I’m taking a low-level Political Science course this
semester and the other day the professor started off the class by playing a
song by protest singer Phil Ochs. I wasn’t familiar with Ochs and the professor
described him as “Bob Dylan if he didn’t sell out.” Then we’re assigned the
Thomas Frank article for #bsupop dealing with sellouts and the New Left and I
couldn’t tell which class I was reading for anymore.
I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan, but I’d never so much as heard of
Phil Ochs, which is a shame. If Bob Dylan hadn’t “sold out” then I wouldn’t
have come to enjoy his music. I might have heard the name once in a Political
Science class and that would be that.
Looking at the blend of mainstream and counter cultures, I
tended to default to the idea that the ad agencies and “corporate types” were
the shady ones who infiltrated the counter culture and commercialized it,
selling it back to people who have taken on that counterculture as a style, not
a way of life. Frank says that that revitalized American business along the
way.
I’m starting to think differently about it now. Maybe that
infiltration comes from both sides until mainstream and counter culture is
blended, each “side” believing they’re the ones who have come out ahead. Take Lady Gaga, she could be a “sellout” in
the sense that she brings in immense amounts of money through her work as a
performer, but she’s also stuck to her original “be yourself” message and put
her money where her mouth is in terms of being… well… weird. Sellout or not,
this has enabled her to send her message all over the world. Along the same
lines, Apple Inc. likes to paint themselves as liberators and their competitors
as lemmings droning on to their deaths (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYP1Tjgt1Ao),
but they do make great computers that could be used as tools for some sort of
informational liberation… at a high price, of course.
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