What makes a sellout?  Generally speaking, it may be agreed that one who “sells out” is one who compromises his or her personal honor, integrity, or other core value, in exchange for money or power.  In the lexicon of popular music, an artist can be said to “sell out” when the artist changes his or her musical style or personality in a reach for greater commercial success.  In short, sellout artists redefine themselves to sell more records. 
           Whether or not one sells more records is pretty straightforward.  The more interesting question lies in what is meant by “redefine”.  Is it a change in musical style, genre?  Is it a change in personal appearance?   It could be any of the above.  How about making a video?  Here’s an act that says nothing about musical style or appearance; really, no physical parameter of a band need change for it to appear in a music video.
            Since its inception in 1981, MTV has insinuated itself into almost every corner of popular music.  These days, it is a rare, rare artist or band that makes it into the Billboard Top Ten without MTV airplay.  This is not all that new a phenomenon; it was understood in the late ‘80s that MTV meant sales, and to be on MTV, one needed a video.
            Interestingly enough, MTV quickly began to stand for something else, as well.  MTV meant mainstream.  For a band that began in the underground; that celebrated the underground; and to many, stood for all that was underground; to make a video – the corollary of this, to appear on MTV – would be ultimate treason.  Sure, it would move some records – but it would be a betrayal of a fan base with no parallel.
            In 1988, the cult hero band Metallica shot a video for their blistering antiwar track “One,” a horrific seven-minute piece based on the novel Johnny Got His Gun.  A more commercially unsound song could hardly be imagined; neither, it seemed, could one find a more commercially unsound band.  Beginning in early ‘80s San Francisco, Metallica was underground incarnate, existing as Mike Bruno wrote in an online article, “to jam metal up the ass of any greasy haired stoner kid who would listen.”
           In 1988, Metallica released …And Justice For All, considered their fastest, hardest, and best album, and one hindered by awful production that makes it sound, as Bruno writes, like it was recorded “in a soup can."  Metallica had always rejected the notion of music videos.  They had become stunningly popular, spread by word of mouth alone, without the conventional media attention of radio play, interviews in publications, or music videos – after all, they had not made any.  They had launched three records, considered to this day to be tomes of metal.  Their names are sacred: Kill ‘em All.  Ride the Lightning.  Master of Puppets.
            I discovered Metallica by accident, picking up their S&M album, in which they had recorded with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.  I still remember the rush I felt hearing the four chords that begin their album title track and epic anthem of heroin addiction, Master of Puppets:

I will occupy!  I will help you die!
I will run to you!  Nowhere will you turn!
Come crawling faster!  Obey your master!  Master!
Master of puppets, pulling your strings!  Twisting your mind, Smashing your dreams!  Blinded by me, you can’t see a thing! 
Just call my name, and I’ll hear you scream!  Master!

Metallica, “Master of Puppets”

            In 1988, I was two years old, hardly aware of the intricacies of the metal and drug abuse and the other things that pervade this musical universe.  I wasn’t alive to feel the betrayal felt by the fans of a band that sang of violence and disease and swore never to make a video, never to appear on MTV, and then did just that. 
            Metallica was one of two bands I grew up with.  The other was Iron Maiden.  Iron Maiden is the counterexample to Metallica and the previous pages’ theorizing.
            While Metallica spent their first six years of existence wearing shirts that said “Fuck MTV” – now, this is a lame cliché, but it sure wasn’t when guitarist Kirk Hammett did it.  Maiden did no such thing.  They made videos from day one; in their earliest, “Women in Uniform,” and “Run To The Hills,” they wear jeans and sound punk; they bear hardly any resemblance to the band that would later take the stage in leathers and sing anthems of apocalypse.  That sounds, to me anyway, a lot like a major change in appearance and style – alleged criteria, along with their video collection, for selling out.  Yet, I’ve never heard someone call them as much.
            Maiden made no pretenses of caring to be “underground.”  By the time they released Powerslave in 1984, as Mike Hurst notes in The Iron Maiden Commentary, they had become the first Western rock band to take a full-scale arena tour production across the Iron Curtain, into (at that time) Soviet-dominated Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia.  They never seemed to be concerned one way or the other with publicity tools like MTV.  While this behavior is similar to that of Metallica in their earliest years, it should be noted that this was a band taking arena shows around the world, and acting this way, as opposed to a relatively obscure local act, which seemed content to lampoon the world of commercial music until given an opportunity to join it.
            I was given a copy of Powerslave for the Christmas of my sophomore year of high school.  I was addicted in an instant to the aerial battles of “Aces High,” the myth of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a song in which Coleridge’s poem has been set to a power ballad, and the rolling rebel groove of anti-war “Two Minutes to Midnight”.  The song refers to the “midnight” at which ensues nuclear holocaust, and it exists against the backdrop of the threat of nuclear annihilation, which hung over Cold War Europe.  I played it over and over and over again: 

The killer’s breed, the demon’s seed,
The glamour, the fortune, the pain;
Go to war again, blood is freedom’s stain,
Don’t you pray for my soul anymore…
Two!  Minutes!  To midnight! 
The hands that threaten doom…

Iron Maiden, “Two Minutes to Midnight

            At a show in Boston a few weeks ago, they played their new record, A Matter of Life and Death, start to finish, and the crowd sang along to every song. I realized the secret to selling out, or more specifically, not selling out.  You don’t sell out by taking any specific action.  You sell out by trying to be something you’re not.  Maiden’s avoided it all these years by being Maiden.  Metallica didn’t sell out by making a video; Metallica sold out when they tried to something other than what they started as.
            I’ve never gotten into the politics of music, or been interested in who has or hasn’t “sold out.”  Nonetheless, I’ve found the career path taken by Metallica to be a tad fishy; they didn’t seem to have been terribly up-front with their fans.  Iron Maiden, in comparison, never claimed to be anything but who they were; they made videos, changed their styles – and no one cared.  It wasn’t the changes that got Metallica in trouble; it was the contradictory words and actions. 
            Therein, I believe, lies the true meaning of selling out: honesty.  It’s not about a style, record sales, a sound, or a music video.  It’s not even limited to music.  It’s just the old ideal of telling the truth.

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