Amusing examples of selling out
- Thread starter Corpsey
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
John Lydon was flogging butter a while back:
Although you could say that, even if he had a 'proper' career with PiL in the interim, he's really just gone back to his Sex Pistols roots, since they were launched as a cynical money-making exercise in the first place. So he was, in a sense, sold out before he was ever sold in.
Although you could say that, even if he had a 'proper' career with PiL in the interim, he's really just gone back to his Sex Pistols roots, since they were launched as a cynical money-making exercise in the first place. So he was, in a sense, sold out before he was ever sold in.
Dunno...I think that's what Malcolm McLaren would have liked everyone to believe. Weirdest was probably when British Airways nearly ran an ad campaign using "Theme" but that's sadly lost media now. Lydon also covered "Route 66" for a Mountain Dew advert, so he had form way before the butter ad.
Suppose there was a tragicomic irony in New Model Army playing CND benefits while signed up to what was the old Thorn EMI group. Also hard to take Chumbawamba seriously given the invective they spat at anyone who signed up to a major label before they did (wish John Prescott had smacked them in the face too).
If it's true that Desmond Dekker stormed off stage at some '90s festival when the audience sang back "Vitalite" to him, that's kind of amusing.
Think the biggest head-scratcher for neo-nazis must be how Paul Burnley went from singing about smashing ZOG with No Remorse to doing the visual effects on The Bourne Ultimatum and one of the Harry Potter films.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Haha, really? That's wonderful.
The person who told me he was there and saw it happen wasn't always the most, er, reliable narrator. And I've never seen another reference to it ever happening. But I like to believe, in this case, it's gospel.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
So if McLaren was only cynically pretending to be cynical, does that come round again to being earnest, like multiplying two negative numbers? Or does it constitute a new sort of hyper-cynicism?
qwerty south
no use for a witticism
The use of the song may have been out of his control. It's still an appropriate response by the crowd
I'm sure he was out to sell SEX clobber in their first few months playing clubs, before it spiralled beyond his control - I meant more like his claims to have stage-managed a situationist hoax and swindled his way to the top are mostly horseshit.
Just thought of another example - Iggy Pop's "Party" album. Apparently doing songs about dating 14-year-olds and eating dogfood weren't making Arista enough money, so they pressured him to make a commercial LP. Still not sure if what he produced was a fuck-you to the label, or genuinely what he considered hit material, but it's kind of enjoyably rubbish (once, anyway).
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Ah, I think I get it - retroactively trying to spin it as a bit of KLF-before-the-KLF 'culture jamming', something like that?
I reckon, yeah. Think he was winging it like the rest of them.
Agreed, though Citizen Fish runs them close.
Making a compelling case for perfidious Albion to be subjected to a ban on producing music for at least 100 years under the auspices of the proletarian dictatorship.
IdleRich
IdleRich
You can knock them down but they'll just get back up again.
Couldn't you have decreed this before 'Pictures Of Starving Children' came out?
no. We had to permit Sleaford Mods to embarrass themselves.