The Biggest Sellouts In Music History

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  • Опубликовано: 8 сен 2024

Комментарии • 60

  • @jamesdaniels487
    @jamesdaniels487 Месяц назад +1

    The return of the king!

  • @fromchomleystreet
    @fromchomleystreet Месяц назад +11

    There’s a sweet spot somewhere between Angus Maclise at one extreme, and Adam Levine at the other. It’s difficult to definitively say where the line is, but you can smell it when it’s been crossed.

    • @bigyellowpraxis
      @bigyellowpraxis  Месяц назад +3

      Excellent point. Adam Levine probably is the best/worst example of selling out. Thanks for watching!

  • @zorantaylor3190
    @zorantaylor3190 Месяц назад +4

    Angus MacLise dodged a huge bullet. Imagine being a secondary character in Lou Reed's life story instead of a tertiary one. I'd far rather be eternally immortalized as a weird footnote in the story of The Velvet Underground than be just important enough a part of it to inspire jealousy, paranoia and/or outright violence in one of the most volatile, vindictive, ungrateful and generally unpleasant musicians to ever live. Imagine being well-remembered by a guy who loved nothing more than ripping people off and then throwing them under the bus whilst smacked out of his mind in interviews for decades to come when you could be almost completely forgotten by him but still mentioned in books about him forever. The VU's career would have completely destroyed that man's life. He made the right choice. Good for him.

    • @evanlong6767
      @evanlong6767 Месяц назад +2

      I think you’re making Lou out to be so much worse than he was. He had a rough patch in the 70s where he could be pretty mean, even abusive, to some people including his first wife, but it was a dark time for him and recovered in the following decades to really be the best version of himself. He was actually a very receptive interviewee if the journalist wasn’t an asshole or a muckraker. He just wasn’t for the bullshit, wasn’t for getting used. His public persona of being the “grouch” was always an embodiment of his attitude towards the industry and the vampirism of fame, and at his lowest point, was his own self-destructiveness and insecurity as well. Tracking through his career there are way more positive stories of collaboration than bad ones. He wasn’t perfect but he was a genius, few ever have equaled him. Moe tucker adored him, and the ego battle with John Cale was resolved pretty soon afterwards. Many knew him as a kind, understanding, and incredibly intelligent human. Most everything cool in music post-1965 wouldn’t exist without Lou and the Velvets. I love Angus’ footnote story, but he coulda been in the greatest band of all time imo

    • @captainhardon
      @captainhardon Месяц назад +1

      He went on to live after the 70s lol. I love how polite musicians are in interviews is the metric for their worth. He remained on good terms with Moe for the rest of his life, even playing on her solo album and giving her credit on Loaded despite her not even being featured on the record. Him and Cale went onto to make the best album of all time in the 90s and all of them (including Sterling) had the biggest victory lap in rock history with their tour in the 90s. Most people that knew Lou after he kicked cocaine and heroin say he was an incredibly humble and kind man. People are assholes when they're young. Hopefully you're young too and cam grow to respect artistry and vision over the feelings of journalists and gossip.

  • @raletky
    @raletky Месяц назад +2

    If it don't make dollars, it don't make sense - DJ Quick

  • @dhenderson1810
    @dhenderson1810 Месяц назад +3

    They're making money.
    Not selling out doesn't pay the bills.

  • @leppaeti1815
    @leppaeti1815 Месяц назад +1

    Thanks for being back! I like that your videos are pretty long and comprehensive, you take the time to actually explain a point. I'd also say that selling out might be the only way for most artists to defeat their own laziness and unwillingness to produce. When you get into the machine and people expect something from you, you're sure going to get something done, as opposed to not having expectations from anyone.

    • @bigyellowpraxis
      @bigyellowpraxis  Месяц назад +1

      Thanks so much for the kind words, and for watching! That's all precisely what I try to do with my videos, so I'm just glad they're finding an audience :)
      I think that's a good point about selling out - and sort of a part of what I was getting at. Thanks!

  • @Slydeil
    @Slydeil Месяц назад +2

    Good video.
    All Artists want their work to reach and be appreciated by the widest possible audience.
    Artists can be commercial but have moral standpoints which they refuse to compromise e.g. The Beatles refused to play to segregated audiences in the US on their first US tour, or touring South Africa.
    It would have been so easy for them to roll over and succumb to these things as they were young and new artists, but they stood up and could have jeopardized their career.
    They refused to allow their songs to be used for commercials.
    And they had artistic control and progressed throughout their career. They didn't follow a template and regurgitate the same style and format that had been a "hit"
    They also aimed to give their fans value for money e.g. not including singles on albums.

  • @anarchodolly
    @anarchodolly Месяц назад +2

    I think the commercial angle is actually the least problematic. People have to eat, after all. I personally don't consider aiming for popularity or commercial successs to even be selling out really. To my mind, selling out is about abandoning principles rather than just making money, and on that basis not all artists are even capable of selling out as they have no particular moral or ethical core to give up. It strikes me as weird thinking of Taylor Swift, for example, as selling out, since she's merely being what she has always been. She's never claimed to stand for anything other than herself. On the other hand, I'd definitely consider Alec Empire to be a sell out since he started shilling for crypto shite. I've heard some people call Steve Ignorant a sell out for continuing to tour off the back of Crass after saying The Last Supper tour was going to be people's last chance to hear him do that stuff. I've got more sympathy for his decision though since all he's doing is touring and playing songs from a band he used to be in: there's nothing in that which really negates what Crass stood for. With Alec Empire though, he's not merely playing the hits for nostalgia-cash: he was actively engaging in a really poisonous hypercapitalist scam and there's just no way to square that with what Atari Teenage Riot were meant to be about. Selling out is about hypocrisy; I don't think any of your examples really reflected that.

    • @mikoajborkowski4707
      @mikoajborkowski4707 Месяц назад

      One hundred percent agreed! I hate that sentiment but it really seems like some people just hate when an artist is successful. I don't know much about the history of other examples but John Lennon literally used the money he made to make huge important political statements. It's like the opposite of selling out, he got the resources and used them for exactly what he was about before he had them.
      I'm quite a socialist and have a bias against wealthy people because of that. But the issue with wealth is exploitation, not just wealth itself. Artists making money off of their craft aren't exploiting anyone for their labour. If anything, they're usually still being exploited by record companies, despite their wealth. It usually would be so much bigger than what they actually make if the record company didn't take that much of a share.

    • @bigyellowpraxis
      @bigyellowpraxis  Месяц назад

      Thanks for the thoughtful reply, and thanks for watching. I agree that my definition of 'selling out' is not necessarily the perfect definition that everyone would agree with. I'm simply defining it in the absolute broadest sense of 'compromising one's art for the sake of commercial success'. And on that definition (which I do think is a viable definition), then I think every musician you've ever heard is on some level a 'sell out'. Indeed, I think the best ones sell out quite a lot - they're just good at it.
      The video was primarily made to try to dispel the idea that artists are (or should be) purely in it for art's sake. I think that's a rather overly romanticised but childish view of what good art is.

  • @dinogoldie9716
    @dinogoldie9716 Месяц назад +3

    It's worth noting that some of the literary/cultural luminaries you proffer as paragons of artistic pragmatism (most notably Shakespeare) weren't the Tay-tay top billers of their time. Shakespeare wasn't as popular/commercially successful in his era as Kyd, Beaumont, Middleton or Jonson.

    • @bigyellowpraxis
      @bigyellowpraxis  Месяц назад

      Did I say that Shakespeare was the top biller of his time? I'm not sure what your point is here, given that I wasn't saying Shakespeare WAS the biggest playwright of his era. My point is merely that he was a commercial pragmatist - that he was in it for the money, to at least *some* extent.
      Also, I would in fact challenge your assertion that Kyd, Beaumont, Middleton and Jonson were definitely more popular or commercialy successful than Shakespeare. At best, it's simply going to be very hard to conclusively demonstrate who was the most successful out of those - we don't exactly have very robust data to make the case either way. But it is a pretty straightforward fact that Shakespeare's acting company was very wealthy, enriched him greatly, and that his published works sold very very well.
      I mean, just take one of the playwrights you meantion - Thomas Kyd: his career hardly overlapped with Shakespeare's and in even just that very short period of time, the theatrical world of Elizabethan London changed massively. I don't see how you could argue with a straight face that Kyd was more popular than Will unless you're privy to some information that literally no one else is

    • @dinogoldie9716
      @dinogoldie9716 Месяц назад

      ​@@bigyellowpraxis "Did I say that Shakespeare..." yes, you did. Shakespeare had secured wealthy patrons but had a smaller audience/reach than many of his contemporaries during his lifetime. He's the opposite of Taylor Swift who is enormously popular right now but will soon be forgotten. Very different approaches. Shakespeare's strategy was more like the Wu Tang Clan/Martin Shkreli arrangement than Taylor Swift. Whereas many of Shakespeare's contemporaries were the in-house session players of their time, Shakespeare retained ownership of his material. That's great for us because much more of his material survives today than many other renaissance playwrights.

    • @bigyellowpraxis
      @bigyellowpraxis  Месяц назад

      You're going to have to quote me precisely. Where did I state that Shakespeare was the top biller of his time? I know what I said, *and* I have the script right in front of me. Very few of the names listed in that were the most commercially successful artists of their time, and I simply never made the case that they were.
      Not only did I not say it, it's not even relevant to my point, which is simply that Shakespeare was interested in doing well financially. He wasn't just in it for the sake of pure are or pure expression, but to make money as well. And this is a good thing.
      In fact, and I'm repeating myself here as you're struggling to understand very simple points, I don't think you have any way of demonstrating that any of those playwrights were in fact bigger or more popular than Shakespeare during that time period. There is simply no way to make the case either way based on the information that survives to today.
      Instead of simply restating your case, try substantiating it please - this means providing evidence. If you are unable to, kindly refrain from posting nonsense.

    • @dinogoldie9716
      @dinogoldie9716 Месяц назад

      ​@@bigyellowpraxis Your literary examples/analogies are terrible. You'd be much better off using, say, Dickens, Collins or hardy as good examples of artists who conquered the balancing act of critical acclaim/artistic integrity and commercial success during their lifetime. Tolkien wasn't an enormous commercial success, even if his work slowly grew to be. You're perceiving Woolf/Tolkien/Shakespeare through 2024 eyes and not as they were in their time.

    • @bigyellowpraxis
      @bigyellowpraxis  Месяц назад

      @dinogoldie9716 right. So you fail to understand my very simple points, and also refuse to admit I didn't even say what you initially said I did.
      You need to improve your comprehension skills, badly.

  • @justicelovingskunk9910
    @justicelovingskunk9910 Месяц назад +1

    You probably have something of a broad point here, but I think you are wrong about Angus MacLise. The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda album is very listenable albeit unique. If you're talking about the earlier work with minimalists Tony Conrad and LaMonte Young, then that's a recognised modern classical genre and may be hard going and a bit ivory tower but it's also very influential not least with the Cale period of the Velvet Underground.
    As a counter to your argument maybe don't think in terms of the greatness of individual artists, but how the broader artistic scene produces greats. The more avant garde and the more populist should perhaps not be seen as belonging to different trends, but different components of the same scene.
    Cool channel name btw.

    • @bigyellowpraxis
      @bigyellowpraxis  Месяц назад

      Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I'm sure I do miss some of the finer details of some points, particularly when it comes to topics or people that really need a more nuanced take - but I will unapoligetically make my own appeal to/excuse for selling out: I need to make videos of reasonable length (so can't cover every nuance or detail!), that is appealing to a broad range of RUclips users.
      Basically, I'm trying to get views just as much as I'm trying to say something worthwhile! It's a hard balance to strike. Thanks for watching :)

  • @ggr.
    @ggr. Месяц назад +1

    Just found your channel about a week ago and I’ve been binging videos. Glad to see you’re back!

  • @davidwhiting5630
    @davidwhiting5630 Месяц назад +1

    If you don't make money as an artist you don't progress. You can't work for nothing.

    • @bigyellowpraxis
      @bigyellowpraxis  Месяц назад

      Yup! But there's also more to it than that ;) thanks for watching

    • @davidwhiting5630
      @davidwhiting5630 Месяц назад

      @bigyellowpraxis They have to pay for the studio time, equipment, and roadies, groupies, drugs, and it's not free.

  • @petermcgill1315
    @petermcgill1315 Месяц назад

    We have a zero alcohol beer being spruiked with “Baby you can drive my car”…
    Sad. And very sad.

  • @OperationPhantom
    @OperationPhantom Месяц назад +1

    Mike Love knew "the kids" were into that rap sh*t but he took it too far... but I like your point of musicians also having to get with the reality of their times and general taste and not disappear too far up their own arse. That's kind of my takeaway anyway. Very happy to see another video upload by you sir!

    • @bigyellowpraxis
      @bigyellowpraxis  Месяц назад

      Thanks for sticking around! I'll try to get back to a semi-regular schedule haha.

  • @michaeljzaneski8746
    @michaeljzaneski8746 Месяц назад +1

    Loved your presentation. You remind me a bit of a young Neil Hannon.
    My definition of "sell out" is much narrower than MacLise's. There must be a degree of commercial success already established, then one must cave to the pressures of producers and financiers to produce cookie cutter copies of a prior, extremely successful work, and then that artist is only selling out if he/she knows they are on a completely different track. As you point out with the Dylan example, an artist might be an innovator but seem like a "sell out" at one moment in time, and later to be understood to have simply been on his/her own specific artistic path.
    I don't think the Lennon example helps you make your point, though. Most of the time, artists experiment cuz it's fun, and it can get boring having a maybe TOO well defined artistic territory which one inhabits. It's pretty healthy, actually, to transgress that territory occasionally! IOW, I believe in most cases, artistic experimentation is more about really trying to understand ones own artistic identity: what it is, what it can be, etc.

    • @bigyellowpraxis
      @bigyellowpraxis  Месяц назад

      The Lennon bit with Cambridge 1969 was just something of a joke, to be honest, though I do think the general 'John wanted to be commercially successful' point is definitely accurate.
      And you're right that there are different ways to define 'selling out': I sort of glossed over that, and I think it's fair to think of it as a sort of 'having artistic integrity and then not having it'. One could argue that KISS never 'sold out' because they were always quite obviously about making money - there was nothing to 'sell out' in the first place.
      I personally just define it in the broadest sense of 'compromising art for the sake of commercial success', and I think every artist worth paying attention to does this at least a bit (and the best do it quite a lot).

  • @virtuosoification
    @virtuosoification Месяц назад +1

    always knew boot the "junk" connection dont like it or its followers. anyways , that being said from the noises you played early in the vid and then said youll stop . well my sarcastic ass side comes up with yeah the good ol H will do that to ya . AND i like noiz music many diff kinds i like scary music ,dark music brutal metal and grind so im much open minded . i heard there exactly my sarcastic response . already starting out to be a cool vid hope its gets more traction

  • @dinogoldie9716
    @dinogoldie9716 Месяц назад

    Shit is popular with flies.

    • @mikoajborkowski4707
      @mikoajborkowski4707 Месяц назад +1

      What a misanthropic take. Do you think of people who enjoy the most mainstream shit as flies? It's most people, you know?

    • @dinogoldie9716
      @dinogoldie9716 Месяц назад

      ​@@mikoajborkowski4707 Hitler/Trump/Putin/Boris Johnson were also popular. It is not unreasonable to hold an unfavorable view of those with whom they were/are popular. Nor is it unreasonable to be cynical of mass conformity and the promotion of beige mediocrity. Like what you like. Dislike what you dislike. Try to understand why you like/dislike what you do.

    • @mikoajborkowski4707
      @mikoajborkowski4707 Месяц назад +1

      @@dinogoldie9716 I would say that comparing political movements capable of hurting millions of people to taste in music is what is unreasonable. I don't know what more to say if that's your argument, that's wild.
      What makes you so sure, that your taste in music is better? Do you have something to prove it? I don't like quite a lot of mainstream music but I wouldn't say that my taste in music is better. Sometimes I get that urge, but I don't have any logic behind it, it's only bias honestly

    • @dinogoldie9716
      @dinogoldie9716 Месяц назад

      ​@@mikoajborkowski4707 Your wild inferences are projection on your part. Cultural conformity is as significant and potentially dangerous as political conformity. They're not mutually exclusive either. Microsoft/Apple/Google/mcdonalds/Coke are as powerful as any individual politician you care to name. As I say, like/dislike whatever but try to understand (or at least give thought to) why you like/dislike what you do.

    • @mikoajborkowski4707
      @mikoajborkowski4707 Месяц назад

      @@dinogoldie9716 I know why I dislike what I dislike. I'm a musician that studied music in school. I can give you a detailed theoretical explanation of all of the musical elements that make me like or dislike something if I think about it long enough.
      But that's beside the point. I asked you to give me an argument on why this music makes people who listen to it like flies to shit. You didn't provide any, except for "conformity" as a vague concept. Most of the population conform to a shit-ton of principles and things that you would agree with, that's not a very good argument.
      I just dislike the contempt for people. You can dislike the music, but calling people flies over a taste in music is a bit much.