Is there really such a thing as selling out?
Although Metallica kicked Dave Mustaine out of the band before they were terribly famous, both Megadeth and Metallica started off with a fairly similar thrash metal sound.
Therefore, when Metallica’s ratings-chasing Black Album became enormously successful, we could charitably consider that Megadeth’s ensuing Cryptic Writings was simply the result of like-minded songwriters coming up with similar ideas – and not at all that Mustaine thought, “if I sound like ‘Enter Sandman’, I’ll make a fuckton of cash”.
Even if the motivations for the change in sound were commercial, there’s an integrity there because – to put it bluntly – they’re fucking brilliant records. In order to ‘sell out’ in the proper sense, there must be some sort of loss of artistic integrity. You really have to suck a little bit. Someone obviously told this to Metallica, because their next album – Load – was generally dismissed as ‘a load of wank’, and Megadeth’s Risk album’s gamble was of alienating the fan-base with such pandering drivel.
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