The Who's The Who Sell Out

Description

Released in the U.S. in January 1968, The Who Sell Out was, according to critic Dave Marsh, a complete backfire--the album sold well, but not spectacularly ultimately a nostalgic in-joke: Who but a pop intellectual could appreciate such a thing? Further rarifying its in-joke status was its unapologetic Englishness; 13 tracks stitched together in a mock pirate radio broadcast, without a DJ, with cool, anglocentric commercials to boot. In the 36 years since its release, Sell Out, though still not the best selling release in The Who's catalog, has been embraced by a growing number of fans who regard it as the band's best work, one of the few recordings of the late 1960s that best represents the ambitious aesthetic possibilities of the concept album without becoming mired in a bog of smug, self-aggrandizing, high art aspirations. Sell Out, powerfully and ecstatically, articulates the nexus of pop music and pop culture. As much as it is an expression of the band's expanding sonic palette, Sell Out also functions as a critique of the rock and roll lifestyle. Not the cliched mantra of sex, drugs, and rock and roll but in the ways that commercial advertising fabricates a youth-oriented cultural reality by hawking pimple cream, deodorant, food, musical equipment, etc., and linking it with rock and roll. In this sense Sell Out is a reflective work, one that struggles with rock and roll as a cultural expression that aspires to aesthetic permanence while marketed as ephemera. From this conflict emerges a pop art masterpiece.

John Dougan is Professor in the Department of Recording Industry at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He has published essays and reviews in Rolling Stone, Spin, All Music Guide, American Music, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Popular Music and Society, Salon, and Perfect Sound Forever. He is the author of The Who Sell Out (Bloomsbury, 2006), and The Mistakes of Yesterday, The Hopes of Tomorrow: The Story of the Prisonaires (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).

Dougan provides detailed dissection of not just the music and the minutiae, but the unique British cultural milieu that spawned Sell Out (for example, he spends a good time chronicling the rise and fall of the pirate stations). His love for the album and the band consistently shines through, but he never lets that get in the way of cogent analysis, and he additionally brings to the fore a dry wit perfectly suited to his subject. -- Fred Mills * Blurt Magazine *