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You're probably just as dismissive of the term "sellout" and the self-important pop-culture junkies who use it as I am -- but what you may not realize is that we're all those self-important junkies. And, no, I'm not talking about the "let's bash hipsters" bandwagon here. I'm talking about normal, everyday people who don't regularly get rocks thrown at them.

As a culture, we feel like our art is ruined if the people creating it make any money. You can see it in every medium, at every level: It's why it's harder for big-budget films to get nominated for Academy Awards. It's why, when Metallica was starting out, they (allegedly) said that they would never make a music video because doing so would compromise their artistry, even though what does that have to do with anything, Metallica, what are you talking about? Is it Lars? Did Lars say that? Because I could totally see him saying that.

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Well, they were talking to their fans, and their fans listened:

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"Because you admitted you like money, you can't have any of mine!"

What we refuse to accept is that getting paid for doing what you love doesn't always make you suck. Nirvana made their two best albums (MTV Unplugged and In Utero) after it had been made clear that no one in that band would ever need to work again. Yet even during those times, there was still a large group of fans who would have preferred them to have never left their days of surviving on nothing but gas station corn dogs.

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Again, I'm not immune. My favorite band is Coheed and Cambria, at least partially because they wrote this song, which is like a standard pop-rock song if you ran it through a wood chipper and Scotch Taped it back together while drunk. But then they had kind of a hit with this track, and they started writing more songs like that, and now more people have heard of them and ... I dunno, I just occasionally catch myself coming up with reasons to be mad about that, like it makes any fucking difference in my life at all. By any sane metric, I should be happy that those guys get to have some financial security in their lives, because they wrote some of my favorite songs. But I'm not. My gut instinct is to say "Fuck their happiness, I just want them to make albums like The Second Stage Turbine Blade again. And I want to touch that big ol' fluffy hair so bad."