91–100 of 141 posts
What also changed is bands don’t sell records any more. You got to pay the bills somehow.
>That feeling part of a larger anti-consumerist vibe percolating through culture at the time. No, now this is not how I remember it at all. It was entirely limited to that era of music. Back then, Michael Jordan got hundreds of millions on just his sneakers. Nobody dared to think he was "selling out". George Foreman grills were hot. Gretzky was into selling you quite a lot of stuff. Shaq has never stopped doing TV co…
I like the premise. However i think there's an angle about the death of religion. It happened before most people were ready to stop being religous. Energy went to sports teams, heretical charismatics and celebrities. I do worry that jake paul or mr beast or someone like that will become president. Oprah probably could have if she'd tried. People read one person's opinion now almost as much if not more than people rea…
> I do worry that jake paul or mr beast or someone like that will become president. Not that I'm happy about it or want it to continue, but we're already there, have been since 2016.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To a degree that was a sentiment, for sure. But many of us just like good music no matter what shape and size it comes in. Some of us even like bad music. I listen to a lot of bad music. I make a lot of bad music, too. But I'm having fun and I like to see other people have fun and even make money doing it. When I was 5 I had every Backstreet Boys CD. I had Backstreet Boys action figures from Burger King. I love the S…
I'm not talking about the existence of individual anecdotes, I'm talking broadly as a culture because this is a comment section for a blog post about culture. I was an adult working in the music industry in the 1990s. By and large if you were part of the indie music scene it was incredibly common to consider anything in mainstream commercial music "not cool." Boy bands were reviled for it, and people felt strongly ab…
> The only thing that’s unprecedented about these craven cash-ins is how well they seem to be working. Selling out no longer carries a stigma—if anything, fans are excited for tie-ins between their favorite bands and their favorite brands, no matter how shameless. I feel like this only really makes sense in contrast to specifically the 90s? This wasn't some eternal cultural rule that changed in the 2000s, it's just t…
But I do think there is a real difference here. I just think it's a media difference. It's true that in the 90s (and I would say longer than that) culture writers would pretty universally scoff at "sellouts" and lionize auteurs. But those gatekeepers have lost all their power to control the message. I think that's the real difference.
I was in Vegas a few years back with friends. While walking the strip, notice this massive throng of kids all around us. I learned they were in town for the BTS concert. I noticed this young girl, no older than 20, wearing a Pink Floyd "Dark side of the Moon" t-shirt, I asked her what she thought of the band. To my abject dissatisfaction she responded "I bought the T-shirt because it looked cool". In that moment I a…
I don't know if I buy this framing. The intro Pearl Jam story is only noteworthy because it's unique. Cobain wasn't one of a million examples of counter-culture; we still talk about him today because it was uniquely his brand (to be incredibly famous while seemingly rejecting the fame). Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire filming a Pepsi commercial in 1984. Bill Cosby famously hawked Jell-O Pudding. Sports stars we…
I well remember the "sell out" musicians of the 90s - even the Rolling Stones sold a song to... Microsoft! They might have lost their cool with some people, but that didn't stop them from remaining one of the most influential bands of their generation, and they've continued their success for decades.
As you say, Pearl Jam are the exception that proves the rule, the non-sell-out who managed to get huge anyway.
I don't know if I buy this framing. The intro Pearl Jam story is only noteworthy because it's unique. Cobain wasn't one of a million examples of counter-culture; we still talk about him today because it was uniquely his brand (to be incredibly famous while seemingly rejecting the fame). Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire filming a Pepsi commercial in 1984. Bill Cosby famously hawked Jell-O Pudding. Sports stars we…
There's no numbers there to show that disliking fame was bigger than compared to now. Billie Eilish has written big hits about not being happy as a result of fame or the downsides of it.
Also, look at the amount of anti-AI/anti-big-tech memes/commentary/activity today. You can draw a straight line from No Logo to that. And I don't think it's that hard to extend that line MUCH further back than Naomi Klein. Open Source itself has plenty of adherents and is inherently a don't-sell-out movement and mentality.
"Selling out" as a concept back then only came about because everything felt fake and contrived (to some people). Just like today, not everyone would agree that everything is fake and contrived - look at how many people are still listening/watching some of the "nepo babies" or suspected"industry plants"...
The pop-culture part of this article is just "I have nostalgia for this thing I remember and knew a lot about" while ignoring the pre-existing-and-continual Michael Jackson / New Kids on the Block / Vanilla Ice / N Sync / Britney Spears mega-stardom super-celebrity mainstream hype machine that was also massively successful through the whole period.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're overstating the uniqueness of Cobain's "brand" and underestimating the size of the anti-corporate movement in the popular culture of the 1990s. First, it wasnt really Cobain per se—Nirvana were huge for a few years, but Cobain really only became a household name in death. More importantly the rejection of corporate influence and "mainstream" art was the guiding ethos of that whole genre, and eventually…
This reminds me a lot of the tension the I felt when I was first coming of age as a young adult in the late 00s. At that point, it wasn't grunge, it was hipsters. But I always felt like: How can hipsters be hip and counterculture and a movement that is big deal culturally at the same time? As soon as a "counterculture" becomes a mainstream movement, it's no longer a counterculture... So which is it? Was Cobain a big…
But why not? Result (huge sales, mainstream popularity) and process (not aiming at that goal, or even resenting ending up there) are entirely decoupled because the result is the sum of actions done by everyone else and only the process is the action of the person involved.
To be a big deal in the mainstream is about saturation and mass appeal.
To be countercultural is usually to be celebrated for the process/intent.
Entirely possible to hit both of those.
An even longer-lasting example: Radiohead repeatedly shifted directions after huge hits into more-and-more avant garde styles. But many of their songs kept ending up hugely popular regardless. Their intent was "let's do what we want to do, not just try to appease the lowest common denominator" - a classic "indie" sentiment. But it ended up appealing to huge numbers of people anyway, time after time. Even today's kids are picking them up in substantial amounts.
I don't know if I buy this framing. The intro Pearl Jam story is only noteworthy because it's unique. Cobain wasn't one of a million examples of counter-culture; we still talk about him today because it was uniquely his brand (to be incredibly famous while seemingly rejecting the fame). Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire filming a Pepsi commercial in 1984. Bill Cosby famously hawked Jell-O Pudding. Sports stars we…
There's one good part of this article, the chart of sequel/reboot/spinoff movies. And I wonder if it's just cause of movie piracy, cause it started going to crap in the 2000s. There's effectively a price ceiling now on how much you can charge to view a movie, which tilts the risk/reward in favor of reliably making ok-ish movies, and also milking old IP harder.
Ever since made-for-cable TV series went mainstream with HBO in the late-90s, a huge chunk of yesterday's non-blockbuster movies have become today's TV series. And there are massively more TV series than ever before.
That "25%" in the 80s shows you that there were already tons of those, and it's easy to remember them (Jaws 2, Empire Strikes Back, Temple of Doom, Aliens, Godfather Pt 2, etc etc etc).