Sell out!

Question: is it possible for cool things to become popular and still keep their integrity and whatever it was that made them cool in the first place?

Let’s call the it the Jon and Kate syndrome, though that’s not really what I’m thinking about. They were cool to watch because they were this struggling family with lots of kids and you wondered how they could handle it all. Well, they got famous, money is clearly not an issue, and the answer now is that they handle it with money. They no longer have the qualities that made them endearing originally.

Or say Whole Foods. Nice store, lots of nice natural products, carries “eco-friendly” stuff (that phrase is a whole discussion on its own)… but it’s huge. It grew to become like other national chains, so it kind of lost it’s soul. You know what I mean? When the organic produce is flown halfway around the world, is it really that much better? See The Omnivore’s Dilemma (by Michael Pollan) for a better discussion of that particular issue. I’m parroting the idea here.

Sponsorship, I feel, is a huge issue. Everything is sponsored. I’ve stopped trusting a lot of things, because I assume it’s sponsored and that’s why the product is conveniently mentioned. It makes me sad.

I hope it doesn’t happen to the stuff I like. But if a company in Maine is big enough for me to have heard about it, has it already lost its Mom and Pop soul? It’s the end result of a commercialized world. Isn’t the goal sort of to get a good enough idea that one of the big companies will buy you out for millions? So then the whole world is controlled by the same four huge corporations… Will everyone sell out when given the chance? Would I, if it meant I could live a more relaxed life? Probably so I suppose.

Sometimes I want to go live in a cave. Anyone care to join me?