New Example, Green Day has been called sell-outs forever – but who says they don’t love the music they are pushing. And fans discount them because they don’t like their ‘new’ music, and they push it off as if they sold out. What does that mean? It doesn’t make sense to me. If Billy Whatever wrote this music and loves it, and thought, hey I should write a play with this music, because I love broadway music… why is that selling out? I love tons of music; does that mean I’m supposed to do songs exactly the same every time? In that case, the Gin Blossoms should be the most popular band in the history of music, because every one of their songs is the same. They are the anti-sellouts? Side Note: I love the Gin Blossoms. My point is, if selling out is changing your music to be marketed to a larger audience for the soul purpose of making money… then how will we ever know if a band is just evolving, experimenting, or selling out? And if you don’t like it… it’s automatically selling out? Dumb… I doubt Green Day was sitting a room with their record company and says, “ya know what, we should really make our music mainstream, ultra pop, even thought I don’t like, because we’ll make a shit ton of money.” They already had a huge record that made them millionaires… why would they screw that up and change. All they did was make new music that people didn’t like as much… that’s not selling out. Side Note: I went to a Green Day Concert: Not a fan… they played ‘Shout’ – verging if not plummeting into sell-out-ville… I know, I’m a hypocrite, but this is all hypothetical…
On the biggest ‘sell-out music show’ ever – American Idol… one of the contestants, Siobhan Magnus, said something that makes complete sense about assigning sounds to an artist, and it was so good, noone could say anything back. It was incredibly philosophical, "Even I can't pinpoint who or what I am and I've always kind of taken pride in that. I'm not just one kind of singer or one kind of artist, I mean, if I can't even label myself, I don't think it's necessary to even be labeled. I just love to sing." Side Note: I love American Idol.
Last thing, I promise… Panic at the Disco; made an ultra punk pop record that sold tons of copies, was played everywhere for about a year. It was madness. And then they made a record with a folk song, a punk song, a hippie song… there were so many different genres of songs on this album, it was new madness. They said, we like to make music and this album was something we’ve always wanted to make. Ya know what people said, yup, called them sellouts. Hopefully my point means something to anyone… I just like music, and I’ll appreciate it for what it is, pop, country, bad music, etc… Music is music for the soul purpose of giving us something to do while we waste our time kicking rocks on the pavement or smelling the flowers… I refuse to sell out to the bands I love; I’ll just admit I don’t like it as much…
