Commercializing one’s own art came to count as defiance itself

Evidence

In the old logic of cool, defiance was a noble act—an artistic stand against authority. But The Defiant Ones redefined it, equating N.W.A’s culture-bending releases (e.g., “Fuck Tha Police”) with Iovine’s “greatest hits”: coercing Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty into making radio-friendly singles, peddling the monstrous Marilyn Manson’s banal provocations to suburban teens, and turning his entire Interscope artist roster into a marketing team for Beats headphones. The Defiant Ones framed industry profiteering as equally valuable as the art it commercialized. And as Taylor Swift continued to show, fans were right there with their idols—cheering on their quest to escape the embarrassment of being mere multimillionaires. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 545

Categorization

• XREF: This is the ‘death of the sellout’ idea the reader flagged — the sellout inverted from shame to achievement.
• SEED: Angle: the figure of the sellout as a historical category that died — why being mid-level rich, not a mercenary, became the rebel pose.