You never have to choose between being the pure artist or the craven, sellout entertainer. You can be both.
Most of the people who call me a sellout were 7 when I was down face-first in the punk trenches.
You have a tendency to just remember the bad times and bad moments. I think that often it's the way of life. Yet the rewards we got from it were fantastic and we played a lot of shows to sellout audiences in I don't know how many cities. I just think we didn't realise how insane it was until we were actually right in the middle of it and couldn't stop. We just couldn't stop.
I decided to live as an individual and as I grew older, and thought more, and read more and experienced more, my views became more conservative. But my group is liberal. Not only that, they say, 'If you're not liberal and not a Democrat, you're not black. If you're conservative, you're a sellout. ' Here, then, I'm living with that kind of a pressure against my individuality.
My 13-year-old self would have beaten up my 17-year-old self because she would be like, 'You're a sellout!'
Whether it's an $11 flip-flop or a $2 key ring or a $2,000 dress, they're all done with integrity. They're all done with a design sense. As long as the creativity exists, then I don't think it's a sellout. A sellout is putting your name on any piece of crap and then expecting people to buy it because it's got your name on it.
Sellout. . . I'm not crazy about the word. We're all entrepreneurs. To me, I don't care if you own a furniture store or whatever - the best sign you can put up is SOLD OUT.
I've had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.
The Sellout is about friends and relatives who have touched me in real ways.
We will never know the extent of the damage movies are doing to us, but movie art, it appears, thrives on moral chaos. When the country is paralyzed, the popular culture may tell us why. After innocence, winners become losers. Movies are probably inuring us to corruption; the sellout is the hero-survivor for our times.
