To "Sell-Out" Or To Stay The Same?

I once had a great conversation about sell-outs. Meaning, of course, an argument. Any discussion of sell-outs is bound to end up in ugly territory. For me, the ugly territory began with Kings of Leon.

The problem begins with the term “sell-out” itself. The negative connotations to the word “sell-out” are impossible to ignore. My handy Mac dictionary is quick to label “sell-out” as “a betrayal of one's principles for reasons of expedience.” Which, you know, doesn’t exactly sound like a good thing. 

But back to Kings of Leon:

From left to right, Matt, Caleb and Nathan Followill (behind drum set) of the band Kings of Leon; via Wikimedia Commons

It doesn’t take a Kings of Leon fan club member to know that somewhere between their third album Because Of The Times and their fourth album Only By The Night something changed. It wouldn’t be easy to spell out that change—for while there are notable shifts in songwriting and mixing, the first-time listener might be more struck by the similarities that carry over between albums.

But no one would disagree with the fact that Only By The Night sounds cleaner than Because Of The Times. Prior to Only, the Folowill clan had a deep-fried southern rock sound…but afterwards, their sound somewhat morphed into an arena-rock groove. You can’t listen to “Use Somebody” and tell me that it’s quite the same band that recorded the eight-minute toe-tapper “Knocked Up.”

But the real issue at stake: is that swap necessarily such a bad thing?

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It’s a thorny issue—inextricably tied, of course, to whether or not you like Kings of Leon—but that doesn’t mean it cannot be parsed out a little.

It helps to imagine that you’re Caleb or Nathan Followill right after the release of Because Of The Times: you’ve now written and released three well-received albums—well-received, that is, by critics. You have a loyal fanbase, but by no means an enormous following the likes of Coldplay or U2.

Where do you go from here? Do you keep making the same bluesy, gritty rock? Or do you change it up? Do you, so to speak, clean out the grit from the engine and wax the hood—even if that means wiping away layers of nostalgia and maybe even the very skin of self-identity?

I don’t think it’s too much to imagine that the Followills contemplated these things. In fact, I think it’s a fair assumption that most artists who “sell-out” go through a similar thought process: I’ve done what I can and it hasn’t totally worked—now what?

But our sympathies in this discussion cannot rely solely on the artist—the audience, after all, has a voice as well. The voices of dissent regarding the Kings of Leon’s “sell-out” have been, at least in my experience, particularly vicious. I’ve even heard someone claim that the band sold-out after Aha Shaka Heartbreaker—claiming that Because was the move into the big leagues.

So what happens to that loyal fanbase? They get angry! They’re pissed! “You sold us out, Caleb!” they yell. “You moron! You’re compromising your sound! For what? For money! For fame! You shallow a***ole!”

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As bizarre as it might sound, I think it might help to think like Freud.

I think that the Followill’s loyal fanbase has some abandonment issues. Anytime someone you love starts ignoring you, it tends to sting a little (quite a lot actually). While I might be overreaching a little in comparing the relationship between artist and audience to mother and child, I don’t think it’s an entirely inaccurate comparison, especially when you consider the weight and importance that some people place in their favorite musical artists.

After all, everyone has those kinds of musicians to whom we have, in a way, entrusted ourselves. We like them and we like to think they like us. When they release something we dislike, we shrug and maybe feel a little let down. I will freely admit that sometimes I even feel badly for the artist. When Matt & Kim released their not-so-great-sophomore-slump-of-an-album, I felt pretty badly for them.

But something different happens when those artists release something that we not only dislike, but something that violently disagrees with our vision of the artist. It’s one thing when Sufjan Stevens releases Seven Swans and you grumble that it’s no Greetings From Michigan, but it’s entirely another when he releases The Age of Adz—an album that caters to Stevens’s wildest orchestral/electronic fantasies, but seems to largely ignore his folkie back-history. (That’s my take, anyway.)

Sufjan Stevens plays an acoustic concert; via Wikimedia Commons

My point here is that there’s a funny relationship going on. Did Kings of Leon pull some Freudian shit on me with Only By The Night? Yes and no. I answer ambivalently only meaning to point out that the Followills probably didn’t think about it that way. They thought: where do we go from this place? I thought: why would you ever leave?

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A tendency of this argument is to find the root of the problem in economics. The assumption at work is that musicians, at the end of the day, play music to make money. The truth, obviously, is not so black and white. Musicians play music for a host of interconnected reasons, some of them monetary and others not so much at all. But money, I will grudgingly admit, is not a negligible player in this discussion.

A friend of mine, J.R., quite astutely pointed out that sometimes artists will “compromise” their sound for commercial success in order to achieve greater artistic freedom at a later point in their career. While this sort of path sounds somewhat arrogant (you can just be a success like that?!), I don’t think that we can dismiss the possibility.

Any examples of this path are difficult to find, because usually people are not so frank as to admit that they did things purely out of artistic leverage. One promising lead would be that of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, the glaring issue with that example being the lack of evidence that Nevermind was at all intended as a “sell-out.” But regardless of that, Nevermind ended up being one of the biggest-selling albums of the 1990s and allowed Cobain to follow his muse wherever it took him—one need only listen to the gritty soundscape of In Utero or the peculiar (but brilliant!) live set of Unplugged in New York to know that Cobain had been released into financial security to do whatsoever he pleased.

Another band that I think may be enduring somewhat of a sell-out phase for the same reasons is Modest Mouse. Many longtime fans viewed Good News For People Who Love Bad News and/or We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank as selling-out albums, but I have the suspicion that by this point Isaac Brock has leveraged for the band enough mainstream success that he could score an unlimited amount of financial support for whatever project he feels like. 

Isaac Brock of the band Modest Mouse: Is he selling-out on purpose?? ; via Wikimedia Commons

But sadly, the reality is that these discussions from an economic point of view will overwhelmingly amount to not much more than idle speculation. That, maybe, is the real problem with the sell-out discussion; it’s all based on motives and thoughts that we, as critics and fans, cannot really see—it’s all just speculation.