(For part one of this series, go here)
You gotta hear this one song – it’ll change your life.
-Sam in “Garden State,” as played by Natalie Portman
This single scene, in which the Shins’ song “New Slang” is played, has changed the entire outlook for this Portland-based, Albuquerque-grown pop band.
In the three years since they released their last album, “Chutes Too Narrow”, more and more people have taken to rolling their eyes when the Shins are mentioned. Why? They signed to a big label (Sub Pop), released two great albums and rode the coaster of their mainstream success. Is that “selling out”? And should I join the backlash? How can I root for a band to achieve success without selling out? That sounds like paper football: go far with your success, but don’t you dare go too far, or else you’re dead to me. Am I just hurt because the Shins are now wooing my little sister’s demographic?
I’m confused: 3 years ago, I was happy to declare that the Shins’ albums were among my favorites. Nothing has changed about the music. But now, people giggle at me for making the same declaration. Everyone and their mom has read The Kite Runner, so it’s now a much less appealing book to some, even though nothing about the book changed.
But, Kevin, they played a pool party on “Gilmore Girls” and wrote a song on the “Spongebob Squarepants Movie” soundtrack. And Marty, the band’s keyboardist, has appeared on “America’s Next Top Model”
THEY SOLD OUT.
Or so I’ve been told. Repeatedly. And I have many other examples of sellouts in recent memory (Strokes, Jonathan Safran Foer). But despite the training data, I haven’t figured out what “Selling Out” means… Are we so hellbent on conferring distinction upon ourselves with “indie”? Why should I be so eager to condescend to people who find out about these same bands once they’re in the mainstream? Is this different than “Jumping the Shark“? I always associated Jumping the Shark with something that’s washed up, and that hollowly resorts to tired gimmicks.
Is mainstream success really so bad?
Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and founder of McSweeney’s magazine, was confronted with accusations of sellout by the undergraduate lit editors of the Harvard Advocate. Check it out. His attitude of “saying yes” has molded my last few years.
One of the books that’s formed my thoughts on this matter is Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consume Culture. It traces the lifecycle of various cultural phenomena, from “indie” “authentic” “counterculture” to “co-opted” “commercialism.” Yet it makes the bold claim, that it is this very drive to disavow and rediscover memes that drives the consumerism that is so popularly scorned.
In the Dave Eggers thread of “saying yes,” I’ve put this book on my personal syllabus. It’s about a guy who’s just muddling through life, until one day a stranger on a bus looks him in the eye and says “You should say yes more.”
What do you guys think?
I feel like I only find out about things until after they sell out and become uncool. I heard about hyphy on NPR, and immediately assumed it was no longer vital. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but Neal Stephenson touched on this topic in his great interview on Slashdot. He was asked why scifi doesn’t get any respect in literary circles, and his response was that it was a matter of patronage. The scifi author writes for a mass market to make money, and they don’t get published if they sell lots of books. The “literate” author writes for the critics to gain acclaim, and their patron (university, grant source) pays them based on their reputation. I guess the assumption is that popularity is less of a temptation than money to compromise your own work.
To the question of what I think: personally, I don’t care, and I don’t think you should care about “selling out” either. I guess this is what you are trying to imply when you mentioned “saying yes”. I like this incredibly novel idea: If you like the music, listen to it.
what does it mean to “like the music”?
most Pandora listeners have had an experience like this:
“oh my god, why is pandora playing me {band with stigma or lameness associated}??? BANNED FOREVER.”
Since Pandora is based on an analysis of the music, and not so much the culture of listeners, it may play a Creed track to someone who utterly despises Creed. It just so happens that there’s a hip song and a lame song that sound the same to musicologists, but most listeners will be damned before they admit that some of their indie-jazz-vocalist stuff sounds like Norah Jones.
Can the contemporary music listening experience can be separated from its cultural context? Or does that song sound automatically more banging at the underground club than at the local supermarket? Is a song automatically cooler if fewer people know about it? I mean two big movements in rock have been “indie” and “alterative.” Aren’t those wildly successful (and musically meaningless) labels just code for “Not like them”? Is it any coincidence that “genres” that define you as “different” have both grown wildly popular, and even help define what pop is today?
Well, first off I’d point you to the Tool song ‘Hooker with a Penis’, the title of which I’m guessing may get me caught in your anti-spam device, but relevant just the same… The tale of the singer of Tool running into an old-sk00l fan who accuses him of selling out, to which he responds along the lines of:
I sold out long before you ever even heard my name.
I sold my soul to make a record,
Dip shit,
and then you bought one.
So, that out of the way – I agree definitely that while really, the popularity of a band shouldn’t influence your opinion of them, it does. When a band you have loved since you first found those scratchy recordings in the depths of Soulseek, or something, suddenly is on the radio every 10 minutes and little teenage girls are going on about how they love them, the reaction is never ‘Oh, man, great for them, finally they’re getting the reward they deserve,’ it’s usually ‘they sold out.’ Regardless of any action on their own part. They may not have changed a thing, but just fallen into the right place at the right time, but it changes how you think about them, and rarely for the better.
One of my favorite ‘sellout’ stories was with the band Mojave 3. A few years back, they had a song in a Hummer commercial, for which they got just *blasted* on their forum, called sellouts, etc. One of the members of the band responded and defended their choice by saying:
“At the end of the day, the music is being heard by a whole lot more people in the States than two weeks of touring could ever manage, if not years nof touring as is our case. And maybe, as a result, we will be able to come back next year and do more gigs.”
Which I just loved. Are they ‘selling out’ by allowing their music to be used in a commercial? Maybe, but who cares. It lets them get heard a bit more, it basically funded a US tour they’d wanted to do for ages (and that the same people on the forum had been clamoring for)… so how is that not a good thing?
I’d be glad to sell out, if I had anything anyone wanted to buy…
Selling out is when an artist violates his/her own principles for monetary gain. Artistic integrity is important…for artists who think it’s important. Since the audience generally doesn’t know the artist’s principles, their judgements aren’t particularly valid.
Also, I think the Shins are great! I’m looking forward to the new album, but am a little wary from the two songs I’ve heard so far.
There is more to selling out than just simply becoming popular. There is nothing “wrong” with making money or being popular but as has already been expressed, selling out is going against some basic principle that one would assume a band with the depth that The Shins have would share.
The fact that The Shins have sold some of their songs to a corporation like McDonalds IS disappointing to say the least. Struggling financially or not, it is each individual’s responsibility to know what they are selling their music to and (indirectly) endorse.
The fact that there is a Burger King in Paris is disappointing for more reasons than our wanting to see the “authentic” Paris but also because we don’t want to see something so unappealing in something we have romanticized.
When The Shins decided to “sell out” it is disappointing because the “art” that we want to represent OUR ideals seem less shared by the artist…. or maybe I’m just talking about me.