Sell Out

What You Need to Know to Be a Rockstar: Selling Out

(No Cover Magazine, September 2001)

By Robert Welborn

What more do you want from me young padawan? These last few months you have learned all that you must to ascend the diseased and fetid steps of the pooh-pooh scented Temple of Rock and/or Roll. So now, I shall speak one last time, but only of the things to come. [Sorry for waxing all Jedi-cum-Gandalf, but I’ve been re-reading The Lord of Rings to prepare myself properly for the movie due out this December (yes, I’m that HUGE of a nerd)]

The final chapter in your career will be where you sell out. It’s a wonderful day when it happens: When your song becomes the jingle for diet soda or a diesel powered SUV. It’s a gradual process that you can’t rush. You want to take your fans from listening to your band in the mosh pit, to listening to your CD that they got when they bought 2 six-packs of Mountain Dew in their fantastic new Ford Focus hatchback with your signature on the passenger side airbag cover.

So, with your supermodel wife by your side, your celebrity kid in tow, your tour bus in hock, and your therapy bill all paid up, follow this simple recipe and you’ll never have to buy another soft drink or pair of sneakers again:

1. Get on the soundtrack of a Jerry Bruckheimer film

You’d be surprised how easy this is. Just ask. Jerry is an awfully nice guy and he drinks way too much at parties. He’ll put almost anything in writing when he’s drunk, too. He always feels bad about it and includes you in his next project. How else do you think Michael Sembello ever got his tripe on celluloid? Jerry’s e-mail address is jerry@jbfilms.com; ask him what parties he’s going to.

2. Release your inner Gap commercial

Yeah, it’s the Gap. Cambodian children earning $7.50 per year make the stretch t-shirts that they sell for $80. Everyone in high school or their mid-twenties shops there (because you can’t afford Gap when you are in College), yet somehow, they try to convince you that you’re being original. If using your music to sell clothes is prostitution, Gap is the whorehouse. You don’t have to go looking for them, they’ll come looking for you. Make sure you get a new “do rag” or “wife-beater” out of the deal.

3. Suck up to Carson Daly

How this uber-normal California boy got to be rock’s most uninteresting, but powerful voice, we’ll never know. Perhaps, we’re not supposed to know. But everyone from Madonna, to Eminem have gone on TRL in NYC and confessed L-O-V-E for this PBWB (poster boy for Wonder Bread). You’ll have to be all wacky and make constant “surprise” guest appearances so that MTV doesn’t risk Carson actually conveying one of his Machiavellian thoughts to the susceptible teenage audience bowing at his feet in an of worship.

4. Play a Super Bowl half time show with a Boy Band/Elton John

There is nothing less interesting than a Super Bowl Half Time show. This principle is more prevalent in the universe than gravity (given the nature of the distortion surrounding singularities). However, the hype to interest ratio is close to infinity (assuming interest is both positive and slightly greater than Plank’s constant 6.262E-22). This gives you the opportunity to hang out with that dreamboat Justin Timberlake and his fellow former Mouseketeers of N’Sync or whatever manufactured Boy Band that he plays with.

5. Support <insert cause here> at the DNC

This might go completely against your personal beliefs, but the easiest party to sell out to is the Democratic National Committee. They will take just about anybody into their fold, even if they’ve objected to your music before. They are like the Roman Catholics of political parties. Ask the DNC what they would like you to support, in particular, (if there is anything left after Ed Harris is done with the “Issues That Make You Violently Mad” sign up list). Then, as you step over all of your pepper spray blinded fans locked in a human chain protesting the use of oxygen at convention, to do your interview with Serena Altschul, who, by the way is, is the Norah O’Donnell of MTV, (that is, the rather cute serious journalist, whom we can’t take too seriously due to her being rather cute) people will realize that you’ve completely sold out.

Selling out means getting into all of the best parties, playing all of the best mass manufactured beer related concerts, and most of all, residual income, which you get for just sitting on your couch and eating Planter’s cheese balls (which are WAY better than Cheetos cheese balls, but only partially because they com in big cardboard tube). Selling out also means giving all of the seriously dedicated musicians, playing “honest” music, the motivation to hate you even more as they eat their diet of government cheese and ramen noodles in the back of the Chevy “Good Times” van that they have to use as their Green Room before they play to the devoted crowd of 22 listeners that “really get it, finally”.

Disclaimer:

OK, I’ll admit it. I want to be Carson Daly. He’s the man that gives every boring, talent-less guy hope that he can hang out with Rock’s illuminati and date Tara Reid.

Disclaimer to the Disclaimer: Tara could use some eye cream, ‘cause she’s looking a whole lot older than she is. Norah is really an outstanding journalist whom I can’t say enough nice things about even though she broke three of my pencils right before a test in Algebra II. Those “stretch” t-shirts from gap really make an outfit come together. Tolkien totally wrote himself into the Gandalf character, but if I had my way I would have been Boromir.

Author’s Note: Robert has had government cheese, and it’s not all that bad. He’s available for weddings and bar mitzvahs, but not as the entertainment, rather as the brooding guy who tries to talk to people by the punch bowl. You can read more of his stuff at www.robertwelborn.com