent Dixieland jazz and worldbeat (with "King of the Zulus" and "Cornet Chop Suey"), and leads the way toward R&B and rock'n'roll by using zesty hooks and fast dance rhythms in a small-band format in rambunctious Hot Five and Hot Seven songs like "Georgia Grind" and "Muskrat Ramble"; by 1929, no black musician anywhere is more popular. Winds up four decades later doing happyface swill like "Hello, Dolly!" and "What a Wonderful World," succumbing to icky European-bred song structure.
One of rock'n'roll's main reasons for existence has always been to sell Clearasil and new cars.
Xavier Cugat--Rationalized his popular early '50s cocktail-mambo crossover rhumbas thusly-"I would rather play 'Chiquita Banana' and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve."
Elvis Presley--Sacrifices rockabilly power for pop polish when he moves from Sun Records to RCA in 1956; sells out later to bossa nova, Stephen Foster stuff, patriotic stuff, Christian crap, show tunes, ballads based on "O Sole Mio," dance numbers about clams, you name it. He defined rock'n'roll by being the furthest thing from a "purist" rock'n'roll has ever known.
Sam Cooke--Sings in choirs for years, then makes his sacred-to-secular sellout, first under the assumed name "Dale Cook" for Specialty Records in 1956; a year later, tops pop charts. Then at the Harlem Square Club in 1963 he sells out from pop proto-soul to hard rock. (Or maybe his smooth soul records were always a sellout of his fierce live concerts.) Then Cooke gets murdered for screwing around with another man's wife. He readied the altar for such later sellouts-from-God as the Staple Singers, Stryper, and Amy Grant (who wound up on 1991's dreamy Heart in Motion identifying with agnostics and praising defrocked heretic astronomer Galileo). All of these performers got better; too bad they're doomed to be engulfed in demonic flames for eternity. What a price to pay for success.
The Beatles--Abandoned original grimy Liverpool hoodlum-bloke-and-hooligan-bird audience by letting their gay manager dress them in collarless suits and Chelsea boots and adopting image as adorably well-shorn Little-Lord-Fauntleroys-next-door who Shea Stadium teenyboppers or your mom or Leonard Bernstein could love. Became more popular than Jesus Christ, made rock'n'roll (and selling out) "respectable," changed the world.
Bob Dylan--The most scandalous sellout in rock history, July 25, 1965: Wears motorcycle jacket and fancy boots at the Newport Folk Festival and plays electric guitar, backed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. It's so loud the acoustic-purist audience can't hear him. They boo him off stage (or at least that's how the story goes--some people say the crowd was just trying to get him to fix the crummy sound mix. Others say that Boog Powell was there, and the crowd was really yelling "Boog!").
Gilberto Gil--In São Paulo, Brazil, in 1968, his performance crashes to a Dylan-at-Newport-style conclusion when he demonstrates how bossa nova has evolved into Tropicalismo, a multi-hybridized and allegedly ironic world-Beatlemaniac pretension-movement enamored of history, collage techniques, racial pride, campy tangos, and zodiac signs. Humorless leftists tell him to get lost, then rightists who figure he's subversive toss him into solitary confinement for three years. As you'd expect, he becomes a legend, then a superstar, then a city councilman.
San Francisco--Greil Marcus in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1987, on the bands of 1967's Summer of Love: "Commercialism was condemned and selling out was a horror, but every San Francisco rock'n'roller had to decide whether to sell out or change the world, and most decided they could do both at once." For example, the Jefferson Airplane, who did Levi's commercials, then went on to sell out to future spaced-out generations by changing their name to Jefferson Starship, then just plain Starship, then John Starship Mellencamp, then M.C. Starship Hammer, then just plain Starship Hammer. In 1987, I heard either Grace Slick or a remarkable facsimile doing a radio ad for Flintstones vitamins: "One pill's shaped like Barney, and one pill's shaped like Fred... "
Garage Bands--By 1968, the American Breed and a few others cynically start hiring session musicians (even strings!) and crooning ballads to your sister. Hard-grunging Pacific-northwesterners Paul Revere and the Raiders split in two, partly becoming the Raiders (whose 1971 protest-rock smash "Indian Reservation" is the blueprint for Tim McGraw's 1994 country-disco tomahawk-chop "Indian Outlaw") and partly becoming Mark Lindsay, whose 1970 shmooze-rock smash "Arizona" had him telling his hippie-chick girlfriend to get rid of her rainbow shades, hobo shoes, and Indian braids, and to stop acting so teenybopper and follow him into the middle-class adult-contemporary future.
Blondie--New wave garage-retroactivists (who had already set the stage for late '80s Latin dance pop with "The Attack of the Giant Ants" on their 1976 debut) go Eurodisco with "Heart of Glass" in 1979 and "Call Me" in 1980, then go rap with "Rapture" in 1981. All three top the charts.
The Clash--Progress from punk (on 1977's The Clash) to roots music and a couple of attempts at non-4/4 (on 1980's London Calling) to assorted dumber compromises further down the line. London Calling had some wonderful songs, and no terrible ones-so yeah, it was "impressive," and theoretically it's quite brave for musicians to open themselves up to such a gamut of influences. But in doing so, the band forfeited too much of the urgency that made them great in the first place, and their rhythm section never learned how to play funk as well as punk. The Clash were one of those acts that peaked extremely early, only to retreat into archival roots-worship, empty eclecticism, avant-garde thumb-twiddling, and detached protests. You can't really call them sellouts, because their original brazen rock'n'roll spirit was victimized more by artistic ambition than financial ambition.
Lionel Richie--Jumps ship from funk-rock Commodores to solo success and Ricardo Montalban calypso in 1981 with "All Night Long." Rapper Def Jef once put a picture of the "12 apostles of funk" on an album cover, guys like James Brown and George Clinton; he said Lionel would be Judas.
Gloria Estefan and Celine Dion--Torch-dance divas gradually switch from respective foreign languages (Spanish and French) to reach U.S. audience in late '80s and early '90s, softening and lightening their original semi-ethnicity for the same reason. (The same can be said about MTV veejay Daisy Fuentes, who came across far more bronzed and less gringo-ized back when she was only hosting the Latin-pop MTV Internacional, before she became the information highway's token Latina with her own CNBC talk show and hair-care commercials. I preferred her in the good old days.)
Chuck Eddy--I've sold out several times-when I switched from mostly writing about arty punk bands to mostly writing about Debbie Gibson; when I unsuccessfully sued the Beastie Boys for breaking into my hotel room; when I agreed to write advertorial copy for Columbia Records about bad speedmetal bands I can't even remember the names of. For the right price, I'll write like the most vacant hack on earth.
Soul Asylum, Urge Overkill, and Green Day--All three of these bands have graduated from indie-rock insularity to pop stardom in the last year, and all of them have old fans who think they sound "too rock" now and wish they weren't on MTV. Anyhow, the knee jerk backlash is far dumber and more predictable than anything the bands themselves have done. I saw Soul Asylum open for X in Indiana almost ten years ago, but they mean more to me, and to the world, now than they ever did when they were just more indistinctive indie hacks. I thought college radio was pretty much a dead issue music-wise by 1986 or so, but I listen to a commercial modern-rock station real often in my car nowadays, and when Urge's "Sister Havana" or Green Day's "Longview" or one of those Spin Doctors singles that sounds like something off Joe Jackson's Look Sharp comes on, I'm reminded of how much fun I had listening to Adult-Oriented Rock formats go new wave in 1979 and 1980, or how much fun it must've been to hear "underground rock" stations turn into AOR in the early '70s. Suddenly I'm an "alternative rock" fan again--now that the music's sold out.
"Sweet Little Sixteen," 1958, Chuck Berry. "Tomorrow morning, she'll have to change her trend." It doesn't bother him a bit.
Sold Out, 1960, The Kingston Trio. These guys sold out folk-revival stodginess years before Dylan--they did lots of fast dance-beat music (hulas, mariachis, square dances, flamencos), tossed silly jokes into murder ballads, and could sound as crazed as rock'n'roll. This album topped the pop charts for 12 weeks.
"You Don't Own Me," 1964, Lesley Gore. Imagine she's a pop star (which she was) singing to her audience...
"Positively Fourth Street," 1965, Bob Dylan. Supposedly directed at Irwin Silber, from the folk magazine Sing Out!, who'd complained that Bob's move toward the mainstream at Newport meant he'd "lost contact with the people," meaning, of course, Sing Out!'s people. So Bob tells Irwin that he used to run in that crowd but not anymore, that any faith Irwin claimed to lose was never there in the first place. He's pretty vicious. If he sang the song now, he could aim it at people who say he's a traitor now that he's sold "The Times They Are a-Changin'" for use in commercials. People like that should get a life.
"All Sold Out," 1967, Rolling Stones. I have no idea what this song is about. I'm pretty sure it's not happy, but it came off the Stones' first somewhat wimpy album, Between the Buttons, and not long after they'd started doing violin ("As Tears Go By"), dulcimer ("Lady Jane"), and sitar ("Paint It Black") ballads. So maybe they were just defending themselves.
The Who Sell Out, 1967, The Who. Complete with homemade radio commercials, and therefore the predecessor of 1) Run DMC's 1986 "My Adidas" (recorded only two years after they rapped that they didn't want Calvin Klein's name on their behinds); 2) Einstürzende Neubauten's 1988 "Jordache" (subtitled "sell out"); 3) Yvonne Chaka Chaka's 1989 "Umqombati" (a beer commercial, basically, whether the title's really the name of the African beer brand the lyrics say it is or not-a bombastic soul-disco singer beckons us to come and drink her magic beer, while a Soweto chorus chants the brand name); 4) Nirvana's 1991 "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (named for a brand of deodorant, appearing on an album with a drowning baby chasing a dollar bill on its cover, sung by a guy who thought it was real clever and daring to put "Corporate Magazines Still Suck" on his T-shirt when he got photographed for Rolling Stone's cover).
We're Only In It For the Money, 1968, Mothers of Invention. Sounds like a personal problem. Maybe they should retire.
"The Cover of Rolling Stone," 1973, Dr. Hook. The price of beauty and truth-"10,000 dollars a show." He's got his dad driving the limo, teenage blue-eyed groupies, Indian gurus, all the friends money can buy. He's lovin' every minute of it.
"Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue," 1977, Crystal Gayle. A song about the effect of contact lenses on black singers' pop-crossover ambitions. "Public Image," 1979, Public Image Ltd.: "I'm not the same as when I began," and "Albatross." 1980: "...getting rid of the albatross, still the spirit of '68." Johnny Rotten kills punk.
"Cashing In," 1983, Minor Threat. As sarcastic as "The Cover of Rolling Stone," and these clean-living D.C. punks' most powerful song despite itself--starts loud and fast, turns into homesickness out of The Wizard of Oz, then into classical minimalism. But they still feel guilty-the proof is Fugazi, the monk-cloister-like band singer Ian McKaye formed after this one broke up, where he made self-righteous finger-pointing and never-signing-to-a-big-label-no-matter-what his life's mission.
"Shameless," 1991, Garth Brooks. "I'm shameless when you need to be satisfied." And he calls himself "jaded," too; says he once swore he'd never compromise, then changed his mind.
"Black or White," 1991, Michael Jackson. About why Michael's color doesn't matter, how pious hypocrites kick dirt in his eye (brother Jermaine in "Word to the Badd!!," John Fogerty in "Soda Pop," the Pretenders in "How Much Did You Get for Your Soul?"). Coinciding with his lucrative Pepsi endorsements, Michael's racial/facial makeover was the most visible sellout ever. In "Black or White" he's like John Lydon in "Public Image," asking fans whether they only loved him for his hair color.
"So You Want to Be a Rock'n'Roll Star," 1967, The Byrds. Their reaction to the Monkees, supposedly--"You sell your soul to the company, who is waiting there to sell plasticware."
"All the Way From Memphis," 1973, Mott the Hoople. Eternal myth, or the truth?--"As your name gets hot, your heart grows cold." Rephrased by Guns N' Roses in "Right Next Door to Hell" in 1991: "As your arms get shorter, your pockets get deeper."
"White Man in Hammersmith Palais," 1978, The Clash. A great self-righteous tune about sellouts of all different kinds--black musicians adopting Vegas-revue stage shows, punks licking boots and wearing suits, British voters inching toward fascism. (In 1994, they'd be Italian, German, or Russian instead.)
"Money Changes Everything," 1980, The Brains. Rocking Georgia new-wavers, on one of my favorite albums of the '80s--"We think we know what we're doing, but we don't pull the strings." They'd just moved from an unknown indie label to a major. Nobody bought their record, but three years later, Cyndi Lauper got rich singing it even though she didn't sound like she understood the words.
"No Sell Out," 1983, Malcolm X with Keith Leblanc. One of the first pretentious hip-hop records to sample a dead person.
"Caught, Can We Get a Witness?" 1988, Public Enemy. Chuck D. ends this rap with a roundtable discussion on whether his group should sell out; unfortunately for us, they decide not to.
1941--Pepsi unveils "Pepsi-Cola Hits the Spot," the first product-endorsement radio jingle to get played a million times. The '60s--It's become commonplace to say that "corporations kept their distance from rock'n'roll until quite recently" (Dave Marsh, 1985), but it's not entirely true. In The Aesthetics of Rock, published in 1970, Richard Meltzer lists the following commercials--"Jan & Dean, Ray Charles, Four Tops, everybody else for Coke or Pepsi; Jefferson Airplane for Levis; Who, Blues Magoos, Yardbirds for Great Shakes." "Rock outside the domain of its own additional competitive commerciality," he calls it.
1982--Jovan/Musk Oil hands the Rolling Stones a million dollars so it can sponsor their American tour. I seriously doubt they needed the money--maybe Mick just really digs musk oxen.
1983--Ray Charles, who usually shills for cola companies or the Republican Party, temporarily switches his caffeine allegiance to Maxwell House coffee. I wonder if any devout cola fans think he sold out.
1984--Michael Jackson hits big with a Pepsi commercial. In his book Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus claims "You're a Whole New Generation" was tougher music than "Billie Jean"--"The rhythm was harsh, the production not elliptical but direct, Jackson's voice not pleading or confused but fierce. When he sang the line, 'That choice is up to you,' dramatizing the consumer's option of Pepsi versus Coke, he made it sound like a moral choice." And if anybody knows about moral choices, Michael does.
1985--Chrysler corporation offers Bruce Springsteen $12 million to use his Vietnam-vet tribute "Born in the U.S.A."; he turns the bailed-out company down, so they imitate his song, renaming the campaign "The Pride Is Back/Made in America." People who believe a moral issue was involved here either pat Bruce on his back or say he should've taken Lee Iacocca's cash because the end result would've been the same. I say Chrysler should've gone with "Still in Saigon" by the Charlie Daniels Band.
1988--Frank Kogan, in his legendary San Francisco fanzine Why Music Sucks--"At age 14 I knew 'Revolution' was pompous Beatle sap. The song is improved by being in a Nike ad."
1991--Milli Vanilli lipsync to an opera record in a Carefree Sugarless Gum commercial, but the record starts skipping.
1993--"Tarzan Boy," a nervous Italian-produced 1986 disco hit by Baltimora, shows up in an ad wherein a Listerine bottle swings from jungle vines. Italodisco fans the world over (especially ones with really bad breath) complain that they can no longer take Baltimora seriously, now that their heros have been co-opted by the mouthwash industry.
The Future?--"I Wanna Be Your Dog" by the Stooges (Ballpark Franks); "The Happy Organ" by Dave "Baby" Cortez (Trojan condoms); "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen (Dustbuster); "Imaginary Lover" by Atlanta Rhythm Section (Virtual Reality sex); "Enter Sandman" by Metallica (Sominex); "You Stupid Asshole" by the Angry Samoans (Preparation H); "Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick" by Ian Dury (the Singapore Tourist Council); "Turning Japanese" by the Vapors (General Motors and AT&T).
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millennium pop