I think the concept of "selling out" is more complicated than just getting a lot of money for your art (for once).
When you're in a subculture, like metal or punk or goth or skate, the top-down world of mainstream culture is a threat. In its constant search for novelty, it's predatory; and the effect of it latching on your subculture and …
I think the concept of "selling out" is more complicated than just getting a lot of money for your art (for once).
When you're in a subculture, like metal or punk or goth or skate, the top-down world of mainstream culture is a threat. In its constant search for novelty, it's predatory; and the effect of it latching on your subculture and exploiting it then cheapens your subculture down to a few shorthand marks of style and gesture and rubs away any context behind those.
It reduces your culture from a chosen, intentional way of life and expression of values to merely one among many prefab "consumer identities" on offer in the big Marketing Bazaar to anyone who has the money to buy one.
If you, as a member of that subculture, "sell out" you are selling your credibility within and among that culture as a "way in" for peddlers of cars or toothpaste or corn chips or whatever to fad-ify, exploit, cheapen, and eventually de-contextualize your subculture, rendering it meaningless. That's what you've sold; and that's why you got paid so much, and that's why your peers are really mad at you.
Capitalism cannot abide any value system that is not subject to its supremacy; and will seek to subvert and undermine any system which would arise to compete with it, even if it's not in direct opposition to capitalism. By selling out, you are handing capitalism a key to undermining yours, and thus subordinating and suffocating it.
That's why the term hasn't been used much since the dawn of this century; because "mainstream culture" has become a blob so ubiquitous, so massive and dominating, that it senses and moves to eat its potential opponents right out of the cradle, before they become enough of a threat to have to consider buying.
I think the concept of "selling out" is more complicated than just getting a lot of money for your art (for once).
When you're in a subculture, like metal or punk or goth or skate, the top-down world of mainstream culture is a threat. In its constant search for novelty, it's predatory; and the effect of it latching on your subculture and exploiting it then cheapens your subculture down to a few shorthand marks of style and gesture and rubs away any context behind those.
It reduces your culture from a chosen, intentional way of life and expression of values to merely one among many prefab "consumer identities" on offer in the big Marketing Bazaar to anyone who has the money to buy one.
If you, as a member of that subculture, "sell out" you are selling your credibility within and among that culture as a "way in" for peddlers of cars or toothpaste or corn chips or whatever to fad-ify, exploit, cheapen, and eventually de-contextualize your subculture, rendering it meaningless. That's what you've sold; and that's why you got paid so much, and that's why your peers are really mad at you.
Capitalism cannot abide any value system that is not subject to its supremacy; and will seek to subvert and undermine any system which would arise to compete with it, even if it's not in direct opposition to capitalism. By selling out, you are handing capitalism a key to undermining yours, and thus subordinating and suffocating it.
That's why the term hasn't been used much since the dawn of this century; because "mainstream culture" has become a blob so ubiquitous, so massive and dominating, that it senses and moves to eat its potential opponents right out of the cradle, before they become enough of a threat to have to consider buying.
That's my perspective on it, anyway.
"Just the way Jews behave".
No, son; it's the way capitalists behave. Including those of your particular identity-basket, whatever that is.
Don't try to sell idpol to me; neither yours nor others is gonna convert me to it.