Cashing In

For years I disliked hip-hop. Of course I liked Run-DMC and Public Enemy, both of whom I’d discovered through their rock songs, and both of whom were too cool (read: old) to appear on MTV with all the most popular rappers. But I didn’t like the genre; the commercial, capitalist, materialist, millionaire hip-hop that dominated the pop charts throughout my middle school and high school years. The fakeness of it all repulsed me.

In fifth grade, I bought Green Day's Dookie with all my saved allowance money. It was funny, catchy, bratty, and affecting—the first music I loved that I didn’t get from my parents. I had never seen or heard anything cooler than alternative rock, and I jumped at any chance to find it wherever I could. In the nascent internet era, I couldn't see what the bands I loved looked and acted like unless I ended up at a friend's house with unregulated access to MTV, or if someone dropped me off somewhere with a comprehensive magazine rack. It didn't bother me in the least that Green Day left the independent Lookout Records for the major label Reprise, or that Offspring had jumped from Epitaph to Columbia Records. I loved Metallica’s cult favorite Kill ‘Em All as much as their Diamond-selling hit Black Album, and didn’t understand why some people who liked the former detested the latter. Why would Metallica’s success bother me? Didn't we want the bands we liked to be popular?

In ninth grade I started to understand “selling out.” It was around the time I met my first girlfriend, who loved Rent and the show’s anti-sellout theme about as much as I loved Metallica. She brought up selling out nearly every time we spoke—I wasn’t sure why she thought Francis Ford Coppola was a sellout for putting forth the idea for another Godfather movie, but she felt strongly about it. She also seemed smarter and more mature than me, as did the kids at my new high school who had moved on from Green Day to the Dead Kennedys long before I met them. People who knew the music that was on the radio and chose to listen to something different had me in awe. At some point, I didn’t want to listen to artists who had sold out. I didn’t stop loving Green Day, but I’d much rather be seen wearing a Dead Kennedys shirt.

If you were a 90s kid, especially a fan of punk rock, there was little worse that you could be than a sellout. If a band made money from anything that wasn’t music or shirts, their integrity was in question. The music industry was at its commercial peak, a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate growing bigger each year, which all of us patronized but none of us liked. Our artistic heroes looked, dressed, and acted like our idea of slackers. “The nineties were not an age for the aspirant. The worst thing you could be was a sellout,” wrote Chuck Klosterman in his book about the decade. “Selling out meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible…It meant someone was compromising the values they originally espoused in exchange for something superficial (which was usually money, but not necessarily).” 

My father, a lawyer who constantly pushed me to defend my beliefs, would poke holes in my arguments. “You’re pretty tough on Moby,” he said when I complained that the musician had sold his songs to commercials. “David Bowie’s in commercials now. Is he a sellout?”

“David Bowie was already famous. He didn’t do it to make himself rich and popular,” I protested. I still cringed whenever I heard “Changes”  in that software ad with all the fishbowls. 

Keeping up with who did or did not sell out was exhausting, and standards weren’t easy to maintain. Slipknot had gotten too popular, but maybe if their next record would be too heavy for their mainstream fanbase I could like them again. Lou Reed was in a Honda Scooter commercial, but that was because he didn’t care about alienating his fans, not because he sold out. Rage Against the Machine preached Marxism from a Sony-owned record label, but they had only signed with the corporation to spread their message, right? If Ozzy sold out with a TV show we could still like his music, right? Was any of this hypocritical?

As much as I didn’t like sellouts, I could do some mental gymnastics to keep liking my favorite artists. I started to make more exceptions for hip-hop when I found Cypress Hill and Snoop Dogg, for no reason other than I liked their records too much to cut their music out of my life. Not to mention my hardcore favorites Body Count led me to the rap career of their quick-witted frontman, Ice-T. “The feeling in the ‘hood is, if you leave you’re selling out. I would like to know who invented that idea,” Ice told Musician magazine in 1991. “I don’t think it was nobody Black.”

“I think of what it is to grow up poor in one of your city's worst neighborhoods and dream of money. To grow up with an eye toward gold while young Black men who look like you and come from a neighborhood like the one you come from in a city just a highway away are covered in gold from rapping,” I read years later in Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Unless They Kill Us. “There is generosity in one who goes out of their way to look fly and raise the bar of the room they're in…As someone who grew up with no money, I know what it is to want to show someone, anyone who will look, what little you have earned. Whether it's drinks, or jewelry or some combination of both. Whether it's donating to a school or throwing a fistful of dollar bills to the sky. I believe all of these things to be noble acts."

Letting myself love hip-hop started opening a scary and fun world to me, with a refreshing difference from the one I lived in. But still, I didn’t want to listen to music by people that sold out. My favorite artist was GG Allin, the punkest of all punks, too raw and edgy for anything to come close to commercializing him. I loved GG’s music enough to separate it from the fact that he was an unrepentant misogynist, racist, and serial abuser. At least no one was calling him a sellout. Besides, punk was clearly ethical enough that we could afford to make room for guys like him. Us punk rock feminists liked Liz Phair, until she made a pop album with Avril Lavigne's co-writers. We liked Kathleen Hanna, too, unaware that more in-the-know punk circles were already calling her out for being a hypocrite who worked in a strip club during the day and sang Bikini Kill songs at night. Watching the controversy unravel years later in the Hanna documentary The Punk Singer, I’m awed by her perseverance and a little ashamed to think of how I’d have reacted in the 90s.

In Hanna’s memoir Rebel Girl, she recalls being asked to justify her position as a professional stripper and outspoken feminist artist. “The DC scene did not think my working as a dancer was a good look,” writes Hanna. “I wasn’t stripping as a statement, I just didn’t have a trust fund like so many DC punks did. And thanks to the Royal Palace, I’d already made the $1,000 we needed to get the van and start playing shows again.” She was consistently expected to prove her authenticity, over everything from stripping to writing dance hooks for Le Tigre to falling in love with and marrying a Beastie Boy. I’m guessing none of Hanna’s purist detractors have written anything as transcendent as “Rebel Girl.”

Not long ago, I met up with some friends at Tattoo Bar for pregame drinks before we headed next door to Kings Theatre for the Bikini Kill reunion. The bartenders knew their audience and played 90s alternative rock while we waited. When the playlist landed on No Doubt's "Just a Girl," a forty-something riot grrrl at our table looked up from her drink upon hearing the first notes.

"When this came out, to me, No Doubt was the enemy," she said. "It was fake punk, it was fake riot grrrl, I hated it. And now this is my karaoke song," she smiled. "I even get teary-eyed when I hear 'Don't Speak.'”

I also catch myself enjoying music that I wouldn’t have let myself like in high school, so much that I’ve started losing track of my teenage standards. I heard a popular song where a woman seethed at her ex who preferred “some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.” She sounded hurt. I didn’t know that was the kind of thing that could make a popular person feel hurt. I also really loved the song. GG Allin would’ve been appalled.

More recently, Ice-T has been appearing in an ad campaign for Honey Nut Cheerios. I’ve watched the commercials numerous times, laughing and sharing them with my friends who’d appreciate seeing the author of “Cop Killer,” “KKK Bitch,” and “Evil Dick” showing off his dance moves with a cartoon bumble bee. I might have been irked by those ads 25 years ago, horrified by the thought that Ice compromised his integrity by acting silly, and worried that nobody would take him seriously again. But Ice doesn’t care, and neither do I, listening to his music with the same reverence I’ve felt for most of my life. It’s hard for me to imagine younger listeners, most of whom have never bought a CD, caring either. Watching a hot newer punk band like Turnstile sell a song to Taco Bell with no discernible backlash, I’m thankful their fans aren’t wasting a month arguing over it like my high school buddies might have.

In college I met Pan Asian Repertory Theatre co-founder Ernest Abuba, whose acting career had included on-screen roles with Bruce Willis and Laurence Fishburne. While he regaled me with stories, I learned that he had turned down a role in 90s sci-fi hit The Fifth Element. “I had the part,” Ernest told me. “I was working on the scene with Bruce, when Luc Besson, the director, came over and said”—Ernest drew out an exaggerated French impression—“‘Uh, can you do this scene again, and this time do a funny Chinese accent.’”

Ernest laughed. “I said ‘Fuck you, racist!’ and I left,” he stated, punctuating the story with another laugh. Still a little shocked, I laughed too.

"But you know what," said Ernest. "If I were starving, I would have taken it."

I’ve never worried about starving in my life. It feels like I've worried about almost everything else that’s ever crossed my mind. But never starving.