That's the first paragraph of "Ibram X. Kendi, Hasan Minhaj, and the Question of Selling Out/Is it possible to reap all the rewards of the mass market and still maintain a sense of political purpose?" by Jay Caspian Kang (The New Yorker).
I am not calling Kendi or Minhaj a sellout... But I do wonder why we’ve largely abandoned the part of the “sellout” critique that assumes nothing truly interesting or revolutionary can ever be found on mass-market platforms. What does it mean when the revolution gets run through tech money donated to a center at a private university? Can a best-selling book—one that was probably recommended by human-resources departments across the country—do anything other than flatter the vanity of its millions of readers by scolding them in the exact way they want to be scolded?
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Can a best-selling book—one that was probably recommended by human-resources departments across the country—do anything other than flatter the vanity of its millions of readers by scolding them in the exact way they want to be scolded?
Progressive BDSM.
What’s the political purpose of being a conman? I suppose it educates us to hold our wallets as tightly as we can.
Nobody really gets scolded for being a sellout anymore.
And the “don’t trust anyone over 30” crowd tells us to do whatever octogenarians demand.
The Boomers have really made a mess of things and they won’t exit the stage.
"Can a best-selling book—one that was probably recommended by human-resources departments across the country—do anything other than flatter the vanity of its millions of readers by scolding them in the exact way they want to be scolded?"
I would not feel so alone: everybody must get stoned.
Sellout? Not in the slightest. Mr Barnum correctly noted “ there’s one born every minute” and these hucksters just fleeced the flock by playing on their virtuous need to have their racial sins cleansed by guilt flagellation. The political nonsense attached to their “message” was just icing on the cake. Sweet, sinful and totally devoid of content or real meaning.
Buy Larger Mansions meets Chocolate Marx.
Like Jay Caspian Kang isn’t himself somewhat of a sellout?
"You got a lotta nerve
To say you got a helping hand to lend"
I am not calling Kendi or Minhaj a sellout...
i would call Kendi a sellout either.. Not My choice of words
Huckster?
Con Artist?
Extortionist
oh, i know the phrase i was looking for: Racist Thug
To sell out you have to have integrity to sell. Henry Rogers ("Ibrahim X. Kendi") never had any integrity to begin with.
Gen X opposed to 'sell-outs'? BS. Our generation largely celebrated big commercial successes like Michael Jackson, Garth Brooks, and numerous others. The notion that starving artists are 'authentic' is a Boomer trait
Oh, dear.
Calling one of your cultural heroes a "sellout" is so 14-years-old.
Grow up.
Kendi is a con artist- it all worked out exactly how he planned except for the part about being caught out publicly.
So many of today's artists and literary writers are in universities. Recognizing that as selling out would sweep away most of those professions.
There's a cap on the bad things people will do in order to make a buck. "Behind every great fortune, there's a great crime." That's a standard issue shibboleth among the left. I would argue, however, that behind every great genocide there's a great ideal. Catholics, Puritans, Muslims, Marxists, patriots have all been willing to make great personal sacrifices in order to murder as many of their enemies and their enemies' women and children as circumstances would allow. And these murderers have never lost a minute's sleep because of those crimes.....Kendi and these others are mendacious con men, but, to their credit, they have not yet been implicated in mass murder or terror bombings. Well, they're young yet. Lenin and Trotsky while in exile were perceptive critics of imperialism and capitalism. You couldn't accuse the Bolshies of the crimes committed by the leaders of the world during WWI or of themselves being personally corrupt. They had a slow start but they eventually exceeded their masters.... However, I don't think Kendi is willing to make the kind of self sacrifices that Lenin and Trotsky did in order to bring their ideals to fruition. Well, thank God for that. Their venality and corruption works to our favor.
Eighties and nineties?
No. It all went to Hell in '65 when Bob walked onstage at Newport and plugged in that damned electric guitar.
The current ethos is all about selling out. Everyone of my students dreams of having a profitable Youtube channel or Onlyfans page as their career.
But when you call someone a sell-out, the implication is that they had something of value to begin with - the thing that has been 'sold' in a compromise of moral or ethical principles they formerly espoused. A talented dramatic actor might be hard up for cash and take a part in a B movie, like DeNiro has done (repeatedly). That's a 'sell-out'. But if you're a talent-less hack to begin with, you're not selling out. The grift and the scam represent the best you'll ever be.
And so it is with the likes of Kendi. His scam is the best product of his intellectual and moral code. He didn't sell out anything - he was trading up. Which makes him a successful failure, in a way.
Tom T.,
"So many of today's artists and literary writers are in universities. Recognizing that as selling out would sweep away most of those professions."
That's an interesting proposal; are there any downsides?
Sellout - Can be used to attack financial success, but also can be used within racial groups to attack someone for not being "black, brown, yellow, whatever" enough.
The people who came of age during or after the 2008 financial crisis, for example, understandably do not have much patience for Gen X-ers who wax nostalgic about bands that ignored major-record-label attention or Adbusters
I have never in my life heard someone wax nostalgic about Adbusters or bands spurning corporate sponsorship and I bet Kang hasn’t either.
You can't blame a grifter for taking the money. You ALWAYS take the money.
I blame the idiot, guilty, white liberals who fund the grift.
How can you be a "Sellout" when you're funded and supported by the richest and most powerful people in the USA, and the entire Establishment mainstream press?
Its always amazing how these Leftists pose as "rebels" and "iconoclasts" when they are being promoted by the ruling elite and the people who have all the icons.
I'm reminded of Chris Hitchens, who wrote for all the established Press outlets, dined with Billionaire publishers, and had all the right opinions being called a "brave, truth teller" who went after "sacred cows". Y'know like Bob Hope, Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Arabs or Nazis!
Y'know all the people who were beloved by the wealthy NYC/LA millionaires who run Hollwyood, the media, the publishing industry, and our cultural life.
Stravinsky: “Let me say, once and for all, that I have never regarded poverty as attractive; that I do not wish to be buried in the rain, unattended, as Mozart was; that the very image of Bartok’s poverty-stricken demise, to mention only one of my less fortunate colleagues, was enough to fire my ambition to earn every penny that my art would enable me to extract from the society that had failed in its duty toward Bartok as it had earlier failed with Mozart.”
The title to the linked article is amusing.
"...to maintain a sense of political purpose" is merely to have the feeeeeeeelz, not to perform any useful function. So yes, of course, fear not you brave revolutionary readers of the New Yorker, the politically correct feeeeeeeelz can be maintained while raking in the filthy lucre. Keep on raking!
Great catch, Khematite- I like Stravinsky quite a bit more now than I did in the past.
Yes, he is calling them sellouts. He's just reframing sellout now as a good thing, much like they are reframing old age as a good thing because Biden is old.
Wanting not only to scold but also to be scolded, and having the vanity to believe that in such scolding we are participating in a revolution, this is a good summary of the progressive mind today.
For-profit non-profit corporations.
The 2008 financial crisis? That's a bad place to pick to make this particular point. It's the writer in their 20a or something?
The Rubicon in the music industry was Napster and P2P in general. High-speed Internet killed the radio star, not video :)
In America you either burn out or sell out. Sometimes you do both at the same time.
I really don't get the comment about GenX "scolding" anyone about selling out and somehow connecting that to bands and entertainment. In actuality, we don't and never did care whether entertainers made money or not, and nobody really cared about politics when we were young (and that was glorious).*
Maybe the contrast is that GenX people don't think that total record sales or number of downloads ON THEIR OWN makes something good, while later millennials really do bring up the popularity of artists or songs as an argument for why they are good. I vividly remember overhearing a student ranting about how stupid someone was for not liking Beyonce's "Lemonade" album and not saying a word about a single song, but actually talking about some world-record for the number of downloads. This was utterly bizarre to me, and maybe its another weird example of later millennials being so messed up that they're not just susceptible to groupthink but actually love it and long for the embrace of the "hive mind."
The "coming of age in 2008" tidbit might be the tell. If you were 18-22 in '08 then you were born '86-'90, and those are the millennials raised by Boomers: like Boomers, incredibly spoiled and, also like Boomers, in constant need of validation. It's funny but also a little sad how desperate these people are to be special in some way, even if that way of being special is so incredibly lame ("Well, at least we don't expect people to have integrity like we imagine you GenX people did.")
*I guess if Jello Biafra had licensed "Chemical Warfare" to Dupont, that would have been "selling out."
I’ve been hearing Crazy Train by Ozzie Osbourne on an Applebee’s commercial lately.
I like Applebee’s food better than Ozzie’s music.
Not sure who the sellout is on that one.
Today being a sellout is so popular that people will even do it without the payout. See: wannabe influencers. Regular people are turning themselves into brands, selling out for attention that may or may not ever materialize.
To clarify: There's nothing particularly pathetic about wanting to be special or in thinking that you're in some way special as an individual. That's just normal human natures, and most people are in some way special.
There IS something particularly pathetic about thinking that you're special BECAUSE OF THE GENERATION YOU WERE BORN INTO.
What would be funny about this if it weren't so sad is how desperately important generational membership is to so many Boomers and late Millennials, and yet how angry they get when someone criticizes something about their generation in general even when explicitly exempting the specific people in the conversation.
It's now become a thing for late Millennials to try to troll GenX by insisting that they're just so much more moral and so much more concerned and so much more 'anti-racist.' And they get froth-at-the-mouth furious when the response is not "No, we're totally more moral, concerned etc., etc." but "Who cares?"
In my earlier comment I didn't realize he was talking about Henry Rodgers fake think tank.
I think several folks have noted that con men aren't sellouts.
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