You won’t believe how Nirvana stunned fans in the 90s! Find out why selling out was a hot concern back then!

Opinion

Big data has helped the music industry sell us only what we already like, but the results are less vivid and less surprising

Tue, July 18, 2023 at 3:00 am EDT

I was 14 when Kurt Cobain of Nirvana appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone he was wearing a T-shirt that read “CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK.” Even at that tender age, I found her message troubling: If Rolling Stone sucked, why was it on the cover? Perhaps the shirt was ironic. Perhaps her participation in her profile was ironic. Or perhaps, alarmingly, he saw no contradiction between his shirt and his appearance in this company magazine, because we all had to understand that any assertion of meaningful values ​​in popular music was inherently stupid, even though many of the songs on Nevermind were clearly on me.

Cobain’s interview did little to resolve these ambiguities. After lamely defending Rolling Stone for having some good articles, he added, “I don’t blame the average 17-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout.”

There’s a word you don’t hear much anymore. Like very baggy pants, the concept of clearance was so central to the ’90s that it seems bizarre today. Also like big pants, though, it looks relevant again. As galling as the idea of ​​selling out was, its disappearance from our collective values ​​has had profound consequences in the 21st century.

Let’s agree first of all that he was totally upset. Nirvana – the band who, along with Pearl Jam, were primarily responsible for transforming the “grunge” subgenre into the “alternative” marketing strategy – were the sold-out band of their era by the highest metric quantifiable: the sale of albums. The vast number of units It does not matter moved created Nirvana, like Rolling Stone to put it, “the world’s first triple-platinum punk-rock band”. However, for the intuitive values ​​of the time, I didn’t consider them sold.

Certainly they had run out of more than, shall we say, Fugazzi, the post-hardcore band who sold no merchandise and aggressively negotiated with venues for the lowest possible ticket price, but compared to the sold-out convoy that would travel the road paved by Nirvana: the seemingly joyless Stone Temple Pilots , the telegenic Bush, the canary in the mine that was Smash Mouth – they were aesthetes. This difference was clear to me and to all my friends who moaned about what was on the radio, even if we found it impossible to articulate in concrete terms.

As a result, we liked it Nirvana more than we liked Bush. This preference was obviously personal and therefore difficult to defend, so we resorted to moral reasoning: the Bushes were a sellout group, and sellout groups pursued marketing strategies at the expense of artistic vision, giving them economic advantages that had a homogenizing effect on music like Total.

Those of us who survived 90s culture will recall that it was intensely aware of the value of being different. That “being different” was mostly a marketing pitch — literally, in the case of Apple computers – somehow not evident to us until years later, or evident at the time, but explained by the idea that consumer culture was “co-opting” the authentic values ​​of youth rather than manufacturing them.

For much of my teenage years, I sincerely believed that some of the most popular bands in the world were “alternatives” while others were only sold as alternatives. The irony that my sense of a band’s diversity was often directly proportional to its popularity had practically escaped me.

All of this is to say that the concept of “selling out,” while central to my adolescent value system, was pretty much completely bogus. Yet it was epistemologically false, false in its lack of coherence and precision; at the level of ethics, or at any rate it can be called ethics in art, it indicated an important value. It is that value that the abandonment of the concept of “selling out” risks losing sight of, perhaps forever.

Obviously, you want your entertainment to enjoy. Ironically, though, it’s less fun to watch a musician — or, for that matter, a writer, director, or comedian — just do what they think you want. We prefer the work of artists who to some extent do what they want. This is probably because such work is more likely to surprise us, and the element of surprise is needed to feel that the culture is moving forward.

The 1990s music industry became famous for leveraging its understanding of what audiences wanted, going from the “discovery” of improbable hits like Nirvana to a morass of bands that recreated those more lucrative elements to imitate. But even in that cynically effective era, record labels had to guess what what people liked, and this process of approximation made room for artists and their marketers to do what they liked, sometimes in ways that grossly sucked (Blues traveler) but also in ways that introduced strange groups deeply loved by niche audiences (Tool). Selling music was a less exact science, so there were more surprises.

Digital distribution has changed that. By generating huge amounts of more precise and almost totally accurate data, online sales and then streaming have given artists, labels and platforms a much clearer perspective on what sells and what doesn’t. And because this perspective is (a) demonstrable and (b) quantitative in ways that ideas like “sold out” or “authentic” or “good” aren’t, the people deciding what music to promote are pretty much forced to decide based on to a metric: what the public likes, defined as what they liked before. To a greater or lesser extent, this phenomenon has shaped every field of popular culture over the past two decades: not just music, but also television, film and online publishing.

And there’s something wrong with 21st century popular culture, right? You don’t have to be a middle-aged punk to think he’s any less amazing and alive than he once was. The entertainment industry in general and the music industry in particular have gotten exceptionally good at selling the maximum number of units, but selling units is not the point of music. As flawed as the idea of ​​”selling out” was, it captured an incontrovertible truth: Only a fool would write a song to make money. Write a song to surprise yourself, to give others what they never knew they wanted. Perhaps what 21st-century popular culture lacks is sufficient contempt for those who give us what we have already asked for.