The ironic detachment with which the video maker asked “What is selling out, anyways?” told me that he felt it to be practically a rhetorical question – or at least a childish one that didn’t acknowledge the interconnectedness of the corporate and punk worlds. I, on the other hand, felt it to be a complex question, but not infinitely so – and that it was a question that should be asked. Even if it implicated me.

When I sold out, it was to HarperCollins. I found the corporate ownership heinous but I decided that the political content of the book balanced it out a little – the Trojan horse defense. But having published a book myself a few years prior in an edition of 500, I was also interested in the novelty of having someone else publish me.

I wrote a zine called Holiday in the Sun: Surviving Exposure to the Mainstream as a way to focus my thoughts about it and share my experiences with other zinesters. One pundit termed it a “guiltzine,” but I felt devoid of any feelings of guilt. I wasn’t really concerned with people calling me a sellout, and I consciously drew more attention to my hypocrisy by criticizing HarperCollins owner Rupert Murdoch in the press and by writing smart-ass open letters to the media magnate.

Certainly, even respected members of the punk community had told me that publishing houses were “different” from major labels. At first I figured they were just cutting me some slack – when you're selling your art to a nasty corporation, what's the difference between an album or a novel? But looking at the exceptions to the rule proved revealing. Most punks, for instance, don’t label the Sex Pistols and the Ramones as sellouts even though they were on major labels… that was “different,” too. Was it just a nostalgic soft spot, having first been exposed to punk through images of these bands on television? Images that may have been watered down and misrepresentative but nonetheless gave a context for and hints towards the more authentic punk subculture? Are the grandfathers of punk exempt in the same way a racist grandfather might be exempt -- because they came from a less enlightened time, without the network of dissemination and political awareness that the next generation of punks had? Or was it because the history of the subculture was rooted in this paradoxical relationship?

Punk doctrine teaches that the only relationship that exists between the mainstream and punk is a parasitical one – that the major labels, when it’s profitable, use the dynamic images and music of punk to sell commodities, and thus drain it of meaning for the authentic subculture. And of course, the mainstream provides punk something to react against. But there’s another, not often acknowledged exchange – the fact that the mainstream disseminates the images that focuses the rebellion in a fourteen-year-old kid to the point where she gives herself a mohawk. If it weren’t for this constant (if unintentional) replenishment, punk would have ceased to be a youth culture long ago. So punk cannot be said to be outside of the mainstream, even though it exists in opposition to many of its values.

But while it’s not a parasite-host relationship, it’s hardly a meeting of equals. Developing countries have protectionist laws in trading with the US to prevent exploitation, but what does punk have? Imagine punk as a tiny country within a much larger country, with its own laws. In Punkland, yuppies were considered second-class citizens, musicians were philosopher kings, and eating from dumpsters was socially acceptable. The economy was such that entertainment and consumer items were cheap enough for people to have a dignified and varied life making half of the money that people outside the country had to make, so more people made art for reasons other than money. This atmosphere nurtured innovative bands, which in turn inspired other bands, and so it went.

One day one of these bands, for a variety of reasons, wanted to move out of the country. At the border, they said they had nothing to declare. The guard searched the car and found, on a guitar in the trunk, a string of influences that could only have been made within the borders of Punkland. “You know it’s illegal to take this out of the country."

“Oh, that,” the guitarist said. “I couldn’t detach that from my own music. It’s totally in there, I couldn’t untangle it.“

“Uh huh,” the guard said indifferently, stamping their passports.

The guitarist looked at his passport, which was stamped SELLOUT. “Ah, dude! It’ll be hell getting back in with this.“

The guard nodded. “Sorry pal. It’s the law.“

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And while it seems unfair at times, this barrier is there for a good reason: to prevent subcultures from becoming cultural sweatshops for the mainstream. The sellout law also draws attention to the fact that when a band sells their music, they’re also selling something that’s not entirely theirs. They’re profiting from not just their individual work, but the communal work of the anti-profit punk community – the bands that influenced them and the people that provided feedback. While the artist has failed to acknowledge or understand this, it’s also a failure of the capitalist system to reward anyone except the person who brings the product to market.

Although at times an all-purpose insult (almost as divorced from its original meaning as the word "bastard") the call of “sellout” is still important. It's an integral part of maintaining any sort of distinctness to punk rock – it’s the membrane of a cell surrounded by the dominant culture. Too much traffic will render it so permeable that the distinctness of the values of punk will become completely diluted by those of the dominant culture. Without the distinctness, it will cease to be an alternative where different artistic and cultural experiments can be played out – and this is a loss to everyone, since these experiments can have applications beyond the punk community.

For instance: punk broke the cultural monopoly that major labels had on music. By challenging the ethical and creative bankruptcy of the majors by releasing critically acclaimed and culturally influential music for decades, people now think differently about independent music. Punk didn’t do it alone, and it certainly didn’t do it irrevocably, but it showed by example what was wrong with the current state of affairs – and how to fix it.

So, despite having sold out, I decided to self-publish my second book even though I had the option to publish through HarperCollins again. My website, (www.nomediakings.org) describes the many practical and ethical problems I had with delivering art through a corporation, and spreads the message of “if you can make a zine, you can make a book” through a do-it-yourself publishing resource. Taking the credibility granted by being with a major publishing house and using it to undermine the credibility of major publishing houses appeals to me immensely. Even more so is the tantalizing possibility that the DIY attitude could do to the book industry what punk did to the music industry: revolutionize it by ignoring it.

For people like myself and the video maker who have found minor success on our own terms, it becomes easy to believe that there is a comfortable niche for the dissidents, for those who would challenge the status quo. Thinking about how we have or haven’t sold out is a valuable way to avoid this killing complacency, because just because we’ve found a way to survive in the world doesn’t mean the world is any less fucked up.