The Washington Post Takes Aim At Musical “Sellouts”

If any Idolator readers are still confused as to what constitutes a “sellout” in 2007, the Washington Post has come to your aid with what they’ve described, with typical timeliness, as “the Moby Quotient,” a mathematical formula “that could be used to determine just how much of a sellout is a particular artist.”

Cute, right? And the WP‘s “tongue [is] firmly in cheek,” for anyone who’s taking a cutesy charticle too seriously. After all, the idea of “selling out” has been debated unto death over the last decade, with even WP writer Bill Wyman arguing on the first page that “there is no longer even a debate, let alone a stigma.”

But Wyman still takes the idea of pop sellouts very seriously. The text of the article leans on all the leaky assumptions that will comfort the Post‘s crusty boomer readership–that “Imagine” is more important than “Get Ur Freak On” and therefore in more danger of being “corrupted,” that Kelly Clarkson or Fall Out Boy are somehow less tainted by doing the advertising dance than the Stones. Or check this quote from “one time rock critic” Bill Brown:

“The problem with branding yourself and selling your songs to commercials is the music is no longer for the listener.”

Huh? The repetition of a popular ad has the power to turn a song you love into an annoying earworm, sure. But it’s an odd quirk of boomer critics that songs already designed to reach a mass audience somehow void their warranty when they come into contact with “commerce,” or that a band hawking its song to an advertiser automatically equates to “greed.” It’s become a sad, but viable, option for many during the industry’s never-ending commercial downturn.

As a final warning, Wyman tells “sellouts” that they should “beware,” because “commercially and artistically, [Moby’s] recorded work since ‘Play has been on a downward spiral,” as if his aesthetic decline had any direct connection with the Play advertising blitz. But if “the jut-jawed vegan still makes a good living touring and doing film soundtracks and the like,” it’s more than you can say for most musicians these days, making it hard to see Moby as a cautionary example for up-and-coming musicians.

How To Calculate Musical Sellouts [Washington Post via Daily Swarm] [Second image: Washington Post]