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 were on Wheaties. Ronald Regan (the actor!) was a spokesperson for GE.
But that being said, celeb endorsements aside... I do think that the author is right that everything these days "feels fake/contrived" and almost nothing exists without an angle to make money somehow.
Everyone now has the ability to go viral and make it big financially, so it does feel like much of our actions (even if that's not our goal) are shaped that way. A random person may not want to be a rich, famous Instagram influencer... but that doesn't stop them from acting similarly (posting photos for likes).
Humans have always had versions of trying to monetize their lifestyles (tupperware parties?); now we all have the tools to do it at scale.
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 of lots of other artists as well . "Smells Like Teen Spirit" may have been the spark, but you could see the influence of that movement for many years, across the punk revival, riot girrls, zine culture, independent film, "culture-jamming" efforts like Naomi Klein's No Logo, etc (to say nothing of the glam, "hair" bands who were instantly put out of work by the advent of grunge). Not for nothing did the anti-WTO protest take place in Seattle.
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 deal in the mainstream, or was he countercultural? I don't think you can have it both ways.
IMO the tension is a feature, not a bug. We (humans) put far too much emphasis on the current state (is Cobain a mainstream success or counter culture hero?). We need to focus on the change we're observing; Cobain was an alternative that we watched catch on and take over everyone with a pair of Doc Marten boots regardless if they were a punk or a sophmore at Duke. The tension exists in the change we are living within, and it does not move at a steady, universal state. I liken trying to decide "What is this?" to trying to stand still in a raging river. It doesn't really matter as the current churns past, with logs zipping along and rocky outcrops threatening. The "movement" either consumes itself (ex: Pop Music), is terminated prematurely (like Cobain) or consciously never lets itsef happen (ex: Nofx)
> So which is it? Was Cobain a big deal in the mainstream, or was he countercultural? I don't think you can have it both ways.
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 think this is a reasonably framing, and I agree with your take by this framing. But I don't think it's the same thing as "mainstream" vs "countercultural". I think those two things are just antonyms.
All punks - and quite a few non punks - are aware of NOFX. They refused to play the game yet had a 40+ year career and even bigger impact on punk music since the late 80's.
Not overstating his uniqueness in being anti-corporate, as much as his uniqueness in being both anti-corporate AND mainstream. And you might be right that his mainstream appeal came later, but I think the point still stands.
Right. If anything, the 1990s were the decade of apex celebrity superstardom? You had singers like George Michael on the covers of mainstream magazines and in TV ads, you had all the boy bands (New Kids on the Block, Backstreet Boys, NSYNC)... the Rolling Stones got paid millions for the promo song for Windows 95, Britney Spears was selling Pepsi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fugLhNbwoY), Celine Dion had her line of cosmetics, etc.
The author was a teen back then, and teens to be countercultural, but I don't think they're drawing the right conclusions from that.
Indeed, in music there is a fandom subculture where bands are appreciated only so long as they aren't too successful - hence the indie music scene. Some fans want to discover new bands that are obscure, but not too obscure (after all, they need somebody they can talk to about the band, thus the fan can prove themselves to be cool for knowing all about them). The ideal band is one that only cool people know about, not those lame masses who only ever hear commercial music.
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.
Yeah I tend to agree. What is the thesis here? Is it that being indie and not selling out was mainstream and now it's not? I don't think that adds up. It wasn't mainstream then either, that's what was notable about it...
So is it that there is no culture that feels this way about selling out in the present? I'm pretty skeptical of that! Is it really true that if I went to a high school or university right now and asked every kid there what they think about selling out and consumerism, that I wouldn't find a subculture there that feels that way? I suspect I would find that subculture.
So is it just that this subculture is smaller now? Ok, maybe so. But this seems like a much weaker thesis?
Or is it actually that this subculture is less visible now? This seems the most plausible to me. Kurt Cobain and Pearl Jam were interesting and frequently reported upon. But then this is a more boring phenomenon: things that are interesting become less novel and less interesting over time.
I do very much like the section in this essay pointing out that the masses in the US have changed from temporarily embarrassed millionaires to temporarily embarrassed celebrities. That resonates!
I think it's cyclical. Punk in the early 80s was a reaction to the excesses of 70s superbands (e.g. Johnny Rotten's "I hate Pink Floyd" t-shirt). Then things built up again to "monsters of rock" arena tours, The Spice Girls, and hair bands before getting torn down again by the likes of Nirvana.
(Hell, rock and roll was born as an anti-establishment thing in the 1950s)
Maybe we're just due for another one of the inflection points where being anti-cool will become cool again.
Ok, the Spice Girls were formed 1994, the same year Kurt Cobain died, but Take That and lots of other boy/girl bands and other extremely commercial pop acts were contemporary with Nirvana and the whole grunge phenomenon. So it's not cyclical, it's actually two sides of the same medal. There are to this day still lots of bands that hold their "indie ethos" high, the only thing different in the 1990s was that some of those indie/alternative bands were actually successful enough to be considered (shudder) mainstream...
> There are to this day still lots of bands that hold their "indie ethos" high, the only thing different in the 1990s was that some of those indie/alternative bands were actually successful enough to be considered (shudder) mainstream...
The late 80s to early 2000s was a distribution sweet-spot for groups like that.
Early MTV didn't always line up with what mainstream radio played, but gave more new artists opportunities. This continued up at least through Eminem getting his breakout in that way - I wouldn't say he shunned fame, but until breaking through with a music video there the radio machine wasn't giving him that fame. Tapes, and later CD burners, also massively accelerated word-of-mouth for stuff that wasn't the immediate first choice for top-40 format radio stations because it let more people share more things. Then you had the internet/napster era supercharge that. "It Wasn't Me" by Shaggy became a huge hit because a local DJ in Hawaii found it on Napster and started playing it.
Now we've crossed a tipping point where there's more indie stuff available than ever, but also so much personalized listening where it's getting harder again to get Nirvana-level famous outside of the system. But a Chappel Roan still fits the bill pretty well. Did you have lesbian dance-pop with 80s camp on your bingo card for massive mainstream popularity a few years ago?
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.
A non-percentage-based one would be more interesting. The whole MCU phenomenon would likely increase the absolute number, but I doubt that it would be as dramatic. What the chart as-is fails to show is the specific loss of other types of movies that have moved to other media.
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).
I also generally think it's not that different today.
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.
Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, and Ronald Regan are all great examples of people who were considered sellouts at the time. It didn't hinder their mainstream commercial success, but there were a large number of people that definitely did not consider them cool.
Sellouts have always existed at some level, but now it's different, I don't even think a lot of kids know what "sellout" means.
I was alert to popular culture by the time Thriller happened and I don't recall anybody thinking Michael Jackson was a "sellout". Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson did not one but two duets together.
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 Spice Girls and stadium bands like Pink Floyd. They stay on rotation. And I also really love finding the most obscure music possible and frequently dive into old, obscure artists, particularly folk and early electronic music. I love hearing masterpieces that have gone unnoticed for decades. I love hearing some stranger's brand new shitty song with 20 views on YouTube. My algorithm knows this too and very frequently shows me videos that are 10 minutes old with 5 views from accounts with a dozen subscribers. All of these things bring me different joys.
The line is when a celebrity starts actively hawking harmful things to everyday people. Doing a Pepsi commercial is a sellout move. But I still listen to the Jackson 5 all the time. It's good music.
If you had every Backstreet Boys CD when you were 5, you are probably not a reliable narrator of the zeitgeist of Michael Jackson in the early 1980s. :)
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 about it.
From a cultural standpoint much of this sentiment has been lost entirely. This is part of the change the author is talking about.
We're not talking about Steve Albini, Ian MacKaye, or even Bob Mould. We're comparing Pearl Jam to Nirvana --- artists on Epic and Geffen. If you knew who SST Records was, you believed everyone was a sellout, including everyone on Touch And Go and Dischord.
Yeah, and I completely believe in the punk rock DIY ethos and independent artistic control from start to finish. I don't like big labels and I don't like to support them because they aren't supporting artists. All of these are important conversations to have when discussing what "sell out" really means. But much of the music is still good, that's my point. I can articulate the issues with the music industry while still enjoying the fruits of human creativity.
> I don't even think a lot of kids know what "sellout" means.
I think they still do, but selling out to do a deal with a brand to put your name on some clothes or cookies is so far down the scale it doesn't really register to begin with. At worst, all the harm it does is a potential harm to their future art, but a man's gotta make money somehow. It is capitalism after all.
Selling out when there are moral or ethical problems in the mix, they're still able to get very mad about that, but most artists are smart enough to not sell out to Northrup Grumman, OpenAI, Nestlé, nor to your favourite local crypto coin or gambling website.
Agreed, which is my point: the framing of the article (specifically the title) is about Lady Gaga, and she's a pop star. There's a lot of good points in there, cheapened by the framing.
The author is a superb writer. Actually made me lol:
"I have a problem with artists doing commerce under the guise of art. I listen, I read, and I watch because I want to inhabit, even if just for a moment, the mind of another human. I want to feel what it’s like to be them, and in so doing, I want to better understand what it’s like to be me. But if I journey to the center of someone’s psyche and all I find there is a billboard for Pizza Hut, I’m turning around. If your art is just one node in your business empire, if your albums are merely commercials for your cologne, if you’re trying to turn your first billion into your second billion, you are no longer an artist at all. You are a credit default swap with a discography attached."
Definitely a fun read, I almost spit out my coffee after reading about Gen Z thinking nirvana is a clothing brand.
But I don’t follow with the whole premise. The mobility hypothesis is interesting, that people no longer see rich people as something attainable. But becoming famous through influencing or something on that vain. But famous people have been sellouts for far longer than i can remember. Kate bush did some weird promotion for a Dutch theme park called de Efteling and we have been messing with millennials for the past 20 years that nirvana is headlining the biggest Dutch music festival every year. “Ooh yeah i love that song”. And as far as I know Paris Hilton played half of the world into thinking that she was dumb as a rock.
Think that brands have given up on old school advertising. Just god lazy to give people a big bag of money for exposure. For how long will that work until people get bored of that? Yes, a music artist aligning themselves with Pantone as a color once is novel. But how many times does that really stay interesting? Just lazy advertising what only work for a couple of years until the larger crowed stops caring about the next branded Oreo deal.
Author is way off base. Might as well tell me to stop breathing air, except they stopped selling air 6 years ago and I’ve been gasping ever since.
Chromatica Oreos were absolutely wonderful (as far as mass produced garbage that is unfit for human consumption is concerned) and I miss them dearly. Telling me to stop eating them is like telling me to stop seeing a boyfriend who died tragically years ago.
Worse, it brings up painful memories of when Oreo Coke (actually good, unlike Coke Oreo) came into my life, showed me that true love is possible, then disappeared forever in barely a month. I’m still reeling.
I really liked Selena Gomez's Oreos, but I would prefer that Oreo brought them back as "horchata flavored" or "cinnamon cream flavored" so I didn't have awkward conversations every time I accidentally said, "I like Selena Gomez flavor" and people would ask how I knew what Selena Gomez tasted like.
> when Oreo Coke (actually good, unlike Coke Oreo) came into my life
Sometimes I think Americans are completely lost to the rest of us, residing in a haze of consumerism and political divide as they do. Then sometimes I read something like this and I cannot deny a certain curiosity as regards the finer differences between Oreo Coke and Coke Oreo.
We have coke in my country (of both the Coca Cola and cocaine varieties, and even the pure carbon variety used for steel smelting) and also Oreos are readily available in most supermarkets. Can any of the US based HN visitors enlighten us about the exact mixture required to produce Oreo Coke (but not, preferably, Coke Oreo)?
WRT to Oreo Coke, the best description is Vanilla Coke with a dark chocolate flavor, but somehow not like the chocolate a European might imagine.
I found out recently that Oreo is in fact made with real cocoa; I find this surprising and still somewhat hard to believe.
The drink’s unique combination of flavors somehow made the whole experience less cloying than a typical zero sugar coke. And also, mysteriously, it was quite satiating, almost like I had eaten actual cookies. Except not, because any American can tell you that Oreo has negative satiation - you can eat an Oreo from a state of not being hungry at all, then discover you have eaten a whole Family Size pack.
There is a premise in the "selling out" scenario that assumes the artist is accepting money from a company so that company can sell more of the same -- or even a WORSE -- product using the artist to market the product. This CAN be true, and humans have a cogitative bias to remember negativity over positives. So we remember the times when the artists screwed over their fans... and hence we boo them.
When marketing collaborations are used to inform people of something actually good, then they can actually be great for everyone. The best example is Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream collaborations. It's hard to communicate "no, it's hard to understand, but this blend of candies is especially worth trying," so the best way to do that is to have a celebrity vouch for it. And, what do you know, those collaborations have been wildly successful. It's hard to convince people that "putting ice cream cone in the ice cream" is surprisingly good, but if you just put Stephen Colbert on the label with a big thumbs up, most people will give it a try.
Marketing can be manipulative, but it can also be very, very helpful to customers who don't have perfect information. This is exactly the point of Rory Sutherland's book Alchemy: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26210508-alchemy
> It's hard to communicate "no, it's hard to understand, but this blend of candies is especially worth trying," so the best way to do that is to have a celebrity vouch for it.
Your view is very optimistic, you're trying to see the mega-brands in the best possible light. I would almost call it euphemistic. Celebrities don't vouch for a product, they're not reviewers (although they can be paid to pretend to be one), they can't provide neutral or negative feedback. They're advertisers. The ice cream brand could pay them to promote ice cream blended with shredded cardboard for all they care, and because of the celebrity's face on it there would be an uptick in sales regardless of the quality.
If your product is that good, it'll spread the same way products became popular in the past - through word of mouth, people recommending it to one another, getting their friends to try it. Of course, some good ideas that deserved the light of day may not get appropriately rewarded, especially if the product is good but revolutionary. But I would take that possibility over having our singular, sellout, corporate mass of sludge of a culture dominate everything.
> If your product is that good, it'll spread the same way products became popular in the past - through word of mouth, people recommending it to one another, getting their friends to try it.
Most products fail. All the products you see in the stores are the result of a massive war that’s constantly being waged by companies fighting to the death.
Anyone serious about selling something either needs to bootstrap the crap out of it on tiny margins forever, or they need to launch their product.
Again, most products fail which often means bankruptcy for their creators. Having someone put their reputation on the line for something good-but-unintuitive is a great way to have consumers become more willing to take a chance on something they might otherwise be skeptical of. The George Forman grill is the perfect example of a bizarre product that benefited from a celebrity endorsement. I seriously doubt a “two sided griddle” is successful at all unless you give people a reason to listen to the sales pitch, and even then to give it a shot.
Ten years ago, around the time Instagram started allowing influencers to monetize their posts, I remember thinking that the bar for “selling out” had suddenly been drastically lowered. In the past, companies had to weigh a lot of factors before selling out, usually for millions of dollars. Now, an individual gig worker may, out of economic necessity, have to sell out for $500.
As people become brands—or aspire to become brands—every meaningful aspect of life, from intimate family moments to vacations, is pushed toward commodification and monetization. The craving for fame becomes intertwined with that process, with each reinforcing the other. And when you're a modern equivalent to a hunter and gatherer, there's little time or (incentive) to step back and reflect on the system that led you and your cohort to this bleak place.
> 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 two pretty recent trends in mainstream culture. You can still find people who are snobby about Drake compared to Kendrick or Taylor Swift compared to Chappelle Roan nowadays anyway. That mindset isn't gone?
Right! Even in the 90s this doesn't make sense. If The New Kids on the Block had sold branded Oreos, they would have flown off the shelves. There have always been mainstream pop culture figures with dedicated fandoms that don't care whether they have "sold out".
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 also think it's important to distinguish selling out from participating in culture and making things people may enjoy. The pendulum often swings between extremes before settling on reasonable middle ground.
Having fun colors for one of the world's most popular cookie brands is pretty low on the scale of harm compared to, say, actively promoting people to go use online gambling services or buy snakeoil supplements.
For me the issue is that online gambling firms can operate legally at this scale and that they therefore have the money to get commercials like that. The celebrity endorsements are bad too, but priorities
I don't care who has their name on the package. I just enjoy the different flavors. The Selena Gomez ones were great. I appreciate the different flavors occasionally, and buy them from time to time if I see them.
I realize most people aren't like me. But that's even more reason to not bother to tell people this. People who like Lady Gaga are going to feel inspired to buy her Oreos, no matter what you say. They know she's already mega-rich, and they are happy to keep giving her money. You aren't going to stop that.
The author describes a world that existed not that long ago where similar tie-ins would still be popular, but where engaging with them would be seen by some people as a guilty pleasure or beneath you. I don't think you're going to stop Lady Gaga fans from buying Lady Gaga products, but a resurrection of some anti-consumerist crowds would be a welcome sight, because they don't seem to really exist anymore.
I 100% agree with you. It looks like multiple people (including me) were typing comments about how good the Selena Gomez Oreos were at the same time as you.
The post seems to have found a strange niche of HN, or maybe the Selena Gomez Oreos had wider appeal than I thought.
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 read the news.
I do think its on the nose about belief, people want to believe they want to be famous and can be famous and people feel less like they can be rich.
I also wonder if its just counter culture though and we're due another cycle. I find it upsetting that so many people aspire to be digital beggars.
I actually don't think we should expect artists to be something bigger or more than their art. He is right that the fix needs to be consumer driven, but I think it just needs to be that we care a lot less about celebrities of all kinds outside of whatever it is that made them famous. We shouldn't be arguing about whether whatever thing an artist or sports star did or said that wasn't related to their art and/or sport is good or bad....we should all just collectively not care. Read the book, listen to the music, watch the game, and beyond that treat these people like any other stranger: someone whose actions and opinions you do not care about.
Celebrity themed oreos shouldn't be a thing, but not because we demand our celebrities think of themselves as above crass commercialism, but because no one would consider "celebrity themed" to be anything even remotely close to a selling point for oreos, and that therefore there is no value in them being hired by Nabisco.
But I may as well be pissing in the wind. Celebrity worship seems to be incredibly deeply ingrained in human psychology. Maybe he's right that we can't get rid of it, we can just change the norms around it.
Well, you are for sure right that the root of the problem is celebrity itself, but I do wonder if that's really unfixable. Are there cultures that celebrate celebrity less than others, I wonder?
I have a problem with artists doing commerce under the guise of art. I listen, I read, and I watch because I want to inhabit, even if just for a moment, the mind of another human. I want to feel what it’s like to be them, and in so doing, I want to better understand what it’s like to be me. But if I journey to the center of someone’s psyche and all I find there is a billboard for Pizza Hut, I’m turning around.
Kind of sounds like they have a bigger problem with what everyone else is doing when they listen to popular music. One can simply not listen to Lady Gaga; I've succeeded at that for decades.
I read and enjoyed this article but strongly disagree with the thesis.
Oreos are as important a part of life as anything else. People have feelings, memories, and good experiences with it. Just because a big company makes them instead of a small doesn't make that any less valid.
Hell, michaelangelo had to balance the art of his soul with what his patrons wanted.
And the same artist can make one spiritually deep, untouched by consumerism piece and also make a music video with Mario the next week. A healthy life and mix can include both.
I think the author exaggerates how much artists were shunned for selling out in the past - sellout pop culture has always existed to some degree. The bigger issue is the almost complete vanishing of a counterculture. There's almost no people who understand why someone's random collabs with every company ever could ever be seen in a negative light.
>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 commercials since the 90s.
Those people are not artists though, they're athletes. I think with the word "culture" the author is mainly referring to forms of art such as movies, music, tv, and literature.
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 GenExer, felt a profound generational dissonance.
The big tongue is a Rolling Stones thing and was used inside the fold of their Sticky Fingers album (the outer cover for which was an Andy Warhol photograph that seems primarily focused on a gentleman's sausage and/or the tight pants that constrain it; a working zipper was an included part of this published work).
Pink Floyd's popular Dark Side of the Moon artwork, meanwhile, involves an illustration of a prism splitting a beam of white light into a rainbow.
There’s a very simple reason that artists don’t worry about selling out anymore (a phenomenon that was much more widespread than just the early 90s): the music industry finally finished their project of extracting nearly all of the money. These days, you’re more likely to have a hit because your song was in an advert than have your hit song used in an advert. Merchandising and the rest is pretty much your principal revenue stream.
Stop eating oreos because they changed the formula, the filling can now be described as white paste product, and they want $4.99 for the "family" size now. I know this isn't what the article is about, but I'm sad by what Oreos have become.
I mean: Yes, but you introduced the concept of lard. And I'm nostalgic for lard (and for OS/2 Warp).
The filling for Oreos used to just be lard that was folded together with granulated cane sugar. That's all that the white stuff was (according to a good friend of mine who made Oreos way back then, and still makes them today). It definitely was a different experience back then.
So was IBM's now-completely-forgotten WebExplorer browser, especially when hacked to have 8 network threads downloading at once instead of 4. :)
And that's OK. Modern Oreos are still tasty; they're just not quite the same. And the modern web experience still works, even though it is very different compared to what it was back then.
MCA wouldn't have dropped that line about not selling his songs for no tv ads if it wasn't something lots of his colleagues were doing. (And Mike D wouldn't have rhymed "commercial" with "commercial" for the same reason)
I saw the first article on thick art. This was linked within that article.
I enjoyed reading both, then popped over to see if this one had ever been submitted to HN. It hadn't, so I did. Figured that if people liked the first one, they might like this one as well.
Music piracy really did a number. People like to blame cheap streaming, but it's only cheap because the market knows it can't charge very much before people pirate instead. A CD album was about $18 in the early 2000s, so $32 today.
> Why don’t the poor people vote to take all the money away from the rich people and redistribute it amongst themselves?
It's because the Powers That Be don't put it on the ballot. If you put "take 99% of the money from the 1000 richest billionaires (about $10 trillion, I think), and nobody has to pay any income taxes for the next four years" on some sort of national ballot, I think there's a very good chance that it would pass.
That law would take a hammer to average US quality of life almost overnight. Its hard to state how dramatic the societal upheaval would be and how destructive.
I misread the title and was confused and appalled for a few seconds sorting through the word being "Oreos" instead of "Orgasms" and the meaning that word has in Urban Dictionary.
I thought this was going to be some anecdote about how a rival (or maybe a group of rabid fans) found a bowl of Oreos backstage at a Lady Gaga concert and ate them all just to spite her.
One of the reasons why I knew the video game Mixtape was made by phonies, most of whom did not understand actual 90s culture and may not have been alive during the 90s, is because while the main characters adopt grunge aesthetics, they do not have that hyperawareness of authenticity (or lack thereof) that characterized being a teenager back then. Which is kind of fitting for a game made during an era where everything is boiled down to an "aesthetic". Being a kid in the 90s was a stance of mind, it wasn't just about what you wore or what bands you listened to. A lot of us thought we were Holden Caulfield back then, able to spot phonies and waging a quiet, desperate struggle against them for our own minds.
As a huge fan of Fishbone, who did not make it big, despite being oh so close in the early 90ies... it'd be nice if there were a better balance. They've seemingly struggled over the years and kept going, but you get the sense that the guys don't have a lot of economic security that they might have with a few big hits.
> The internet decapitated art criticism, elevating the YouTube commenter to the same level as the Pitchfork editor.
Part of that issue is people think "reviews" and "criticism" is one and the same. Ideally, a critic places the artwork in appropriate historical context and provides analysis. But most people just want Numbers or THumbs Ups.
>Saying that some art is better than other art started sounding too much like saying that some people are better than other people.
I think this is a more important line than the author even appreciates. It's complex, but it's easy to see that people have generally leveraged the label of "art" is a defense against criticism, and it usually takes this form.
If someone likes to listen to whatever clearly "trashy" pop music is famous at the moment, they have learned that they don't need to feel shame for doing so- all they have to do is call it art and all of a sudden they're absolved of all the negative connotations associated with the consumerist aspects of that music.
Of course, it's not hard to recognize that if you're willing to call anything made by a person "art," then the concept of "art" will have lost all meaning. Sure, the newest Marvel movie was engineered by a huge team of professionals who designed it to generate as much profit as possible, but there's a human involved who likely put some creative effort into the project, therefore it is art and it is absolved of any criticism that doesn't treat it as such.
>I think this is why we now tolerate such blatant greed among famous people: we think we have a chance of becoming one of them. We once saw ourselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires; now we see ourselves as temporarily unknown celebrities.
I don't buy this exactly. I think it's more like: people associate their being so personally with celebrities that they feel as though they're already almost famous themselves just by being their fan. It's the "parasocial" dynamic that people have been recognizing more and more.
I think this does end up cropping up in the form of leveraging fandom to make yourself a celebrity (e.g., the fans that appear the most obsessed are the same ones who can be known for being the fans which are the most obsessed), but I don't think that is the core motivation.
>If we want this to stop, the solution is simple: we have to stop eating Lady Gaga’s Oreos. We have to stop pretending that celebrities are just like us, and that their success is our success. We have to redraw the line between art and entertainment, and more importantly, we have to redraw the line between art and advertisement.
This is the "fun" part of all of this.
If "we" need to do something to stop this, then "we" are fucked. People are in way too deep at this point to turn this around anytime soon in any meaningful way.
The reality is that "you" need to do what is best for "you" and to recognize that the huge swaths of the population who are addicted to consumerism on this level should be treated similarly to how we treat people addicted to drugs or gambling: have pity, try to help them help themselves, but ultimately don't let them drag you down with them.
This might seem overly dramatic, but this dynamic does come with a huge cost: literally money. If you're spending your money on overpriced bullshit, then you're no longer able to spend or invest that money on things that can have a much greater ROI (where that return may be in the form of money, or it could be more meaningful experiences, things that make you genuinely happy, etc.). Just the same, all of these products detract from your capacity to experience in general. When you're spending any amount of your capacity thinking about, consuming, discussing, etc., Lady Gaga's Oreos, then that as capacity not spent on things that matter much more.
The worst part is that this isn't limited to people irrationally consuming celebrity endorsed products. Right now, you're reading my comment about some dumb post on a dumb website where my point doesn't matter. You're consuming this instead of spending your time being productive. Embarrassingly, I've sunk way more time into this comment than you have reading it, so I'm not any better off. But I like to think I'm getting something more meaningful out of this than just mindlessly consuming products made for the lowest common denominator (even if it is just marginal), so at least I can feel a bit superior in that regard.
I think the world has bigger problems than Lady Gaga's Oreos. That said, why not say "Stop Eating Oreos" altogether? Although they are certainly yummy, the sugar in them is a lot worse for people than Lady Gaga's association.
I will say, Oreos are one of the better vegan cookies on the market. The ones purposely advertized as vegan tend to be less tasty. But yeah, 100% should not be a regular thing to eat.
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 were on Wheaties. Ronald Regan (the actor!) was a spokesperson for GE.
But that being said, celeb endorsements aside... I do think that the author is right that everything these days "feels fake/contrived" and almost nothing exists without an angle to make money somehow.
Everyone now has the ability to go viral and make it big financially, so it does feel like much of our actions (even if that's not our goal) are shaped that way. A random person may not want to be a rich, famous Instagram influencer... but that doesn't stop them from acting similarly (posting photos for likes).
Humans have always had versions of trying to monetize their lifestyles (tupperware parties?); now we all have the tools to do it at scale.
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 of lots of other artists as well . "Smells Like Teen Spirit" may have been the spark, but you could see the influence of that movement for many years, across the punk revival, riot girrls, zine culture, independent film, "culture-jamming" efforts like Naomi Klein's No Logo, etc (to say nothing of the glam, "hair" bands who were instantly put out of work by the advent of grunge). Not for nothing did the anti-WTO protest take place in Seattle.
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 deal in the mainstream, or was he countercultural? I don't think you can have it both ways.
IMO the tension is a feature, not a bug. We (humans) put far too much emphasis on the current state (is Cobain a mainstream success or counter culture hero?). We need to focus on the change we're observing; Cobain was an alternative that we watched catch on and take over everyone with a pair of Doc Marten boots regardless if they were a punk or a sophmore at Duke. The tension exists in the change we are living within, and it does not move at a steady, universal state. I liken trying to decide "What is this?" to trying to stand still in a raging river. It doesn't really matter as the current churns past, with logs zipping along and rocky outcrops threatening. The "movement" either consumes itself (ex: Pop Music), is terminated prematurely (like Cobain) or consciously never lets itsef happen (ex: Nofx)
> So which is it? Was Cobain a big deal in the mainstream, or was he countercultural? I don't think you can have it both ways.
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 think this is a reasonably framing, and I agree with your take by this framing. But I don't think it's the same thing as "mainstream" vs "countercultural". I think those two things are just antonyms.
All punks - and quite a few non punks - are aware of NOFX. They refused to play the game yet had a 40+ year career and even bigger impact on punk music since the late 80's.
Not overstating his uniqueness in being anti-corporate, as much as his uniqueness in being both anti-corporate AND mainstream. And you might be right that his mainstream appeal came later, but I think the point still stands.
Right. If anything, the 1990s were the decade of apex celebrity superstardom? You had singers like George Michael on the covers of mainstream magazines and in TV ads, you had all the boy bands (New Kids on the Block, Backstreet Boys, NSYNC)... the Rolling Stones got paid millions for the promo song for Windows 95, Britney Spears was selling Pepsi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fugLhNbwoY), Celine Dion had her line of cosmetics, etc.
The author was a teen back then, and teens to be countercultural, but I don't think they're drawing the right conclusions from that.
Indeed, in music there is a fandom subculture where bands are appreciated only so long as they aren't too successful - hence the indie music scene. Some fans want to discover new bands that are obscure, but not too obscure (after all, they need somebody they can talk to about the band, thus the fan can prove themselves to be cool for knowing all about them). The ideal band is one that only cool people know about, not those lame masses who only ever hear commercial music.
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.
Yeah I tend to agree. What is the thesis here? Is it that being indie and not selling out was mainstream and now it's not? I don't think that adds up. It wasn't mainstream then either, that's what was notable about it...
So is it that there is no culture that feels this way about selling out in the present? I'm pretty skeptical of that! Is it really true that if I went to a high school or university right now and asked every kid there what they think about selling out and consumerism, that I wouldn't find a subculture there that feels that way? I suspect I would find that subculture.
So is it just that this subculture is smaller now? Ok, maybe so. But this seems like a much weaker thesis?
Or is it actually that this subculture is less visible now? This seems the most plausible to me. Kurt Cobain and Pearl Jam were interesting and frequently reported upon. But then this is a more boring phenomenon: things that are interesting become less novel and less interesting over time.
I do very much like the section in this essay pointing out that the masses in the US have changed from temporarily embarrassed millionaires to temporarily embarrassed celebrities. That resonates!
I think it's cyclical. Punk in the early 80s was a reaction to the excesses of 70s superbands (e.g. Johnny Rotten's "I hate Pink Floyd" t-shirt). Then things built up again to "monsters of rock" arena tours, The Spice Girls, and hair bands before getting torn down again by the likes of Nirvana.
(Hell, rock and roll was born as an anti-establishment thing in the 1950s)
Maybe we're just due for another one of the inflection points where being anti-cool will become cool again.
Ok, the Spice Girls were formed 1994, the same year Kurt Cobain died, but Take That and lots of other boy/girl bands and other extremely commercial pop acts were contemporary with Nirvana and the whole grunge phenomenon. So it's not cyclical, it's actually two sides of the same medal. There are to this day still lots of bands that hold their "indie ethos" high, the only thing different in the 1990s was that some of those indie/alternative bands were actually successful enough to be considered (shudder) mainstream...
> There are to this day still lots of bands that hold their "indie ethos" high, the only thing different in the 1990s was that some of those indie/alternative bands were actually successful enough to be considered (shudder) mainstream...
The late 80s to early 2000s was a distribution sweet-spot for groups like that.
Early MTV didn't always line up with what mainstream radio played, but gave more new artists opportunities. This continued up at least through Eminem getting his breakout in that way - I wouldn't say he shunned fame, but until breaking through with a music video there the radio machine wasn't giving him that fame. Tapes, and later CD burners, also massively accelerated word-of-mouth for stuff that wasn't the immediate first choice for top-40 format radio stations because it let more people share more things. Then you had the internet/napster era supercharge that. "It Wasn't Me" by Shaggy became a huge hit because a local DJ in Hawaii found it on Napster and started playing it.
Now we've crossed a tipping point where there's more indie stuff available than ever, but also so much personalized listening where it's getting harder again to get Nirvana-level famous outside of the system. But a Chappel Roan still fits the bill pretty well. Did you have lesbian dance-pop with 80s camp on your bingo card for massive mainstream popularity a few years ago?
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.
A non-percentage-based one would be more interesting. The whole MCU phenomenon would likely increase the absolute number, but I doubt that it would be as dramatic. What the chart as-is fails to show is the specific loss of other types of movies that have moved to other media.
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).
I also generally think it's not that different today.
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.
Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, and Ronald Regan are all great examples of people who were considered sellouts at the time. It didn't hinder their mainstream commercial success, but there were a large number of people that definitely did not consider them cool.
Sellouts have always existed at some level, but now it's different, I don't even think a lot of kids know what "sellout" means.
I was alert to popular culture by the time Thriller happened and I don't recall anybody thinking Michael Jackson was a "sellout". Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson did not one but two duets together.
if you were into indie music scenes at the time, basically anyone in the pop genre was considered a sellout
Indie music isn’t a unified entity, there’s always been a lot of different cultures under that label.
Some define themselves in relation to mainstream, but others just don’t care about what is or isn’t popular.
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 Spice Girls and stadium bands like Pink Floyd. They stay on rotation. And I also really love finding the most obscure music possible and frequently dive into old, obscure artists, particularly folk and early electronic music. I love hearing masterpieces that have gone unnoticed for decades. I love hearing some stranger's brand new shitty song with 20 views on YouTube. My algorithm knows this too and very frequently shows me videos that are 10 minutes old with 5 views from accounts with a dozen subscribers. All of these things bring me different joys.
The line is when a celebrity starts actively hawking harmful things to everyday people. Doing a Pepsi commercial is a sellout move. But I still listen to the Jackson 5 all the time. It's good music.
If you had every Backstreet Boys CD when you were 5, you are probably not a reliable narrator of the zeitgeist of Michael Jackson in the early 1980s. :)
Did I get something wrong?
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 about it.
From a cultural standpoint much of this sentiment has been lost entirely. This is part of the change the author is talking about.
We're not talking about Steve Albini, Ian MacKaye, or even Bob Mould. We're comparing Pearl Jam to Nirvana --- artists on Epic and Geffen. If you knew who SST Records was, you believed everyone was a sellout, including everyone on Touch And Go and Dischord.
Yeah, and I completely believe in the punk rock DIY ethos and independent artistic control from start to finish. I don't like big labels and I don't like to support them because they aren't supporting artists. All of these are important conversations to have when discussing what "sell out" really means. But much of the music is still good, that's my point. I can articulate the issues with the music industry while still enjoying the fruits of human creativity.
> I don't even think a lot of kids know what "sellout" means.
I think they still do, but selling out to do a deal with a brand to put your name on some clothes or cookies is so far down the scale it doesn't really register to begin with. At worst, all the harm it does is a potential harm to their future art, but a man's gotta make money somehow. It is capitalism after all.
Selling out when there are moral or ethical problems in the mix, they're still able to get very mad about that, but most artists are smart enough to not sell out to Northrup Grumman, OpenAI, Nestlé, nor to your favourite local crypto coin or gambling website.
And in those examples you don’t see any difference to:
>Maroon 5 is covering Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” as a tribute to Hyundai
Because that sentence hits hard in the smh.
A band covering a song for a Hyundai ad?
Michael Jackson did a parody of his own song Billie Jean for Pepsi ("You're the Pepsi generation")
Michael Jackson was a pop star. Selling out was never a sin in pop music.
Agreed, which is my point: the framing of the article (specifically the title) is about Lady Gaga, and she's a pop star. There's a lot of good points in there, cheapened by the framing.
Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" was used in a cruise ship ad in 2003. Not the 90's, but not exactly recent.
One of Nancy Ajram's most popular songs was originally made as a Coca Cola ad soundtrack
Nobody was doing ads exactly like that decades ago, but celebrity endorsements in some form have been a staple of advertising for at least a century.
Isn't it pretty normal for car commercials or soda commercials to get covers of songs made?
"I'd like to teach the world to sing" was covered as a tribute to coca cola in 1971, that's classic now.
The Medici Banking family paid Michelangelo to paint the Medici Chapel.
Scrovegni Chapel by Giotto was made to help the reputation of the scrovegni family who were big creditors.
This is as old as time.
I think plenty of bands back in the day would have done the same if someone paid them.
Bob Marley's original recording of "Jammin'" was used in a Budweiser commercial in 1996.
The author is a superb writer. Actually made me lol:
"I have a problem with artists doing commerce under the guise of art. I listen, I read, and I watch because I want to inhabit, even if just for a moment, the mind of another human. I want to feel what it’s like to be them, and in so doing, I want to better understand what it’s like to be me. But if I journey to the center of someone’s psyche and all I find there is a billboard for Pizza Hut, I’m turning around. If your art is just one node in your business empire, if your albums are merely commercials for your cologne, if you’re trying to turn your first billion into your second billion, you are no longer an artist at all. You are a credit default swap with a discography attached."
Definitely a fun read, I almost spit out my coffee after reading about Gen Z thinking nirvana is a clothing brand.
But I don’t follow with the whole premise. The mobility hypothesis is interesting, that people no longer see rich people as something attainable. But becoming famous through influencing or something on that vain. But famous people have been sellouts for far longer than i can remember. Kate bush did some weird promotion for a Dutch theme park called de Efteling and we have been messing with millennials for the past 20 years that nirvana is headlining the biggest Dutch music festival every year. “Ooh yeah i love that song”. And as far as I know Paris Hilton played half of the world into thinking that she was dumb as a rock.
Think that brands have given up on old school advertising. Just god lazy to give people a big bag of money for exposure. For how long will that work until people get bored of that? Yes, a music artist aligning themselves with Pantone as a color once is novel. But how many times does that really stay interesting? Just lazy advertising what only work for a couple of years until the larger crowed stops caring about the next branded Oreo deal.
Author is way off base. Might as well tell me to stop breathing air, except they stopped selling air 6 years ago and I’ve been gasping ever since.
Chromatica Oreos were absolutely wonderful (as far as mass produced garbage that is unfit for human consumption is concerned) and I miss them dearly. Telling me to stop eating them is like telling me to stop seeing a boyfriend who died tragically years ago.
Worse, it brings up painful memories of when Oreo Coke (actually good, unlike Coke Oreo) came into my life, showed me that true love is possible, then disappeared forever in barely a month. I’m still reeling.
Edit: boo, hiss!
I really liked Selena Gomez's Oreos, but I would prefer that Oreo brought them back as "horchata flavored" or "cinnamon cream flavored" so I didn't have awkward conversations every time I accidentally said, "I like Selena Gomez flavor" and people would ask how I knew what Selena Gomez tasted like.
I would also like to know the flavour of Selena Gomez (Oreos), those sound tasty.
Yea, that's a little awkward, but what is life for if not the awkward enjoyment of a musician's flavour.
> when Oreo Coke (actually good, unlike Coke Oreo) came into my life
Sometimes I think Americans are completely lost to the rest of us, residing in a haze of consumerism and political divide as they do. Then sometimes I read something like this and I cannot deny a certain curiosity as regards the finer differences between Oreo Coke and Coke Oreo.
We have coke in my country (of both the Coca Cola and cocaine varieties, and even the pure carbon variety used for steel smelting) and also Oreos are readily available in most supermarkets. Can any of the US based HN visitors enlighten us about the exact mixture required to produce Oreo Coke (but not, preferably, Coke Oreo)?
WRT to Oreo Coke, the best description is Vanilla Coke with a dark chocolate flavor, but somehow not like the chocolate a European might imagine.
I found out recently that Oreo is in fact made with real cocoa; I find this surprising and still somewhat hard to believe.
The drink’s unique combination of flavors somehow made the whole experience less cloying than a typical zero sugar coke. And also, mysteriously, it was quite satiating, almost like I had eaten actual cookies. Except not, because any American can tell you that Oreo has negative satiation - you can eat an Oreo from a state of not being hungry at all, then discover you have eaten a whole Family Size pack.
Oreo Coke = Oreo-flavored Coca-Cola
Coke Oreo = Coca-Cola-flavored Oreo cookies
welcome to hell
There is a premise in the "selling out" scenario that assumes the artist is accepting money from a company so that company can sell more of the same -- or even a WORSE -- product using the artist to market the product. This CAN be true, and humans have a cogitative bias to remember negativity over positives. So we remember the times when the artists screwed over their fans... and hence we boo them.
When marketing collaborations are used to inform people of something actually good, then they can actually be great for everyone. The best example is Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream collaborations. It's hard to communicate "no, it's hard to understand, but this blend of candies is especially worth trying," so the best way to do that is to have a celebrity vouch for it. And, what do you know, those collaborations have been wildly successful. It's hard to convince people that "putting ice cream cone in the ice cream" is surprisingly good, but if you just put Stephen Colbert on the label with a big thumbs up, most people will give it a try.
Marketing can be manipulative, but it can also be very, very helpful to customers who don't have perfect information. This is exactly the point of Rory Sutherland's book Alchemy: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26210508-alchemy
> It's hard to communicate "no, it's hard to understand, but this blend of candies is especially worth trying," so the best way to do that is to have a celebrity vouch for it.
Your view is very optimistic, you're trying to see the mega-brands in the best possible light. I would almost call it euphemistic. Celebrities don't vouch for a product, they're not reviewers (although they can be paid to pretend to be one), they can't provide neutral or negative feedback. They're advertisers. The ice cream brand could pay them to promote ice cream blended with shredded cardboard for all they care, and because of the celebrity's face on it there would be an uptick in sales regardless of the quality.
If your product is that good, it'll spread the same way products became popular in the past - through word of mouth, people recommending it to one another, getting their friends to try it. Of course, some good ideas that deserved the light of day may not get appropriately rewarded, especially if the product is good but revolutionary. But I would take that possibility over having our singular, sellout, corporate mass of sludge of a culture dominate everything.
> If your product is that good, it'll spread the same way products became popular in the past - through word of mouth, people recommending it to one another, getting their friends to try it.
Most products fail. All the products you see in the stores are the result of a massive war that’s constantly being waged by companies fighting to the death.
Anyone serious about selling something either needs to bootstrap the crap out of it on tiny margins forever, or they need to launch their product.
Again, most products fail which often means bankruptcy for their creators. Having someone put their reputation on the line for something good-but-unintuitive is a great way to have consumers become more willing to take a chance on something they might otherwise be skeptical of. The George Forman grill is the perfect example of a bizarre product that benefited from a celebrity endorsement. I seriously doubt a “two sided griddle” is successful at all unless you give people a reason to listen to the sales pitch, and even then to give it a shot.
"it brings up painful memories of when Oreo Coke (actually good, unlike Coke Oreo)"
Epic
You should try Nerd Clusters!
Ten years ago, around the time Instagram started allowing influencers to monetize their posts, I remember thinking that the bar for “selling out” had suddenly been drastically lowered. In the past, companies had to weigh a lot of factors before selling out, usually for millions of dollars. Now, an individual gig worker may, out of economic necessity, have to sell out for $500.
As people become brands—or aspire to become brands—every meaningful aspect of life, from intimate family moments to vacations, is pushed toward commodification and monetization. The craving for fame becomes intertwined with that process, with each reinforcing the other. And when you're a modern equivalent to a hunter and gatherer, there's little time or (incentive) to step back and reflect on the system that led you and your cohort to this bleak place.
> 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 two pretty recent trends in mainstream culture. You can still find people who are snobby about Drake compared to Kendrick or Taylor Swift compared to Chappelle Roan nowadays anyway. That mindset isn't gone?
Right! Even in the 90s this doesn't make sense. If The New Kids on the Block had sold branded Oreos, they would have flown off the shelves. There have always been mainstream pop culture figures with dedicated fandoms that don't care whether they have "sold out".
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 also think it's important to distinguish selling out from participating in culture and making things people may enjoy. The pendulum often swings between extremes before settling on reasonable middle ground.
Having fun colors for one of the world's most popular cookie brands is pretty low on the scale of harm compared to, say, actively promoting people to go use online gambling services or buy snakeoil supplements.
For me the issue is that online gambling firms can operate legally at this scale and that they therefore have the money to get commercials like that. The celebrity endorsements are bad too, but priorities
I don't care who has their name on the package. I just enjoy the different flavors. The Selena Gomez ones were great. I appreciate the different flavors occasionally, and buy them from time to time if I see them.
I realize most people aren't like me. But that's even more reason to not bother to tell people this. People who like Lady Gaga are going to feel inspired to buy her Oreos, no matter what you say. They know she's already mega-rich, and they are happy to keep giving her money. You aren't going to stop that.
The author describes a world that existed not that long ago where similar tie-ins would still be popular, but where engaging with them would be seen by some people as a guilty pleasure or beneath you. I don't think you're going to stop Lady Gaga fans from buying Lady Gaga products, but a resurrection of some anti-consumerist crowds would be a welcome sight, because they don't seem to really exist anymore.
I 100% agree with you. It looks like multiple people (including me) were typing comments about how good the Selena Gomez Oreos were at the same time as you.
The post seems to have found a strange niche of HN, or maybe the Selena Gomez Oreos had wider appeal than I thought.
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 read the news.
I do think its on the nose about belief, people want to believe they want to be famous and can be famous and people feel less like they can be rich.
I also wonder if its just counter culture though and we're due another cycle. I find it upsetting that so many people aspire to be digital beggars.
> 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.
You could even argue we've been there since Ronald Reagan, who was a movie actor before his political career.
I actually don't think we should expect artists to be something bigger or more than their art. He is right that the fix needs to be consumer driven, but I think it just needs to be that we care a lot less about celebrities of all kinds outside of whatever it is that made them famous. We shouldn't be arguing about whether whatever thing an artist or sports star did or said that wasn't related to their art and/or sport is good or bad....we should all just collectively not care. Read the book, listen to the music, watch the game, and beyond that treat these people like any other stranger: someone whose actions and opinions you do not care about.
Celebrity themed oreos shouldn't be a thing, but not because we demand our celebrities think of themselves as above crass commercialism, but because no one would consider "celebrity themed" to be anything even remotely close to a selling point for oreos, and that therefore there is no value in them being hired by Nabisco.
But I may as well be pissing in the wind. Celebrity worship seems to be incredibly deeply ingrained in human psychology. Maybe he's right that we can't get rid of it, we can just change the norms around it.
Well, you are for sure right that the root of the problem is celebrity itself, but I do wonder if that's really unfixable. Are there cultures that celebrate celebrity less than others, I wonder?
Never heard of Lady Gaga's Oreos until now, don't even care about Lady Gaga, but someone telling me not to eat them is kinda making me want to try.
As for the point of the article, the problem isn't that people are eating the Oreos, it's that Lady Gaga sold out. Doesn't matter how well they sell.
I have a problem with artists doing commerce under the guise of art. I listen, I read, and I watch because I want to inhabit, even if just for a moment, the mind of another human. I want to feel what it’s like to be them, and in so doing, I want to better understand what it’s like to be me. But if I journey to the center of someone’s psyche and all I find there is a billboard for Pizza Hut, I’m turning around.
Kind of sounds like they have a bigger problem with what everyone else is doing when they listen to popular music. One can simply not listen to Lady Gaga; I've succeeded at that for decades.
I read and enjoyed this article but strongly disagree with the thesis.
Oreos are as important a part of life as anything else. People have feelings, memories, and good experiences with it. Just because a big company makes them instead of a small doesn't make that any less valid.
Hell, michaelangelo had to balance the art of his soul with what his patrons wanted.
And the same artist can make one spiritually deep, untouched by consumerism piece and also make a music video with Mario the next week. A healthy life and mix can include both.
But that makes them a hypocrite and undermines their previously produced works, no?
I dont see how that follows at all
I think the author exaggerates how much artists were shunned for selling out in the past - sellout pop culture has always existed to some degree. The bigger issue is the almost complete vanishing of a counterculture. There's almost no people who understand why someone's random collabs with every company ever could ever be seen in a negative light.
>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 commercials since the 90s.
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19950219/2105837/gr...
Those people are not artists though, they're athletes. I think with the word "culture" the author is mainly referring to forms of art such as movies, music, tv, and literature.
"Turn customers into fanatics
Products into obsessions
Employees into ambassadors
And brands into religions"
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 GenExer, felt a profound generational dissonance.
I see three-year-olds wearing Nirvana shirts all the time. I don't bother asking them if they prefer Bleach or Incesticide. Also a GenX'r FWIW.
The big tongue? Yea, people do enjoy pop art.
The big tongue is a Rolling Stones thing and was used inside the fold of their Sticky Fingers album (the outer cover for which was an Andy Warhol photograph that seems primarily focused on a gentleman's sausage and/or the tight pants that constrain it; a working zipper was an included part of this published work).
Pink Floyd's popular Dark Side of the Moon artwork, meanwhile, involves an illustration of a prism splitting a beam of white light into a rainbow.
There’s a very simple reason that artists don’t worry about selling out anymore (a phenomenon that was much more widespread than just the early 90s): the music industry finally finished their project of extracting nearly all of the money. These days, you’re more likely to have a hit because your song was in an advert than have your hit song used in an advert. Merchandising and the rest is pretty much your principal revenue stream.
This 2014 song nails that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuQt9N4Dsok
I don't know about Lady Gaga's Oreos but the Selena Gomez ones are quite good. I bought them as a joke and ended up liking them.
The reason we got testy about selling out in the 80s and 90s was because so many people were doing it.
Stop eating oreos because they changed the formula, the filling can now be described as white paste product, and they want $4.99 for the "family" size now. I know this isn't what the article is about, but I'm sad by what Oreos have become.
Nostalgic for lard?
Perhaps, but: Lard hasn't been a part an Oreo cookie for ~30 years.
(Anyone want to talk about OS/2 Warp like that's still a current event?)
Yes, but the post wasn't specific about which particular change of formula they were made about.
I mean: Yes, but you introduced the concept of lard. And I'm nostalgic for lard (and for OS/2 Warp).
The filling for Oreos used to just be lard that was folded together with granulated cane sugar. That's all that the white stuff was (according to a good friend of mine who made Oreos way back then, and still makes them today). It definitely was a different experience back then.
So was IBM's now-completely-forgotten WebExplorer browser, especially when hacked to have 8 network threads downloading at once instead of 4. :)
And that's OK. Modern Oreos are still tasty; they're just not quite the same. And the modern web experience still works, even though it is very different compared to what it was back then.
MCA wouldn't have dropped that line about not selling his songs for no tv ads if it wasn't something lots of his colleagues were doing. (And Mike D wouldn't have rhymed "commercial" with "commercial" for the same reason)
Back then you didn’t want to sell out or be a poser. Now we are a society of posers.
The article is very good; the headline is great. AI cannot (yet) do this.
Why is this domain trending all of a sudden on HN? Three articles all highly upvoted.
I saw the first article on thick art. This was linked within that article.
I enjoyed reading both, then popped over to see if this one had ever been submitted to HN. It hadn't, so I did. Figured that if people liked the first one, they might like this one as well.
One of the modern problems, is that people can become [in]famous, without being rich.
Not good.
Needing bodyguards, and not being able to afford them, is a problem.
What also changed is bands don’t sell records any more. You got to pay the bills somehow.
Music piracy really did a number. People like to blame cheap streaming, but it's only cheap because the market knows it can't charge very much before people pirate instead. A CD album was about $18 in the early 2000s, so $32 today.
Eat the rich, not their Oreos.
One page in, and I still have no idea what the article is even meant to be about.
> Why don’t the poor people vote to take all the money away from the rich people and redistribute it amongst themselves?
It's because the Powers That Be don't put it on the ballot. If you put "take 99% of the money from the 1000 richest billionaires (about $10 trillion, I think), and nobody has to pay any income taxes for the next four years" on some sort of national ballot, I think there's a very good chance that it would pass.
They dont put it on the ballot because it woulndnt work. Those fortunes are not liquid, but stuck in stocks.
There is no market to buy all of Amazon, or all of Tesla. Not at the current valuation.
You can take their fortune, but you cant spend it. Not in 4 years.
That law would take a hammer to average US quality of life almost overnight. Its hard to state how dramatic the societal upheaval would be and how destructive.
I misread the title and was confused and appalled for a few seconds sorting through the word being "Oreos" instead of "Orgasms" and the meaning that word has in Urban Dictionary.
Stop eating Lady Gaga, Oreos.
I thought this was going to be some anecdote about how a rival (or maybe a group of rabid fans) found a bowl of Oreos backstage at a Lady Gaga concert and ate them all just to spite her.
One of the reasons why I knew the video game Mixtape was made by phonies, most of whom did not understand actual 90s culture and may not have been alive during the 90s, is because while the main characters adopt grunge aesthetics, they do not have that hyperawareness of authenticity (or lack thereof) that characterized being a teenager back then. Which is kind of fitting for a game made during an era where everything is boiled down to an "aesthetic". Being a kid in the 90s was a stance of mind, it wasn't just about what you wore or what bands you listened to. A lot of us thought we were Holden Caulfield back then, able to spot phonies and waging a quiet, desperate struggle against them for our own minds.
As a huge fan of Fishbone, who did not make it big, despite being oh so close in the early 90ies... it'd be nice if there were a better balance. They've seemingly struggled over the years and kept going, but you get the sense that the guys don't have a lot of economic security that they might have with a few big hits.
> Here’s a story from 30 years ago that would make no sense today. > It’s 1992.
Yep, that's enough internet for me today.
Colorful oreos are fun. A tray of these at a party would make people smile. I'm ok with it.
> The internet decapitated art criticism, elevating the YouTube commenter to the same level as the Pitchfork editor.
Part of that issue is people think "reviews" and "criticism" is one and the same. Ideally, a critic places the artwork in appropriate historical context and provides analysis. But most people just want Numbers or THumbs Ups.
Lady Gaga is also a playable character in the video game Fortnite, lol
So is Kelsier from Mistborn, Isaac from the binding of Isaac, lots of fun nerd characters
>Saying that some art is better than other art started sounding too much like saying that some people are better than other people.
I think this is a more important line than the author even appreciates. It's complex, but it's easy to see that people have generally leveraged the label of "art" is a defense against criticism, and it usually takes this form.
If someone likes to listen to whatever clearly "trashy" pop music is famous at the moment, they have learned that they don't need to feel shame for doing so- all they have to do is call it art and all of a sudden they're absolved of all the negative connotations associated with the consumerist aspects of that music.
Of course, it's not hard to recognize that if you're willing to call anything made by a person "art," then the concept of "art" will have lost all meaning. Sure, the newest Marvel movie was engineered by a huge team of professionals who designed it to generate as much profit as possible, but there's a human involved who likely put some creative effort into the project, therefore it is art and it is absolved of any criticism that doesn't treat it as such.
>I think this is why we now tolerate such blatant greed among famous people: we think we have a chance of becoming one of them. We once saw ourselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires; now we see ourselves as temporarily unknown celebrities.
I don't buy this exactly. I think it's more like: people associate their being so personally with celebrities that they feel as though they're already almost famous themselves just by being their fan. It's the "parasocial" dynamic that people have been recognizing more and more.
I think this does end up cropping up in the form of leveraging fandom to make yourself a celebrity (e.g., the fans that appear the most obsessed are the same ones who can be known for being the fans which are the most obsessed), but I don't think that is the core motivation.
>If we want this to stop, the solution is simple: we have to stop eating Lady Gaga’s Oreos. We have to stop pretending that celebrities are just like us, and that their success is our success. We have to redraw the line between art and entertainment, and more importantly, we have to redraw the line between art and advertisement.
This is the "fun" part of all of this.
If "we" need to do something to stop this, then "we" are fucked. People are in way too deep at this point to turn this around anytime soon in any meaningful way.
The reality is that "you" need to do what is best for "you" and to recognize that the huge swaths of the population who are addicted to consumerism on this level should be treated similarly to how we treat people addicted to drugs or gambling: have pity, try to help them help themselves, but ultimately don't let them drag you down with them.
This might seem overly dramatic, but this dynamic does come with a huge cost: literally money. If you're spending your money on overpriced bullshit, then you're no longer able to spend or invest that money on things that can have a much greater ROI (where that return may be in the form of money, or it could be more meaningful experiences, things that make you genuinely happy, etc.). Just the same, all of these products detract from your capacity to experience in general. When you're spending any amount of your capacity thinking about, consuming, discussing, etc., Lady Gaga's Oreos, then that as capacity not spent on things that matter much more.
The worst part is that this isn't limited to people irrationally consuming celebrity endorsed products. Right now, you're reading my comment about some dumb post on a dumb website where my point doesn't matter. You're consuming this instead of spending your time being productive. Embarrassingly, I've sunk way more time into this comment than you have reading it, so I'm not any better off. But I like to think I'm getting something more meaningful out of this than just mindlessly consuming products made for the lowest common denominator (even if it is just marginal), so at least I can feel a bit superior in that regard.
I think the world has bigger problems than Lady Gaga's Oreos. That said, why not say "Stop Eating Oreos" altogether? Although they are certainly yummy, the sugar in them is a lot worse for people than Lady Gaga's association.
I will say, Oreos are one of the better vegan cookies on the market. The ones purposely advertized as vegan tend to be less tasty. But yeah, 100% should not be a regular thing to eat.