Selling out was a thing back in the 90's, certainly something for the youth, maybe it was a throw back to the 70's the counter culture a rejection of our parents in the 80's with all of that consumerism but there was no bigger insult to a person, to a band to a fashion to be deemed a sell out.
The concept of Alternative meant something back then. It mainfested on skateboards, in flannel shirts, in the rave scene, hell there was even alternative film making, there was a concept that to be popular you had to be bad, you had to dumb yourself down, make yourself more appealing. There was a concept that the band that played to 100 people in on a Wednesday night but remained true to themselves were more valid that those who played to thousands in the stadium.
I remember the disappointment when a band you loved scored in the hottest 100, worse still when they signed with a major label, you knew it was over you, it was time to claim that you liked your old stuff better than your new stuff.
This concept doesn't exist anymore, maybe it's the death of broadcast media, there simply isn't a mainstream for the youth, it's now a series of personalised feed on your phone, with no context of whether everyone is seeing it, maybe it's simply that there is no waiting for content anymore, no waiting 2 years for a seperate album with a beginning, middle and end and an evolution to can track, an archive.
Now it's content every few days, nothing is permanent there is no back catalog of ghost posts.
Or is it that there is a easily identifiable gauge of popularly. the scorecard has become popularlarly, the number of likes of shares, of comments, the retweets, the upvotes the HIVE power behind things, we are taught from the womb to value things that go viral, we are taught that fame has a inherent worth, not just for an skills, just for being.
In this world in this culture the concept of selling out, the concept that being more popular being failure is absurd, illogical. In a world where everyone is s content maker the content itself has lost its inherent value, when the content that speaks to me is the content I make, when even sub cultures have global scale then the only way to value worth is through fame.
“The only reason TISM spent years and years and years in the artistic, pure avant-garde is because the mainstream wouldn’t have us. But now the mainstream has embraced us, the avant-garde can go stuff themselves as far as we’re concerned.
“For years and years, we’ve been slagging off the mainstream media, and talking about corporate rock’n’roll and the mendacious entropic forces of world capitalism but that’s only because they wouldn’t give us any money. The only reason we wouldn’t sell our principles was because nobody was buying”.
— Ron Hitler-Barassi to James Wakelin, Behind The Masks in The Advertiser, 2 Jul 1998