In its aversion to indefinite pronouns, the hit power ballad “Use Somebody” was typical of Kings of Leon’s new songwriting style a line like “I could use somebody / someone like you” can mean everything or absolutely nothing depending on the listener. At a time when most rock bands scarcely even reference carnality - let alone tease their facial stubble to just the right level of scruffiness - Kings of Leon set themselves apart by making sex the focal point of their appeal, and then setting that sex on fire! 2 Kings of Leon now conformed to an archetype that had been rendered virtually extinct since the end of the hair metal era: the rock himbo. To borrow an acclaimed writer’s metaphor, it was as if the racist uncles had been escorted out the back door and replaced with fashion models. The backwoods iconography of the first two records was now gone. Imagewise, the Followills cut their hair and shaved off the Russell Hammond mustaches so that their handsome mugs could finally smolder at peak temperature. 1 The band essentially clarified its sound and appearance on Night: The music was pared down to a few core essentials (namely Matthew’s soaring Skynyrd-goes-U2 riffs and Caleb’s lobotomized Randy Newman impersonation), and then those essentials were amplified to the point of inescapable bombast. Then Kings of Leon released their fourth record, 2008’s Only by the Night, and its career changed forever. “Kings of Leon are two-door muscle cars and Piggly Wigglies and racist uncles and upholstery that stinks of smoke,” the novelist Dave Eggers wrote of the band’s musky 2003 debut, Youth & Young Manhood, and I’m pretty sure he meant it as a compliment. That’s what the PR said, anyway - it was the kind of tale that is used to establish a band’s “realness” in the media, and it actually sort of worked for a while. Defying the threat of eternal damnation, the brothers recruited their cousin Matthew to play guitar, invested in a closetful of impossibly tight jeans, and formed a hard-drinking and hip-swinging rock group. KOL’s first two albums were accompanied by a mythic backstory that involved the group’s trio of brothers - Caleb, Nathan, and Jared Followill - being raised by a traveling Pentecostal preacher who forbade his boys to taste the sinful fruit of rock and roll. You might remember that the Tennessee trad-rock outfit once had a reasonably hip reputation in the early ’00s as a Strokes/CCR hybrid. The last time I heard it was five years ago, and it was directed at Kings of Leon. But I remember people still occasionally using “sell out” after that. “Selling” anything in a music context suddenly seemed like a Herculean task. The most commonly regarded turning point away from deriding artists for openly chasing corporate dollars is probably Moby licensing every track off his album Play in 1999, and for obvious reasons - it came out the same year Napster launched and the record industry’s implosion commenced. I‘m not sure of the exact moment when using the term “sell out” officially fell out of fashion in pop-music discourse.
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