This notion of selling out—compromising your art for money, for fame, for mainstream validation—absolutely dominated the decade; the great author/critic/pop philosopher Chuck Klosterman, in his 2022 book The Nineties, described the sellout question as “the single most nineties aspect of the nineties.” Here in the 2020s, it is just as dominantly fashionable to marvel at how antiquated,1 how irrelevant the sellout question seems now that even the coolest artists in any medium are encouraged to get as rich as possible by appealing to as many people as possible. But at the time, mainstream
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