The Age of the Double Sell-Out

In the last three decades, youth culture has moved from a deep suspicion of commerce to a passionate defense of anti-anti-commerce to an entire generation of "creatives” who leverage the commercial market… to do even more commerce

In the 1990s, there was a single ethical principle at the heart of youth culture — don’t sell out. There was a logic behind it: When artists serve the commercial marketplace, they blunt their pure artistic vision in compromising with conventional tastes. This ethic was also core to subcultures, which were supposed to be social spaces for personal expression and community bonding, not style laboratories for the fashion industry.

The ethics against commercial art set strong boundaries for "alternative" culture, which arguably allowed it to flourish as a separate entity. As that culture began to hit the mainstream in the early 1990s, the taboo against selling out spread into broader youth culture. As Chuck Klosterman writes in The Nineties, “The concept of ‘selling out’ — and the degree to which that notion altered the meaning and perception of almost everything is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties.” The kids actually cared. When mainstream radio began to play alternative music, middle school playgrounds erupted with debates on whether REM’s “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” crossed a dangerous "pop" line and whether Stone Temple Pilots were just “poseurs.”

By the late 1990s, however, that very merger between alternative and mainstream culture made the debate around selling out seem very silly. Moreover Britney Spears and the boy bands ushered in a return of manufactured pop. By the early 2000s, everyone — from VICE editors to Total Request Live viewers — agreed that selling out was a dated concept. This backlash found its purest expression when critic Kelefa Sanneh — who spent his youth listening to obscure punk seven-inches and crafting Harvard radio’s notoriously snobby “rock test” — published an op-ed in the New York Times defending Ashlee Simpson for lip syncing on Saturday Night Live. Pop was good, he argued, precisely because it was an industrially manufactured product. This new critical ideology soon crystallized into an "anti-anti-sellout movement" known as “poptimism,” which gave fans of sophisticated culture blanket permission to engage with things made explicitly for profit.

The poptimist ideology succeeded because it made compelling points about why it was unfair to castigate selling out:

1. Artists deserve to make a livelihood: With music sales down after Napster, musicians needed to supplement their income with commercial sponsorship
2. Artists from marginalized communities tend to work in commercially-oriented genres: It was essentially bigotry to see R&B, disco, and teen pop as “lesser"
3. Commercial success is key to true cultural influence: Nirvana and Pearl Jam changed aesthetics because they sold a lot of records

These points were neither cynical nor nihilistic. There was a strong belief that loosening the taboo against selling out would allow art and creativity to flourish. A detente with the marketplace could make art more democratic, more diverse, more sustainable, and more impactful.

There is no question that the poptimists won this debate, and by the mid-Aughts, all lingering anxieties about selling out evaporated from youth culture. The Columbia University students who formed Vampire Weekend didn’t have to take day jobs at Accenture, because they could make a decent living composing Honda ditties alongside their catchy odes to generational wealth.

At this point, the new ideal for an artistic career is what I'd call the “single sell-out.” The artist was "allowed" to make a few commercial compromises to gain attention in the increasingly competitive marketplace, but once they achieved fame and fortune, they were expected to use their vaulted platform to provide the world with meaningful and ground-breaking art. This actually did happen: The Neptunes leveraged their strong track record of pop hits to push legitimately bizarre minimalist tracks like Clipse’s “Grindin’” and Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It's Hot.”  Beyoncé’s “Formation” was musically adventurous, and the video is now considered “the best of all time.”

Unfortunately these examples became rarer and rarer over time. In fact, the 21st century has been the age of the “double sell-out”: Creators who produce market-friendly content to achieve fame — and then use that fame to pursue even more commerce-for-commerce's-sake. MrBeast is arguably one of the most important "creators" of our times. He dreams up, produces, and directs elaborate and sensational video content, which made him the #1 channel on YouTube. He then used this world-historical level of fame... to open a generic fast food chain. This has also become common amongst established stars: George Clooney worked hard for decades to become a well-respected actor... who could take the lead role in a Nespresso commercial.

YouTuber Emma Chamberlain may be the clearest example of the double-sellout, in that she could have taken a very different path. Chamberlain rose to fame through charming confessional videos, arguably a new art form for the internet age. And in not being a total sociopath like many other popular YouTubers, she won the endorsements of mainstream brands. In 2019, she became an official Louis Vuitton ambassador and has been one of the few digital-natives to still receive invitations to the Met Gala. By almost every metric, Chamberlain "made it."

Such fame and financial stability opened the door to a bewildering panoply of opportunity, so where did she put her non-video energy? She worked with her talent agency to create a brand of coffee called Chamberlain Coffee. There are already many coffee brands. What was the innovation Chamberlain hoped to bring to the world of coffee? Well, unlike other brands, Chamberlain Coffee is “passionate about providing high quality, delicious beverages.” Okay, but did she pursue some manner of product differentiation? “We believe that drinks can be more than just drinks, but sources of joy, inspiration and creativity in a cup.” But hold on: Chamberlain holds a very strong belief: “Coffee. For some people (aka me), it’s more than a drink. It’s a way to connect. It’s a way to share moments. And, ok, sometimes it’s just a way to wake up and get stuff done.” Alright.

On first glance, celebrity coffee brands appear to be cynical cash-grabs — a way to nudge captive audiences into buying merch on a monthly basis. They're actually much more cynical than that. James Hoffmann interviewed a guy from Masteroast, which produces the actual coffee for most of these brands. As that guy describes, "We no longer produce products. We produce a code." In this "paint by numbers" model, celebrities provide Masteroast with a diagnostic code outlying certain manufacturing parameters, which the company then automates into bags of mass-produced coffee.

The 20th century taboo against selling out was, at its heart, a communal norm to reward young artists who focused on craft and punish those who appropriated art and subculture for empty profiteering. Now the culture is most exemplified by people whose entire end goal appears to be empty profiteering.

Ultra-poptimists believe that celebrities have the god-given right to always be profitmaxxing — no questions asked — but the problem is that all this explicitly non-artistic output, such as moldy Lunchlys and charmless coffee, becomes the culture. MrBeast is a businessman masking as a creator, but unlike Mark Burnett, he is understood as a star engaged in personal cultural expression.

Whether we like it or not, culture operates on norms, and changes in norms have consequences. The old norm was "don't sell out." The new norm is "do sell-out," or maybe more charitably, "don't judge people on selling out." The outcome is Chamberlain Coffee. If we want different outcomes, we can change the norms, which conveniently costs no money. If we want culture to be culture and not just advertorials for a sprawling network of micro-QVCs pumping out low-quality goods, an easy step would be to re-shift the norms towards, at least, “Don’t be a double sell-out.” This is already a quite generous compromise in that it blesses artists to be conventional to stabilize their income and try to win over large fanbases. But this esteem must be given on the promise that the money and fame are used in pursuit of artistic or creative innovation. Double sell-outs don't deserve our esteem as "creative" people. They should be content with the reward they chose: the money extracted from fans who snap up their mediocre commodities out of parasocial loyalty.

The challenge for our times is to locate and elevate the artists using their platforms for art and other social goods rather than just securing further personal profit. Every time we don't condemn the double sell-outs, we're insulting those in pursuit of what used to be the clear goal: to move culture forward.